biosecurity laws hobble research

Video - Director K-State National Agricultural Biosecurity Center.

The Scientist | Ever since the U.S. government has taken steps to protect and encourage research involving pathogens that could be used as biological weapons, that research has become much less efficient, according to a new analysis.

Though funding for research on so-called "select agents," or pathogens that can be used as weapons, has shot through the roof, and the number of papers using those organisms has risen in recent years, the work has become up to five times less efficient -- meaning, the same amount of funding produces fewer papers than it did before.

"The price of the research was multiplied by maybe a factor of 5 for anthrax and maybe a factor of 2 for Ebola," said Carnegie Mellon University associate professor Elizabeth Casman, who led an analysis of the select agent literature that is published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Casman told The Scientist that her group found, for example, that prior to 2002, an average of 17 papers on anthrax were published for every $1 million of funding, whereas after 2002, that average dropped to 3.

At issue, according to the analysis, are two laws designed to regulate select agent research: the PATRIOT Act and the Public Health Security and Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response Act, enacted in 2001 and 2002, respectively.

The laws' new regulations govern the exhaustive documentation of the transportation, guarding, and use of select agents. As a result, they are burying researchers studying select agents with administrative duties, Casman noted. Researchers to whom Casman spoke "all complained of the paperwork," she said. "A lot of it, they just find overwhelming."

Some researchers told Casman that their work took twice as long to carry out because of all the paperwork related to select agents, and that money was being diverted from research expenses to pay for things like security cameras, hiring guards, and building walls. "It's expensive to comply with the regulations," Casman said.

colleague disputes case against anthrax suspect

NYTimes | A former Army microbiologist who worked for years with Bruce E. Ivins, whom the F.B.I. has blamed for the anthrax letter attacks that killed five people in 2001, told a National Academy of Sciences panel on Thursday that he believed it was impossible that the deadly spores had been produced undetected in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory, as the F.B.I. asserts.

Asked by reporters after his testimony whether he believed that there was any chance that Dr. Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008, had carried out the attacks, the microbiologist, Henry S. Heine, replied, “Absolutely not.” At the Army’s biodefense laboratory in Maryland, where Dr. Ivins and Dr. Heine worked, he said, “among the senior scientists, no one believes it.”

Dr. Heine told the 16-member panel, which is reviewing the F.B.I.’s scientific work on the investigation, that producing the quantity of spores in the letters would have taken at least a year of intensive work using the equipment at the army lab. Such an effort would not have escaped colleagues’ notice, he added later, and lab technicians who worked closely with Dr. Ivins have told him they saw no such work.

He told the panel that biological containment measures where Dr. Ivins worked were inadequate to prevent the spores from floating out of the laboratory into animal cages and offices. “You’d have had dead animals or dead people,” he said.

The public remarks from Dr. Heine, two months after the Justice Department officially closed the case, represent a major public challenge to its conclusion in one of the largest, most politically delicate and scientifically complex cases in F.B.I. history.

Asked why he was speaking out now, Dr. Heine noted that Army officials had prohibited comment on the case, silencing him until he left the government laboratory in late February. He now works for Ordway Research Institute in Albany.

Dr. Heine said he did not dispute that there was a genetic link between the spores in the letters and the anthrax in Dr. Ivins’s flask — a link that led the F.B.I. to conclude that Dr. Ivins had grown the spores from a sample taken from the flask. But samples from the flask were widely shared, Dr. Heine said. Accusing Dr. Ivins of the attacks, he said, was like tracing a murder to the clerk at the sporting goods shop who sold the bullets.

“Whoever did this is still running around out there,” Dr. Heine said. “I truly believe that.”

psychopathic neurosis

Neurological Correlates | What makes Nazis or the BTK killer or the psychopath-guy-the-army-put-in-charge-of-anthrax-research unspeakably cruel to selected targets but otherwise social norm compliance with the rest of their lives?

Short answer: Authoritarian + neurosis = psychopathic neurosis, a new category of evil.

