The key point of the article seems to be the amount of time it took for spore production. The timeline assumes he began after 9-11. Its possible this was planned well ahead of time and that the 9-11 attack was a “lucky” coincidence that provided a good cover. It’s also not necessary to grow the spores on “hundreds of plates” you actually can use the same plates repeatedly and harvest the spores by scraping them off the surface and re-incubating them. It would be possbile to get grams of spores fairly quickly that way but it would be a dirty prep (clumpy, with lots of cell debris, and mixed with vegetative cells. From what I have read, the spores were highly refined and very pure. That takes considerable time and effort. Since the article states that the only source of the material was the Amriid lab, if Ivins didn’t do it, someone else in the lab did.
Nay-saying "scientists" and "journalists" endlessly screw with the facts to make their misleading points.
The first batch of letters, which were sent to the media, were 90 percent debris and only 10 percent spores. And that is what you describe.
The second batch of letters contained pure spores, but there was only about .871 grams of spores in the Leahy letter. The Daschle letter had presumably the same amount. The culprit had THREE WEEKS to prepare the 1.75 grams that he needed, but he might have done it in six days or less.
Arguments that begin with a need to prepare ten or twenty grams of spores for ten letters are just ignoring basic facts. There were less than 2.5 grams of spores in total, and what was in the first 5 letters was very different from what was in the second 2 letters.
Actually the flask at AMRIID was the mother culture but as is clearly stated, portions were distributed to other facilities. The daughter cultures are identical to the mother culture.