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Holly: Is there (that you know of) any standard for what this term means in this context? Does "highly engineered" mean "of super-uniform size, shape and/or toughness"? The term must have some very specific meanings if it's actually used by anthrax researchers, and that meaning may be revealed by what similar terms convey in related fields of study.
That's a really good point. In issues like this it is very important for us to be precise about our terms, lest we slide into "words mean what I want them to mean" territory. I'm not sure about a general standard, but what I mean when I talk about highly engineered material is spores that have been treated with materials ranging from bentonite to silica to the few reports I've seen of something called "polyglass". Many advances have been made in the field of nanotechnology in recent years and particles can be made to have just the size and surface chemistry one wants. If that technology were to be applied to something like anthrax spores, something quite dangerous could result.
ondelette: I am remembering this, so it may need massaging in details, but if I remember correctly, the use of substances like bentonite or kaolin in biological weapons is to facilitate the particles sliding by each other so they won't clump -- during the explosion of a bomb device. Pollen is plenty rough on its edges (required by most bee legs), and aerosolizes just fine in air currents, as do lycopodium spores, which are also rough, and frequently used in science classes to form colloidal suspensions in air which are then exploded to demonstrate [take your pick, mining disasters, grain elevator explosions, etc.].
Since my link to this technology is from my time in the field of biopesticides, I know that another early use of bentonite was to prevent clumping and to allow free flowing of conventional pesticides, so it would make sense that they would borrow bentonite or kaolin for that purpose. However, I have been interpreting "weaponized", in the anthrax case, to mean material that is of the appropriate size and with the appropriate other physical and chemical characteristics to be easily put into the air and taken deeply into the lungs to the smallest passages where infection takes place.
As I mentioned last night, I am starting to believe that it may be possible that sufficiently clean preparations of anthrax spores are naturally "weaponized". If that is not the case, and if clean spores instead would tend to clump, then I would have to think that the material only could have come from Dugway or West Jefferson.
Working with some of those materials that naturally are very small particles and disperse readily in air can be extremely dangerous. I had a co-worker destroy his lungs when he didn't take adequate precautions with material of that sort. He was a formulations specialist helping us to put our biological product (an insect parasitic nematode that wasn't quite microscopic at half a millimeter long, which we had put into partial suspended animation through removing much of its water), into a form that would readily disperse when placed into water. He made it work really well, but the small particles he worked with sensitized his lungs to antigens in the workplace nobody else had problems with and he had to stop coming into the building.
I relate that anecdote to support my thinking that growing and purifying spores wouldn't be such a challenge for a loner, but coming up with an engineered version of weaponizing would be beyond a loner's capability.
While waiting for the FBI's potential release of information this morning I'm going to check on another of my assumptions. In thinking about the loner theory, I've assumed that culture of anthrax is reasonably well understood and that the cultures can be induced to sporulate efficiently. If that information is not readily available, then the theory for a loner working outside one of the established anthrax labs would have to be at least modified to include inside information of the techniques in these labs. I know from personal experience and from a technology package I evaluated as a potential new product, that discovering conditions for culturing the vegetative phase of a bacterium is a completely different issue from inducing that culture to sporulate with high efficiency, and that creative and dedicated scientists can spend years trying to get sporulation at high concentration.
