Tuesday, December 16, 2003 Are the FBI Now Conducting a Real Investigation? After the enormously important disclosures made in Gary Matsumoto's article in Science Magazine entitled Anthrax Powder: State of the Art? there is now evidence that the FBI have begun ro realize that they can no longer pretend about the advanced nature of the anthrax powder sent to the senate.The Daschle anthrax had a distinct trait that made it a deadly product. It was coated with silica
With no coating (A) the particles clump together due to Van der Waals forces. These forces are very short range (a few nanometers) and they fall off in an extremely non-linear fashion as something like r^6, where r is the distance. This means that if particles are able to get close enough to each other to invoke these Van der Waals forces they may become bonded together almost irreversibly. Thus uncoated anthrax particles or spores would be much less likely to cause inhalational anthrax - since when they clump together they would be larger than the 5 microns minimum diameter necessary to become trapped inside lung alveoli.
However, when coated with silica (B), the particles of anthrax cannot physically get close enough together to invoke the short range Van der Waals forces. The anthrax spores will remain as separate entities - and thus be capable of lodging inside lung alveoli where they will find a favorable environment to become biologically active, producing lethal toxin in the process.
To summarize:
The Daschle anthrax had a distinct trait that made it a deadly product. It was coated with silica but it is unknown publicly what method was used to coat the Daschle anthrax with silica - nevertheless it is almost certain that the FBI know this. One of the puzzling questions is why the FBI commissioned Dugway to make anthrax samples using fairly crude equipment but without silica coatings. Not surprisingly none of these products were capable of producing primary aerosols - silica is essential for this.
Finally it is important to realize that such weaponized anthrax products cannot be engineered to be lethal from first principal design. In other words, I can’t simply deduce that a certain amount of silica will give me the most lethal product. The rubber hits the road when these anthrax particles are inhaled inside real lungs. The only way to develop a product that is lethal is to process scores of different formulations and test them on monkeys using a strict design of experiments approach. Once the most lethal formulations are discovered it can then be deduced what silica coating densities are the most favorable and the formulations can then be tweaked. Such a process would take years of development by a team of specialists and with state sponsorship