Full text available: Cotter P (2010) The path to extreme violence: Nazism and serial killers. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 3:61. doi: 10.3389/neuro.08.061.2009

Finally, someone is attempting to deconstruct those who are selective about their proactive aggression. As with domestic violence, this involves selective aggression — not global or generalized (although apparently it can spiral down this way). And this is the puzzle — what makes people only selectively hateful?

About the closest reading that attempts to develop a systematic, organized response including biology is, “Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed and My Sister Stole My Mother’s Boyfriend” .

The Cotter paper out of Geneva combines

(a) psychohistory (how come Nazis are that way, and what’s the difference between a Nazi and a serial killer? Answer: Nazis are cognitively more able to construct a world view, “Weltanschauung,”),

(b) the Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al. 1969 but there are a number of version, one’s up in the Amazon box — this was a study of people to see what authoritarians (e.g., similar to Nazis) think about, versus what more “liberal” (e.g., more egalitarian) people — if you read it your worst suspicions are confirmed);

(c) psychopathy classic research from Cleckley, and

(d) FBI profiling research.

Here is the tee-up for a new category of evil — psychopathic neurosis. Fist tap Dale.

NYTimes | More than eight years after anthrax-laced letters killed five people and terrorized the country, the F.B.I. on Friday closed its investigation, adding eerie new details to its case that the 2001 attacks were carried out by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army biodefense expert who killed himself in 2008.

A 92-page report, which concludes what by many measures is the largest investigation in F.B.I. history, laid out the evidence against Dr. Ivins, including his equivocal answers when asked by a friend in a recorded conversation about whether he was the anthrax mailer.

“If I found out I was involved in some way...” Dr. Ivins said, not finishing the sentence. “I do not have any recollection of ever doing anything like that,” he said, adding, “I can tell you, I am not a killer at heart.” But in a 2008 e-mail message to a former colleague, one of many that reflected distress, Dr. Ivins wrote, “I can hurt, kill, and terrorize.” He added: “Go down low, low, low as you can go, then dig forever, and you’ll find me, my psyche.”

The report disclosed for the first time the F.B.I.’s theory that Dr. Ivins embedded in the notes mailed with the anthrax a complex coded message, based on DNA biochemistry, alluding to two female former colleagues with whom he was obsessed.

system failure

The Nation | There is a widespread consensus that the decade we've just brought to a close was singularly disastrous for the country: the list of scandals, crises and crimes is so long that events that in another context would stand out as genuine lowlights--Enron and Arthur Andersen's collapse, the 2003 Northeast blackout, the unsolved(!) anthrax attacks--are mere afterthoughts. We still don't have a definitive name for this era, though Paul Krugman's 2003 book The Great Unraveling captures well the sense of slow, inexorable dissolution; and the final crisis of the era, what we call the Great Recession, similarly expresses the sense that even our disasters aren't quite epic enough to be cataclysmic. But as a character in Tracy Letts's 2007 Pulitzer Prize-winning play, August: Osage County, says, "Dissipation is actually much worse than cataclysm."

American progressives were the first to identify that something was deeply wrong with the direction the country was heading in and the first to provide a working hypothesis for the cause: George W. Bush. During the initial wave of antiwar mobilization, in 2002, much of the ire focused on Bush himself. But as the decade stretched on, the causal account of the country's problems grew outward in concentric circles: from Bush to his administration (most significantly, Cheney) to the Republican Party to--finally (and not inaccurately)--the entire project of conservative governance.

As much of the country came to share some version of this view (tenuously, but share it they did), the result was a series of Democratic electoral sweeps and a generation of Americans, the Millennials, with more liberal views than any of their elder cohorts. But it always seemed possible that the sheer reactionary insanity of the Bush administration would have a conservatizing effect on the American polity. Because things had gone so wrong, it was a more than natural reaction to long for the good old days; the Clinton years, characterized by deregulation and bubbles, seemed tantalizingly placid and prosperous in retrospect. The atavistic imperialism of the Bush administration had a way of making the pre-Bush foreign policy of soft imperialism and subtle bullying look positively saintly.

