Monday, October 27, 2008
“Trail of Odd Anthrax Cells Led FBI to Army Scientist: Washington Post
A front page Washington Post article from today by Joby Warrick on the Ivins case appears to present the FBI’s side of the story. I will post excerpts from the article and comment (in italics) on its inconsistencies.
Abshire focused her lens on a moldlike clump. Anthrax bacteria were growing here, but some of the cells were odd: strange shapes, strange textures, strange colors. These were mutants, or “morphs,” genetic deviants scattered among the ordinary anthrax cells like chocolate chips in a cookie batter...
Ivins, the FBI discovered, had spent more than a year perfecting what agents called his “ultimate creation” — his signature blend of highly lethal anthrax spores — and guarded it so carefully that his lab assistants did not know where he kept it...
“It was his ultimate creation,” said Jason D. Bannan, an FBI microbiologist assigned to the Amerithrax case. “This was the culmination of a lot of hard work.”
Exceptionally pure concentrations of anthrax spores were Ivins’s trademark and placed him in an exclusive class...
It was intended for garden-variety animal experiments, but the collection of anthrax spores known as RMR-1029 was anything but ordinary. Ivins, its creator, had devoted a year to perfecting it, mixing 34 different batches of bacteria-laden broth and distilling them into a single liter of pure lethality...
Ames-strain bacteria was essentially identical wherever it was found, the advisers said...
The art of “spore preparation” is a tedious job often relegated to novices and technicians.
Inconsistency: Ivins made exceptionally pure spore preparations, but his “master” prep was full of mutants.
Exaggerations: FBI agents call his flask of Ames anthrax his “ultimate creation,” but all it contained was the combined product of 34 separate small production runs at Fort Detrick and Dugway, only some of which Ivins had made. FBI advisers said that Ames was pretty much the same wherever it was found. So the claim of Ivins’ flask having special virulence, compared to other Ames batches, is doubtful.
Ivins spent a year perfecting it? How do you “perfect” 34 separate batches when you didn’t make all of them? There has been no prior evidence that the flask contained “special” Ames spores, nor does this article report any such evidence.
Furthermore, as is noted in the article, growing anthrax is usually the work of technicians, and does not require advanced skills. Growing spores is not a method of perfecting them. The recipes are widely available in the open literature. Ivins could have spent a year growing the anthrax in the flask, but he would have been accomplishing plenty of other tasks simultaneously..........”
Posted by Meryl Nass, M.D.
http://anthraxvaccine.blogspot.com/
Thanks anyway.