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• Tuesday, August 5, 2008 03:24 PM

  @Jim White response to Reilly and Holy

  Sorry, Jim, you are wrong here:

  First, as to the function of a lyophilizer, all it does is to remove the water from the material placed into it. In other words, if you put a mixture of spores, vegetative cells and culture medium into it, you will get dried spores, vegetative cells and culture medium. If you put a water suspension of very highly purified spores into it, you will wind up with dry very highly purified spores.

  Not true. Lyophilization tends to disintegrate any spore preparation to some degree - that is one reason why it is used in vaccine manufacture, in which a broken or heat-killed solution of infectious cell fragments is used to activate one's immune system. There is no way to prepare pure spores using a lyophilizer - it is typically used to fragment plant and animal tissue for DNA extraction, among other purposes. No way.

  The first is that very reputable scientists have seen electron micrographs of the attack material and they report that there appears to be nothing besides spores in the material.

  Those were the photographs shown to Ken Alibek, the Battelle contractor - that's your reputable scientist, the Soviet defector who claimed repeatedly that the anthrax had to be from Iraq??? Wasn't the other Bill Patrick, longtime Battelle employee and anthrax bioweapon patent-holder??? Those were photographs of Battelle's autoclaved hockey pucks, I imagine. (see previous post of mine)

  The bit about Ed Lake is laughable - the guy knows nothing about science, and is just some kook with a web site. Another Hatfill team member.

  I previously was of the opinion that the attack material had to have been produced at Dugway, but the concepts described above make me less sure of that. Now, I am beginning to believe the assertion that someone moderately skilled in microbiology could have produced the material.

  Well, since the concepts you describe are so incorrect, I guess you agree that individuals at Battelle and Dugway Utah, or possibly West Jefferson Ohio, are the guilty party? Murderers on the loose - don't you worry about them having some more of it stashed away somewhere?

  This is all just a massive and desperate attempt at burying the story and closing the case. What's next? Will the Justice Department call in the Enron papershredders to clean up loose ends before the grand exodus?

  And how about that huge fat anthrax vaccine contract, all set to be delivered "in late 2008" - right to longtime Battelle partner, Emergent Biosolutions, proud new owner of Vaxgen? Our troops don't need body armor - they need anthrax vaccinations!

  Unreal. And the press is playing patsy... Well, not ALL of the press. :)

  —CargoCult Read CargoCult's other letters
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