Inside our own labs, the threat of another anthrax attack

In the days after Sept. 11, 2001, a handful of anonymous letters laced with white powder spread new terror through a nation still reeling from the hijackers’ attacks. The powder was deadly anthrax; the letters had scribblings of Islamic extremist rhetoric. Five people died, and 17 others were sickened or injured.

In this atmosphere of dread, policies quickly emerged with profound and lasting import for our national security.

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The mailings helped spur swift passage of the Patriot Act, which gave the government broad new powers to eavesdrop and spy on citizens. Congress and the Bush administration also agreed to a major expansion of laboratories equipped to cultivate, store and study microorganisms that could be used in biological terrorism.

More than 11,000 scientists are being hired to staff no fewer than 17 major and many more smaller labs across the nation, administered by federal agencies and at least a dozen universities. Billions of federal dollars are funding research on new vaccines and antibiotics that might protect us from anthrax, plague, tularemia, Ebola and other frightening germs. The benefits, if any, are years away. But the risks of these new “biocontainment” labs are serious and present now.

The country is owed a thorough review of the decision to launch the labs, informed by long-overlooked lessons from the anthrax attacks. After examining thousands of pages of documents related to the FBI-led investigation of the case and conducting hundreds of interviews for a book about it, I found that the most apparent threat of biological attack looms within our own labs.

Indeed, the evidence from the mailings case points convincingly to an insider, a once-trusted, now-deceased Army microbiologist, Bruce Ivins.

I have been struck by the unwillingness of those responsible for the boom in biodefense research to address Ivins’s role and to publicly acknowledge the risks inherent in the labs’ proliferation. The vetting of scientists who are and will be handling anthrax and other deadly pathogens continues to fall far short of the strict controls for specialists who work in the Army’s nuclear or chemical warfare programs.

As Einstein warned, we can’t solve problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. Our system for securing biodefense facilities has already failed. Rather than fix it, we have multiplied opportunities for breaches.

It is telling that the system failed dramatically within America’s crown jewel of biodefense research, USAMRIID, the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins was a civilian employee from December 1980 until his suicide in July 2008.

One need not be convinced of Ivins’s guilt to realize he should not have been allowed anywhere near the Army’s anthrax, let alone given unrestricted, 24/7 access to live spores for nearly 28 years.

Until he took his own life while waiting to be indicted for the attacks, Ivins for decades carried out secretive, anonymous schemes to punish those who offended him. He twice burglarized sorority houses, part of a vendetta he began as a college student when a member of that sorority turned him down for a date. He stole a colleague’s lab notebook, jeopardizing her chance to complete her doctorate, and taunted her with an unsigned note, telling her where she could find it: in a U.S. mailbox.