Toward the end of the decade, as the establishment definitively rebuked Bush and sought to distance itself from his failures, the big-tent center-left coalition took on an influential constituency--the Colin Powells and Warren Buffetts--who didn't want reform so much as they wanted restoration. This was reflected in a strange internal tension in the Obama campaign rhetoric that simultaneously promised both: change you can believe in and, as Obama said at a March 2008 appearance in Pennsylvania, a foreign policy that is "actually a return to the traditional bipartisan realistic policy of George Bush's father."

If the working hypothesis that bound this unwieldy coalition together--independents, most liberals and the Washington establishment--was that the nation's troubles were chiefly caused by the occupants of the White House, then this past year has served as a kind of natural experiment. We changed the independent variable (the party and people in power) and can observe the results. It is hard, I think, to come to any conclusion but that the former hypothesis was insufficient.

So what, exactly, is it that ails us?

preparedness plans in place...,

WaPo | The Bush administration implemented an $8 billion pandemic flu planning program that created a detailed national blueprint and funneled millions of dollars to state and local governments to create and rehearse their own plans.

After the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), the World Health Organization instituted measures that heightened the world's ability to identify and respond swiftly to outbreaks. They included international regulations that call for countries to report worrisome outbreaks quickly and a revised pandemic threat alert system, which was ratcheted up quickly last week.

So when reports emerged from Mexico of a new virus that most people might have no immunity against, and that appeared to be spreading easily from person to person and -- in an eerie echo of 1918 -- was killing healthy young adults, the world went on high alert.

"If what was being reported in Mexico played out in the United States and elsewhere, this was a potentially serious epidemic that was getting underway," Inglesby said. "We had to respond quickly."

The reaction has also been influenced by political missteps in previous emergencies, including the mixed messages and poor communication about the 2001 anthrax letters and the slow reaction to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

AP | "If we do move into a pandemic, then our expectation is that we will see a large number of people infected worldwide," Fukuda said. "If you look at past pandemics, it would be a reasonable estimate to say perhaps a third of the world's population would get infected with this virus."

With the current total population of more than 6 billion, that would mean an infection total of 2 billion, he said, but added that the world has changed since pandemics of earlier generations, and experts are unable to predict if the impact will be greater or smaller.

"select agent" inventory control problems

Propublica | The U.S. Army has suspended research with deadly agents and toxins at the military's top germ warfare lab, which came under intense scrutiny after the FBI identified it as the source of the anthrax used in the 2001 "Amerithrax" attacks that killed five, injured 17 and kept the nation on knife-edge for weeks.

The suspension, announced internally last week at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), was attributed to concerns about whether the facility had an accurate inventory of all the deadly "select agents [1]" in its freezers and refrigerators. Select agents are the most dangerous and tightly regulated biological substances used in research, including anthrax, Yersinia pestis (plague) and the Ebola and Marburg viruses.

The FBI last year contended that Bruce Ivins, who worked on anthrax vaccines at USAMRIID's labs in Ft. Detrick, Md., engineered the 2001 attacks. Ivins, who had become emotionally troubled, committed suicide before the government could try to prove its theory in court.

As we reported in a three-part series in December [2], many WMD experts are worried that the $20 billion the federal government has spent on bio-defense research in the past seven years might actually have put the nation at even greater risk of a bioterrorism attack because the spending has spawned a proliferation of labs and scientists working with "select agents." [1]

Last week's suspension of much of the germ-warfare research at the military's top bio-defense laboratory is just the latest in safety problems at bio-defense facilities [3] around the country attributed to lax security.

when agricultural science goes really wrong....,

NYTimes | With the F.B.I. preparing to close the case, The New York Times has taken the deepest look so far at the investigation, speaking to dozens of Dr. Ivins’s colleagues and friends, reading hundreds of his e-mail messages, interviewing former bureau investigators and anthrax experts, reviewing court records, and obtaining, for the first time, police reports on his suicide in July, including a lengthy recorded interview with his wife.

That examination found that unless new evidence were to surface, the enormous public investment in the case would appear to have yielded nothing more persuasive than a strong hunch, based on a pattern of damning circumstances, that Dr. Ivins was the perpetrator.

Focused for years on the wrong man, the bureau missed ample clues that Dr. Ivins deserved a closer look. Only after a change of leadership nearly five years after the attacks did the bureau more fully look into Dr. Ivins’s activities. That delay, and his death, may have put a more definitive outcome out of reach.

Brad Garrett, a respected F.B.I. veteran who helped early in the case before his retirement, said logic and evidence point to Dr. Ivins as the most likely perpetrator.

“Does that absolutely prove he did it? No,” Mr. Garrett said. With no confession and no trial, he said, “you’re going to be left not getting over the top of the mountain.”

We've endeavored to look at this story just a little bit hereabouts. This is the NYTimes swan song narrative account. It's a very lengthy story, well worth reading. Not because it clarifies or closes the subject which it addresses, but because it exemplifies the mystifying interstitial space between and accounting of the sundry institutions, apparatuses and operatives of the state and of the Deep State.

When the oil stops flowing

It will come as a shock to most Americans and the media, but as the election reaches a crescendo on the issue of preparedness and energy, neither presidential candidate - nor anyone in local, state or federal government - has developed a contingency plan in the event of a protracted oil cut-off. It is not even being discussed. Government has prepared for hurricanes, anthrax, terrorism and every other disaster, but not the one threatened daily - a protracted oil stoppage, whether caused by terrorism, intervention in the Persian Gulf or a natural disaster.

It is like seeing a hurricane developing without a disaster plan or evacuation route. Our allies have oil shortage interruption contingency plans, but America does not.

THE BEST experts predict that if we suffer as much as 10% for any period of time, let alone 20%, it will be a neighbor-against-neighbor "Mad Max" scenario as food shortages swell and a storm of economic collapse surges across the country. Indeed, experts have been warning about this looming calamity for years. But the government and presidential candidates refuse to even consider the possibility or develop a contingency plan.

Yet our allies have developed oil contingency legislation and other administrative plans that will permit their nations to survive a stoppage. These measures include severe vehicle traffic reductions, enabling fast alternative fuel production and mass vehicle retrofitting, as well as rush public transit enhancement, and mandated changes in driving habits. Unquestionably, for America to survive such a catastrophe will require a very painful, multilayered program of immediate-term, short-term, mid-term and long-term fixes that will change our society and transform it off oil. The nation has no real alternative fuel or retrofitting infrastructure. But every lawmaker, mayor, governor and every candidate must develop such a plan - and now.

When the oil stops flowing in the Jerusalem Post.

Move Along Now, Nothing to See Over Here....,

POSNER: I'm certainly not sold on the theory of the lone mad scientist. I'm not even sold right now on the fact he was involved. I'll tell you why. All we are hearing is one side of the evidence. We're getting it leaked out, as it always is by the government, bit by bit about what happened. And as you said, it's absolutely at best a circumstantial case.

The big thing they're hanging their hat on right now is the fact that they have a new DNA type of evidence for bacteria that can isolate this form of anthrax back to a flask that was in the laboratory that he handled, as did at least ten other people and possibly dozens. They have them in New Jersey, supposedly, a time when mail was sent out with anthrax spores from places in Princeton. And they have him holding a P.O. Box at a postal office inside of Frederick, Maryland, where some of the envelopes were bought they think they can trace back to this.

It's a case where any good defense attorney, a Mark Geragos, an F. Lee Bailey in his heyday a Roy Black, they would relish this type of case. They could knock it out of the ballpark. I have to say one thing, we cannot allow—I really believe this, on a case this important on the anthrax investigation, for a rush to judgment in a matter in which the prime suspect is dead of an apparent suicide.

U.S. Attorney Defends Delays In Anthrax Investigation

It's an extremely tiny *universe* of people he's referring to....,

BioTerror "Efforts" Increased U.S. Risk

So here's the fearful bioterror narrative;

“Across the spectrum of biothreats we have expanded our capacity significantly,” said Craig Vanderwagen, an assistant secretary at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees the biodefense effort. Systems to detect an attack, investigate it and respond with drugs, vaccines and cleanup are all hugely improved, Dr. Vanderwagen said. “We can get pills in the mouth,” he said.

