Letters to the Editor
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The question of purity
The question of purity is more troubling than the question of additives. Let me expain. To produce anthrax bacillus, one must culture the bacteria on live host cells. This implies a sophisticated process involving what biotechnology professionals refer to as a "bioreactor" or three dimensional culture apparatus as opposed to typical two dimensional culture ( dish or flask ) used in most laboratories.
A small bioreactor takes a major biotech facility to support and operate. In this case, the bioreactor would contain a number of components. The culture media, or food, the host cells, the anthrax bacillus, and the spores themselves which were the final product of the procedure. The spores themselves may have been only 1/1000 of the culture volume, or maybe even 1/1,000,000 of the total culture volume. In any case, to produce grams of purified spores, the production facility would have been the size of a campus, not a basement in order to produce enough to fill multiple envelopes with visible amounts ( grams ). That is why most scientists feel that the lone perpetrator hypothesis is not viable. We are looking for a pharmaceutical company or a government lab ( campus ). Since the strain involved was identified via DNA analysis, there are not many alternatives to the above analysis. We know the biological requirements of the bacillus.
Additionally, separating the spores from the culture involved many rounds of centerfuge purification. This itself implies that the perpetrators had a large lead time and in fact knew that the 9/11 attack was coming, possibly years before it happened. For some inexplicable reason, they continued purifying the spores long after the highest purity ever achieved had been reached. This was certainly not “fun in the basement” for some psycho, and the FBI has either been misled or is intentionally misleading the press.