IP: A lab out of control: Anthrax Missing From Army Lab

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Date: Sun, 20 Jan 2002 17:38:03 -0500
> From: tim finin <finin () cs umbc edu>
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> Subject: Anthrax Missing From Army Lab
>
> This is an interesting story from the HArtford
> Courant with a number of new dots suitable for
> connecting with the ones we know about already.
> tim
>
> --
>
> Anthrax Missing From Army Lab
> January 20, 2002
> By JACK DOLAN And DAVE ALTIMARI, Courant Staff Writers
> http://www.ctnow.com/news/specials/hc-detrick0120.artjan20.story?coll=hc%2Dheadlines%2Dhome
>
> Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other
> pathogens disappeared from the Army's biological
> warfare research facility in the early 1990s, during a
> turbulent period of labor complaints and recriminations
> among rival scientists there, documents from an internal
> Army inquiry show.
>
> The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone was
> secretly entering a lab late at night to conduct
> unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A
> numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been
> rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher,
> who left the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine's
> electronic memory, according to the documents obtained
> by The Courant.
>
> Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a
> danger. An Army spokesperson said they do not because
> they would have been effectively killed by chemicals in
> preparation for microscopic study. A prominent molecular
> biologist said, however, that resilient anthrax spores could
> possibly be retrieved from a treated specimen.
>
> In addition, a scientist who once worked at the Army facility
> said that because of poor inventory controls, it is possible
> some of the specimens disappeared while still viable,
> before being treated.
>
> Not in dispute is what the incidents say about
> disorganization and lack of security in some quarters of
> the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious
> Diseases - known as USAMRIID - at Fort Detrick, Md., in
> the 1990s. Fort Detrick is believed to be the original
> source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail
> attacks last fall, and investigators have questioned people
> there and at a handful of other government labs and
> contractors.
>
> It is unclear whether Ames was among the strains of
> anthrax in the 27 sets of specimens reported missing at
> Fort Detrick after an inventory in 1992. The Army
> spokesperson, Caree Vander-Linden, said that at least
> some of the lost anthrax was not Ames. But a former lab
> technician who worked with some of the anthrax that was
> later reported missing said all he ever handled was the
> Ames strain.
>
> Meanwhile, one of the 27 sets of specimens has been
> found and is still in the lab; an Army spokesperson said it
> may have been in use when the inventory was taken. The
> fate of the rest, some containing samples no larger than a
> pencil point, remains unclear. In addition to anthrax and
> Ebola, the specimens included hanta virus, simian AIDS
> virus and two that were labeled "unknown" - an Army
> euphemism for classified research whose subject was
> secret.
>
> A former commander of the lab said in an interview he did
> not believe any of the missing specimens were ever
> found. Vander-Linden said last week that in addition to the
> one complete specimen set, some samples from several
> others were later located, but she could not provide a
> fuller accounting because of incomplete records
> regarding the disposal of specimens.
>
> "In January of 2002, it's hard to say how many of those
> were missing in February of 1991," said Vander-Linden,
> adding that it's likely some were simply thrown out with
> the trash.
>
> Discoveries of lost specimens and unauthorized research
> coincided with an Army inquiry into allegations of
> "improper conduct" at Fort Detrick's experimental
> pathology branch in 1992. The inquiry did not substantiate
> the specific charges of mismanagement by a handful of
> officers.
>
> But a review of hundreds of pages of interview transcripts,
> signed statements and internal memos related to the
> inquiry portrays a climate charged with bitter personal
> rivalries over credit for research, as well as allegations of
> sexual and ethnic harassment. The recriminations and
> unhappiness ultimately became a factor in the departures
> of at least five frustrated Fort Detrick scientists.
>
> In interviews with The Courant last month, two of the
> former scientists said that as recently as 1997, when they
> left, controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn't have
> been hard for someone with security clearance for its
> handful of labs to smuggle out biological specimens.
>
> Lost Samples
>
> The 27 specimens were reported missing in February
> 1992, after a new officer, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, took
> command of what was viewed by Fort Detrick brass as a
> dysfunctional pathology lab. Langford, who no longer
> works at Fort Detrick, said he ordered an inventory after he
> recognized there was "little or no organization" and "little
> or no accountability" in the lab.
>
> "I knew we had to basically tighten up what I thought was
> a very lax and unorganized system," he said in an
> interview last week.
>
> A factor in Langford's decision to order an inventory was
> his suspicion - never proven - that someone in the lab had
> been tampering with records of specimens to conceal
> unauthorized research. As he explained later to Army
> investigators, he asked a lab technician, Charles Brown,
> to "make a list of everything that was missing."
>
> "It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was
> unaccounted for, which only verifies that there needs to be
> some kind of accountability down there," Langford told
> investigators, according to a transcript of his April 1992
> interview.
>
> Brown - whose inventory was limited to specimens
> logged into the lab during the 1991 calendar year -
> detailed his findings in a two-page memo to Langford, in
> which he lamented the loss of the items "due to their
> immediate and future value to the pathology division and
> USAMRIID."
>
> Many of the specimens were tiny samples of tissue taken
> from the dead bodies of lab animals infected with deadly
> diseases during vaccine research. Standard procedure
> for the pathology lab would be to soak the samples in a
> formaldehyde-like fixative and embed them in a hard resin
> or paraffin, in preparation for study under an electron
> microscope.
>
> Some samples, particularly viruses, are also irradiated
> with gamma rays before they are handled by the pathology
> lab.
>
> Whether all of the lost samples went through this
> treatment process is unclear. Vander-Linden said the
> samples had to have been rendered inert if they were
> being worked on in the pathology lab.
>
> But Dr. Ayaad Assaad, a former Fort Detrick scientist who
> had extensive dealings with the lab, said that because
> some samples were received at the lab while still alive -
> with the expectation they would be treated before being
> worked on - it is possible some became missing before
> treatment. A phony "log slip" could then have been entered
> into the lab computer, making it appear they had been
> processed and logged.
>
> In fact, Army investigators appear to have wondered if
> some of the anthrax specimens reported missing had
> ever really been logged in. When an investigator produced
> a log slip and asked Langford if "these exist or [are they]
> just made up on a data entry form," Langford replied that
> he didn't know.
>
> Assuming a specimen was chemically treated and
> embedded for microscopic study, Vander-Linden and
> several scientists interviewed said it would be impossible
> to recover a viable pathogen from them. Brown, who did
> the inventory for Langford and has since left Fort Detrick,
> said in an interview that the specimens he worked on in
> the lab "were completely inert."
>
> "You could spread them on a sandwich," he said.
>
> But Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a molecular biologist
> at the State University of New York who is investigating the
> recent anthrax attacks for the Federation of American
> Scientists, said she would not rule out the possibility that
> anthrax in spore form could survive the chemical-fixative
> process.
>
> "You'd have to grind it up and hope that some of the
> spores survived," Rosenberg said. "It would be a mess.
>
> "It seems to me that it would be an unnecessarily difficult
> task. Anybody who had access to those labs could
> probably get something more useful."
>
> Rosenberg's analysis of the anthrax attacks, which has
> been widely reported, concludes that the culprit is
> probably a government insider, possibly someone from
> Fort Detrick. The Army facility manufactured anthrax before
> biological weapons were banned in 1969, and it has
> experimented with the Ames strain for defensive research
> since the early 1980s.
>
> Vander-Linden said that one of the two sets of anthrax
> specimens listed as missing at Fort Detrick was the
> Vollum strain, which was used in the early days of the U.S.
> biological weapons program. It was not clear what the
> type of anthrax in the other missing specimen was.
>
> Eric Oldenberg, a soldier and pathology lab technician
> who left Fort Detrick and is now a police detective in
> Phoenix, said in an interview that Ames was the only
> anthrax strain he worked with in the lab.
>
> Late-Night Research
>
> More troubling to Langford than the missing specimens
> was what investigators called "surreptitious" work being
> done in the pathology lab late at night and on weekends.
>
> Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come
> to work several times in January and February of 1992 to
> find that someone had been in the lab at odd hours,
> clumsily using the sophisticated electron microscope to
> conduct some kind of off-the-books research.
>
> After one weekend in February, Downs discovered that
> someone had been in the lab using the microscope to
> take photos of slides, and apparently had forgotten to
> reset a feature on the microscope that imprints each
> photo with a label. After taking a few pictures of her own
> slides that morning, Downs was surprised to see "Antrax
> 005" emblazoned on her negatives.
>
> Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the
> camera, like an odometer on a car, had been rolled back
> to hide the fact that pictures had been taken over the
> weekend. She wrote of her findings in a memo to
> Langford, noting that whoever was using the microscope
> was "either in a big hurry or didn't know what they were
> doing."
>
> It is unclear if the Army ever got to the bottom of the
> incident, and some lab insiders believed concerns about
> it were overblown. Brown said many Army officers did not
> understand the scientific process, which he said doesn't
> always follow a 9-to-5 schedule.
>
> "People all over the base knew that they could come in at
> anytime and get on the microscope," Brown said. "If you
> had security clearance, the guard isn't going to ask you if
> you are qualified to use the equipment. I'm sure people
> used it often without our knowledge."
>
> Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized
> person who was observed entering the lab building at
> night was Langford's predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack,
> who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A
> surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40
> p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a
> lab pathologist and close friend of Zack's, according to a
> report filed by a security guard.
>
> Zack could not be reached for comment. In an interview
> this week, Rippy said that she doesn't remember letting
> Zack in, but that he occasionally stopped by after he was
> transferred off the base.
>
> "After he left, he had no [authorized] access to the building.
> Other people let him in," she said. "He knew a lot of
> people there and he was still part of the military. I can tell
> you, there was no suspicious stuff going on there with
> specimens."
>
> Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a
> controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior by
> Zack, Rippy, Brown and others who worked in the
> pathology division. They had formed a clique that was
> accused of harassing the Egyptian-born Assaad, who
> later sued the Army, claiming discrimination.
>
> Assaad said he had believed the harassment was behind
> him until last October, until after the Sept. 11 terrorist
> attacks.
>
> He said that is when the FBI contacted him, saying
> someone had mailed an anonymous letter - a few days
> before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known
> - naming Assaad as a potential bioterrorist. FBI agents
> decided the note was a hoax after interviewing Assaad.
>
> But Assaad said he believes the note's timing makes the
> author a suspect in the anthrax attacks, and he is
> convinced that details of his work contained in the letter
> mean the author must be a former Fort Detrick colleague.
>
> Brown said that he doesn't know who sent the letter, but
> that Assaad's nationality and expertise in biological
> agents made him an obvious subject of concern after
> Sept. 11.

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