Supporters of the spending increase cite studies that project apocalyptic tolls from a large-scale biological attack. One 2003 study led by a Stanford scholar, for instance, found that just two pounds of anthrax spores dropped over an American city could kill more than 100,000 people, even if antibiotic distribution began quickly.

and here are the relevant bioterror facts;

Until the anthrax attacks of 2001, Bruce E. Ivins was one of just a few dozen American bioterrorism researchers working with the most lethal biological pathogens, almost all at high-security military laboratories.

Today, there are hundreds of such researchers in scores of laboratories at universities and other institutions around the United States, preparing for the next bioattack.

But the revelation that F.B.I. investigators believe that the anthrax attacks were carried out by Dr. Ivins, an Army biodefense scientist who committed suicide last week after he learned that he was about to be indicted for murder, has already re-ignited a debate: Has the unprecedented boom in biodefense research made the country less secure by multiplying the places and people with access to dangerous germs?

In today's NYTimes. And so it goes. Only those folks prepared to opportunistically and exploitatively jump on the homegrown, paranoid delusional bandwagon managed to profit from the fear that was instigated by Ivins (the Bush administration) with his here-to-now *unsolvable* involvement with this murderous elite hustle.

Some Saw Opportunity?

Yes, that's former general and Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up a vial of anthrax - part of the generalized misrepresentations alleging that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

In the lead-up to the invasion, the U.S. and UK emphasized the argument that Saddam Hussein was developing "weapons of mass destruction" and thus presented an imminent threat to his neighbors, to the U.S., and to the world community. The US stated "on November 8, 2002, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1441. All fifteen members of the Security Council agreed to give Iraq a final opportunity to comply with its obligations and disarm or face the serious consequences of failing to disarm. The resolution strengthened the mandate of the UN Monitoring and Verification Commission (UNMOVIC) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), giving them authority to go anywhere, at any time and talk to anyone in order to verify Iraq’s disarmament." Throughout late 2001, 2002, and early 2003, the Bush Administration worked to build a case for invading Iraq, culminating in then Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 address to the Security Council. Shortly after the invasion, the Central Intelligence Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies largely discredited evidence related to Iraqi weapons and, as well as links to Al Qaeda, and at this point the Bush and Blair Administrations began to shift to secondary rationales for the war, such as the Hussein government's human rights record and promoting democracy in Iraq.

Accusations of faulty evidence and alleged shifting rationales became the focal point for critics of the war, who charge that the Bush Administration purposely fabricated evidence to justify an invasion it long planned to launch.

Many opine that the U.S. was conscientious in its pursuit of the Iraqi WMD artifacts. Given that the Pentagon and foggy bottom probably still had the invoices and receipts for much of that material, their level of concern was warranted.

Who can say?

From where I sit, it's already just another one of history's mysteries and an anomalous link in the chain of elite rule and the narratives supporting the same. Always interesting to see how a face and a voice invested with such trust and gravitas as Powell's could be associated with something so rank, dank, and stank. The lesson, I suppose, is to always critically examine the facts and the statements and to scrupulously ignore the feelings that the spokesperson evokes. If it bolsters public confidence and is expedient to the narrative aims - TPTB have access to a stellar cast of characters that can be deployed against public confidence building objectives.....,

Some Saw Dark Side

Ivins, 62, committed suicide this week as federal prosecutors zeroed in on him as a suspect in the 2001 attacks. They were planning to indict him and seek the death penalty.

Ivins' brother Tom, who stressed that had not spoken to Bruce since 1985, was not shocked to hear that his brother was accused of making death threats, and he conceded the possibility that Bruce may have been the anthrax mailer.

"It makes sense, what the social worker said," Tom Ivins said. "He considered himself like a god."

Some who knew Ivins said the scrutiny of the investigation was too much for him to bear. But they also asserted his innocence.

"The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways," his attorney, Paul F. Kemp, said in a statement. "In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death."

