Lets return to the difficulty of making the anthrax.
In a March 31, 2003 public exchange sponsored by the Washington Post, in response to my written question submitted in advance, Ali Al-Timimi’s George Mason University colleague, Kenneth Alibek, said: “This anthrax wasn’t sophisticated, didn’t have coatings, had electric charge and many other things.” In other responses, he further explained: “There was no special need to add silica to this anthrax. Presence or absence of silica says nothing about whether it was state sponsored.”
US bioweaponeer William Patrick took time out from advising GMU grad students and gave it a 7 out of 10 -— calling it professionally done but not weapons grade. Perhaps that would be a B+ or even an A-. In an interview with CBS, William Patrick explained that he had been given a polygraph in June 2002 about the anthrax letters. He reports that “The FBI that they wanted me to become a part of their inner circle of—of experts, and that in order to become a part of that inner circle of technical experts, that I’d have to pass a polygraph test.” In fact, he has not been quoted since, as he often was in 2001. Thus, this was a good indication of what scientific information the FBI credits or at least that they credit his expertise.
On April 11, 2003, Scott Shane reported that reverse engineering “carried out at the Army’s biodefense center at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, raises the disquieting possibility that al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups could create lethal bioweapons without scientific or financial help from a state.” Quoting one outside bioterrorism expert. “It shows you can have a fairly sophisticated product with fairly rudimentary methods.” At last report, the reverse engineering reportedly was not able to recreate the identical product. Lisa Bronson, deputy undersecretary of defense for technology security policy and proliferation, has said that commercially available equipment used to make powdered milk could be used to make powderized anthrax. A spray dryer is used in chemical and food processing to manufacture dried egg, powdered milk, animal feed, cake mixes, citrus juices, coffee, corn syrup, cream, creamers, dried eggs, potatoes, shortening, starch derivatives, tea, tomatoes, yeast, and — last but not least — yogurt. Washington State University also has an informative discussion on the web. Making dried milk is not rocket science and doesn’t require a PhD. But, if experience is any guide, Al Qaeda has PhD’s and even rocket scientists who are sympathetic to its cause (indeed, even the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb).
Here is a Q&A from a March 31, 2003 exchange with Kenneth Alibek, in response to a question I posed to him. (The month before 100 agents had come to Syracuse the same minute Ali Al-Timimi’s residence was searched, and so I was curious what the fuss was all about.)
“Q. Could someone expert in making dried milk make the product used in the Daschle and Leahy letters?
A. Let me answer in this way — yes, actually, it would be the same technique to make a powderized anthrax, but at the same time we shouldn’t overestimate the complexity of making it. My opinion is this — in order to make this powder there is no need to have sophisticated equipment. Such a small amount, keep in mind that the people who did could have very simple equipment and very simple procedures. There is no need for industrial equipment. It would be enough to have small equipment. But at the same time, when people talk about it being ‘weaponized’ — I can’t say it was that sophisticated. I saw the particles — they were the size of 40 microns. We can’t say anything about the quality of othis powder because we saw it after it had gone through mailing sorting machines which create very powerful pressure. There was no coating. What I saw on micrograph was no coating. It was natural spores and for some people they mistakenly thought it wasn’t. Some experts said there was [no] charge because it was fluffy and made a cloud when put on scale. This is another mistake. It did have charge.”
To find the missing spraydryer, perhaps the FBI merely needs to find and trace the steps of Al Qaeda’s expert yogurt or dried milk or animal feedstuffs or rice hull processor. Confounding things a bit, a couple years later, Dr. Alibek told me that he had come to think that it was made using a fluidized bed dryer rather than a spraydryer.
Or, if it wants, it can hang out on greek chat boards.
The mixed genotype and inverted plasmid points not to Ivins’ flask but a stream of 8 isolates to which a reported 100 known people had access.
Dr. Read, a scientist helping with the Amerithrax investigation in the DNA sequencing, long ago published the news that the anthrax was a 50/50% mixture of genotype 62 (Ames) and genotype 62 with an inversion on the plasmid. This would mean two distinct nucleic acids were detected in the sample. This means that some of the Ames had a segment of DNA that is inverted, or flipped, relative to the remainder of the plasmid. One expert advises me that no properly trained microbiologist would propagate or archive a mixture (I am unaware of why Dr. Ivins did but he probably had a reason). Standard microbiological procedure calls for isolation of single colonies - i.e., single, unmixed cells and their clonal, unmixed progeny — at each step. Inversions are not an uncommon class of mutational events, however. It would only be especially probative if it were a rare inversion and if samples were to be present among samples collected from laboratory archives. It turns out, thankfully, that there was a match — with 8 isolates that were collected to which 100 people were known to have access (and an unknown number of additional people).
