Dear Chemical:

How kind of you to respond to my quickly written post. As you haver surmised, I was speculating on many of the details. I appreciate your kind inclusion of a link to a masters thesis which provides all of the details. I also found your clarification of BSL requirements helpful. In fact, I feel it is advisable that everyone in the modern laboratory environment understand what BSL 3 requirements specify, and what is “flying under the radar”. As someone who is employing genetic engineering to overexpress membrane protein targets, it is quite possible that you are employing one of the commercially available lentiviral expression vectors. These “fourth generation” kits are referred to as such because generations 1 – 3 were found to be unsafe due to recombinant retrovirus considerations. I'm sure that so somewhere in the insert there are still disclaimers with respect to recombinant retrovirus. It is encouraging to know that if your were to detect recombinant retrovirus in your lab, you would easily and confidently go to biosafety level 3 as mentioned in the insert for such products. In that respect, here many people have been known to “fly under the radar”.

In any respect, neither safety nor production of large quantities of spores are at the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is the use of novel nanotechnology to weaponize the spores after they were produced. As you know individual spores contain electrical charges on their surfaces which causes them to be “sticky” or clump, at least into particle sizes that do not easily become airborne. One way to precess them to combat this problem is processing with clay, or bentonite. This technique is associated with Iraq, and is at the heart of the issue we are discussing. Scientific examination ( I am quoting from the Newsweek article) seems to indicate that a novel technique was used, implying the employment of a unique “nanotechnology” form a different source. Nanotechnology itself is not rare, not even in the biotechnology industry. For example, if one wanted to produce an a biotech product such as insulin or a vaccine for inhalation there may be multiple options. But in fact all of these options involve employing techniques from the nanotechnology industry, or the biotech or pharmaceutical industry. Please keep in mind, if multiple grams of product for inhalation were the product of a pharmaceutical company, it would very possibly represent millions of dollars of product if it were in a quality ready for market. I believe that this implies that someone made a huge investment in the production of the weaponized anthrax used, and that is why the scientific community as a whole stepped back from the issue.

Back to the actual issue at hand, the initial misinformation provided to ABC and Brian Ross about the nature of the anthrax weaponization, and we see that is is very important to see who might have been the original source for that misinformation.

It is encouraging to know that if your were to detect recombinant retrovirus in your lab, you would easily and confidently go to biosafety level 3 as mentioned in the insert for such products. In that respect, here many people have been known to “fly under the radar”.

sorry, I don't follow your point here. I would not easily and confidently go to BSL3 in an existing lab, but I could probably set up an effective and safe work space that met the practical requirements of BSL3 in a suburban garage or a farm outbuilding.

I agree with you that it is definitely of interest to find out who mis-informed ABC news, who misled the public, and why. Like other readers here, I am not surprised that highly placed people in the Bush White House have done so for their own, quite possibly militaristic, goals. Nor do I think that this is an isolated incident. There do seem to be multiple people commanding attention at the WH with different, sometimes conflicting personal agendas. They seem to feed things to the press for their own purposes, and nothing has been done about it, and I'm here reading this discussion because Glenn has been such a committed and eloquent pursuer of this sort of mis-information campaign.

However, I disagree with your conclusions regarding the requirement for millions of dollars and the scientific community.

The heart of the issue is the use of novel nanotechnology to weaponize the spores after they were produced.

This appears to be an unjustified conclusion, based on the evidence that I'm aware of anyway. To scientifically differentiate between naturally occurring silicate structures and nano-tech could be very difficult, and would at least require additional studies which have not been released, if they have been done.

Please keep in mind, if multiple grams of product for inhalation were the product of a pharmaceutical company, it would very possibly represent millions of dollars of product if it were in a quality ready for market.

Well, that does depend a bit on the product, doesn't it? I mean, if you want to isolate some aspirin from willow bark, grind it up really fine and put it in an envelope, it probably won't cost very much. The FDA requirements, not to mention the requirements of stockholders, are stringent, which does make it very expensive to develop, produce and market new drugs. On the other hand, the physical production costs are usually only a fraction of the total costs. This is why generic drugs are cheaper, not to mention drugs from Canada. The production costs of anthrax spores just aren't that big. Remember, the Russians made TONS of it.

I believe that this implies that someone made a huge investment in the production of the weaponized anthrax used, and that is why the scientific community as a whole stepped back from the issue.

Huh? As far as I can tell, someone made an investment, but there's no evidence that it was huge. Most of the anthrax was used up in the x-ray analysis, and there isn't much left for anyone to look at and determine whether it has been weaponized by advanced methods or it has been dried using the silica gel that comes in shoe boxes. What is available is under lock and key at the FBI so the 'scientific community' (to the extent that rivals form a community) doesn't have access to the samples needed to answer the question. The FBI has their own scientists, who draw their own conclusions from their own evidence. Some of them are very, very good. If you want to check for collusion in a grand plan, check on hiring and firing at the FBI. Maybe the scientific findings have been politicized.

Perhaps you would also be interested to know that much of 'nanotech' is inspired by natural forms, like the tiny shells of foraminiferae, the layered structure of a clam shell, and the complicated spinning of spider silk. The layered structure of a bacillus spore is another candidate, which has not been well studied. It turns out that we don't have really good scientific tools for dissecting the structure of things at nano-scale. It's one of the current challenges of nanotech. Whether the natural coating of Ames strain anthrax, when grown under lab conditions, contains traces of silica is unknown, so how can the scientific community comment on it with anything less speculative than the journalistic nonsense that Glenn's pointing out?