Ivins had worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick. For more than a decade, he worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that worked even when different strains of anthrax were mixed, which made vaccines ineffective.

Dr. W. Russell Byrne, a colleague who worked in the bacteriology division of the Fort Detrick research facility, said Ivins was "hounded" by FBI agents who raided his home twice, and he was hospitalized for depression earlier this month.

According to Byrne and local police, Ivins was removed from his workplace out of fears that he might harm himself or others.

"I think he was just psychologically exhausted by the whole process," Byrne said. Ivins could frequently be seen walking around his neighborhood for exercise. He volunteered with the American Red Cross of Frederick County, and he played keyboard and helped clean up after Masses at St. John's the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church, where a dozen parishioners gathered Friday after morning Mass to pray for him.

The Rev. Richard Murphy called Ivins "a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant."

An avid juggler, Ivins gave juggling demonstrations around Frederick in the 1980s.

"One time, he demonstrated his juggling skills by lying on his back in the department and juggling with his hands," said Byrne, who described Ivins as "eccentric."

Whenever a colleague would leave the bacteriology division, Ivins would write a song or poem for that person and perform it, accompanying himself on keyboard, Byrne said.

Ivins had several letters to the editor published in The Frederick News-Post over the last decade. He denounced taxpayer funding for assisted suicide, pointed readers to a study that suggested a genetic component for homosexuality and said he had stopped listening to local radio station WFMD because he was offended by the language and racially charged commentary of its hosts.

He also commented on the growing political influence of conservative Christians, and he was willing to criticize his church.

Ivins had mild persona, but some saw dark side

Case Closed?

A top U.S. biodefense researcher apparently committed suicide just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him in the anthrax mailings that traumatized the nation in the weeks following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, according to a published report.

The scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who worked for the past 18 years at the government's biodefense labs at Fort Detrick, Md., had been told about the impending prosecution, the Los Angeles Times reported for Friday editions. The laboratory has been at the center of the FBI's investigation of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. The Times, quoting an unidentified colleague, said the scientist had taken a massive dose of a prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine.

Top U.S. biological weapons researcher commits suicide as FBI closes in...,

The expanding range of biowarfare threats

Scientists are developing new substances at the cross section of biology and chemistry--such as peptide bioregulators--that could be used to incapacitate and kill. These substances defy the typical biochemical threat spectrum that includes microbial pathogens such as the anthrax bacterium and toxins such as botulinum. In "The Body’s Own Bioweapons" PDF (March/April 2008 Bulletin), Jonathan B. Tucker, a senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, documents this research and its impact on existing arms controls. Tucker and his three fellow discussants continue the debate about the impact of these new lethal and incapacitating agents and suggest ways to discourage their development. A treasure trove of articles discussing bioweapons research at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Fin d'Siecle Governance Issues

The US Senate yesterday introduced a biosafety bill that takes small steps towards resolving some controversial aspects of the system regulating research with agents that could be used for bioterrorism.

The regulations, called the Select Agent Program, have been controversial since they were established in 2002. The new bill, introduced by Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) on behalf of himself and Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), extends funding for the program, which expired last September, for five years. It calls for the federal government to update its agents list and clarify its definition of the smallpox virus to exclude less dangerous viruses, and demands that the government conduct a study on how well the Select Agent Program is functioning. It also mandates biosafety training for researchers working in biosafety level 3 and level 4 labs, and a reporting system for safety breaches -- suggestions made at a Congressional hearing on biosafety held last October. Finally, it gives state governments access to select agent registration information.

Gigi Gronvall of the Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center noted that some researchers believed that the Select Agent Program should be scrapped entirely -- a sentiment she disagrees with. "I don't hold any illusion that this would stop anyone from stealing [a listed pathogen] and potentially working on it as a weapon," she said, but it was still important "to know who is working on what." During the 2001 anthrax attack, she noted, the government's response was, "'We have no idea who works with anthrax.'" But, she said, "that's the wrong answer."

Senate tweeks bioterror regs - The Scientist NewsBlog.