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the Federation of American Scientists’ chemical and biological arms control program, announced in December 2001. “I’m certain it’s someone connected with a government program, or who works in a laboratory connected with a government program,” she said. “The grapevine has it that the results of an experiment on genetic variation at certain locations suggest that this material was made in a very small batch, and that suggests that the material was not made in some old weapons program on a large scale,” she said, citing sources inside and outside the government. “All the available information is consistent with a U.S. government lab as the source, either of the anthrax itself or of the recipe for the U.S. weaponization process,” wrote Rosenberg on a webpage.
In August 2007, scientists working on the FBI Amerithrax investigation wrote “Role of Law Enforcement Response and Microbial Forensics in Investigation of Bioterrorism” in the Croat Medical Journal. The FBI scientist’s article explained that there
“are a variety of genetic markers and methods that allow highly specific and accurate characterization of microbial diversity. For forensic purposes, assaying rapidly evolving markers enables better affiliation to recent common sources, while more stable markers provide better lineage-based evolutionary interpretations, such as strain and sub-strain definition. Since bacteria, viruses, and some fungi reproduce asexually, their genomes are considered to be clonal and portions of their genomes may be very stable and uninformative for distinguishing samples. Therefore, it may not be possible to identify the source of a sample by genetic analysis alone (as often is accomplished in human DNA identity testing). Since many microbial genomes have relatively short generation times, in an overnight culture, a single microbe could have reproduced its genome over a million times, increasing the chance of mutation that may be seen within the culture. Thus, some variation, and hence a forensic signature, may occur during asexual reproduction.”
The authors explained: “The forensic comparison of a genetic profile from a reference sample with that of an evidentiary sample can have three possible general outcomes: match or inclusion, exclusion, or inconclusive. With microbial genetic information, it is less likely to have a prescribed interpretation policy for what constitutes a match and what does not. Some questions may be difficult to answer unequivocally based on extant data. Uncertainty is greater than what is experienced for human DNA identity testing because of unknown diversity, limited databases, unknown manipulations, and limited genetic testing. However, the power of microbial forensic tools is increasing rapidly with ever advancing technology.”
Selected sources:
Budowle, B., M. D. Johnson, C. M. Fraser, T. J. Leighton, R. S. Murch, and R. Chakraborty. 2005. “Genetic analysis and attribution of microbial forensics evidence,” Crit. Rev. Microbiol. 31:233-254.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids=16417203&dopt=AbstractPlus
Budowle B, Murch R, Chakraborty R., “Microbial forensics: the next forensic challenge,” Int J Legal Med. 119(6):317-30 (Nov 2005).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=15821943&ordinalpos=1&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum
Budowle, B., S. E. Schutzer, M. S. Ascher, R. M. Atlas, J. P. Burans, R. Chakraborty, J. J. Dunn, C. M. Fraser, D. R. Franz, T. J. Leighton, S. A. Morse, R. S. Murch, J. Ravel, D. L. Rock, T. R.
Slezak, S. P. Velsko, A. C. Walsh, and R. A. Walters. “Toward a system of microbial forensics: from sample collection to interpretation of evidence,” Appl. Environ. Microbiol. 71:2209-2213 (2005).
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/71/5/2209?ijkey=11f63da16d84d14221469a04d0917d00b4ae7e74&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Budowle, B., S. E. Schutzer, A. Einseln, L. C. Kelley, A. C. Walsh, J. A. L. Smith, B. L. Marrone, J. Robertson, and J. Campos. Building microbial forensics as a response to bioterrorism. Science 301:1852-1853 (2003).
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/301/5641/1852?ijkey=6c5eda5d0b0d4dec11807281f555d5087c756235&keytype2=tf_ipsecsha
Keim et al., “Microbial forensics: DNA fingerprinting of Bacillus anthracis (anthrax),” Analytical Chemistry, 2008 Jul; 80 (13): 4791-9
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/ancham/80/i13/html/0708feature_keim.html
Legal admissibility:
Budowle B, Harmon R., “HIV legal precedent useful for microbial forensics,” Croat Med J. 46(4):514-21 (Aug 2005).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=16100753&ordinalpos=3&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum