December 28, 2003 - I've completed writing my book "Analyzing The Anthrax Attacks".  It's 432 pages, 82,200 words.  Because it looks better and is easier to read on paper than on-line, I removed the sample chapters from the on-line version of the proposal, leaving only the introduction.  Now the work of finding a publisher really begins. 

December 26, 2003 - Just when it seems that everyone has forgotten about the anthrax case, up pop a couple columnists for the The Washington Times who have found unnamed "U.S. officials" who say that "The CIA has been quietly building a case that the anthrax attacks of 2001 were in fact the result of an international terrorist plot." The rest of the article, however, indicates that there is no real evidence of such a plot.  The article even says, "Asked to comment, a[nother] U.S. official said, 'There is no evidence at this point to suggest a foreign terrorist link or connection.  But the matter is still under investigation and we're not ruling anything out.'"  The columnists evidently don't know when the letters were sent (they were sent in September and October of 2001, not October and November as they say), or how many people where infected (22 victims, not 27), or other details about the anthrax (the spores were not milled), or even how to spell Dr. Hatfill's name (it's Steven, not Stephen), but they evidently know how to generate news where there really is no news. 

December 22, 2003 - Someone pointed out to me that my copy of the March 31, 2003, discussion with Ken Alibek was truncated and did not include the question from Stuart Jacobsen and Alibek's answer (and a lot of other interesting questions and answers).   I was looking at the original on the Washington Post's web site when I made my comments of Dec. 19.  I've now updated my copy to include the entire discussion.   Sorry about that.

December 19, 2003 - While looking for something else, I stumbled upon a March 31, 2003, discussion with Ken Alibek on the Washington Post's web site where he repeatedly says that the spores were not coated, that it didn't take sophisticated equipment to make the anthrax, and that the media was putting out a lot of bad information about how the spores were made.   It also appears that Stuart Jacobsen was one of the people asking questions.   I added Alibek's comments to the new supplemental page about coatings.

December 18, 2003 - After several days of e-mail discussions with an expert on taking photographs via a scanning electron microscope (SEM), I made a few changes to the new supplemental page about coatings.  The expert has seen the "fried egg gunk" in images of his own, and he doesn't know what it is, but he knows it isn't silica, since he never used silica when preparing specimens for the SEM.  However, it appears that silica is commonly used to clean parts of older SEMs (and government labs tend to have older equipment).  Also, a specimen inside an SEM is also inside a vacuum, so the material oozing out of the spores could be an effect of the vacuum and could be natural material or material absorbed during the complex preparation procedures necessary for viewing a biological specimen via an SEM.  His observations do not prove that the statements about "fried egg gunk"  in Richard Preston's book "The Demon In The Freezer" are incorrect.  They only show there could be another explanation. 

December 14, 2003 - Although he said his previous post was to be his final post, Gary Matsumoto did respond to what I posted yesterday.   He wrote to the FAS forum: 

To Members of These Respective Lists:

    I am grateful to Mr. Ed Lake for the effort that he has made in responding to my last posting to the CBW list.  He invested a great deal of time and energy in his response, and I, for one, appreciate that.

    Unfortunately, I did not invest much time in what I wrote (about 40 minutes).  I made an error, as Mr. Lake correctly points out, but, as far as I know at this juncture, only one error.  I did, indeed, make a mistake in saying that a four nanometer particle of colloidal silica is a billion times smaller than a spore.  It's a billion times smaller than a meter, not a spore.  For that gaffe, I am duly chastised.  What was I thinking!?  That's what I get for writing an email for public consumption, having had too little sleep ...   I dashed something off a bit too cavalierly and made a mistake.  My apologies to one and all.

    As for the rest of his posting, I've read all of his annotations, and with the exception of my "nanometer/micrometer" error, I disagree with everything else he says.  My thanks again to Mr. Lake.

Sincerely,
Gary Matsumoto

December 13, 2003 - Around 1:30 p.m. (CT) on Dec. 11, Gary Matsumoto posted a 5 page letter about his coating theory to the FAS CBW forum.  While researching my response, I probably learned more about creating anthrax spores than I really want or need to know.  And I certainly don't want to go into too many details on this web site.  However, here is Matsumoto's letter along with my responses after each key comment.  Gary's words are in black and mine are in red.

To the Members of This [FAS CBW forum] List:

For those people who remain curious about nanoengineering bacillus spores and the mechanics of aerobiology, I would like to provide a few more facts to ponder.  This will be my final posting on the subject.

WHY BIOWEAPONEERS USE SILICA NANOPARTICLES
    Silica nanoparticles have been a staple in biological warfare powders and BW simulants for nearly two decades.  These particles come in different sizes and possess different qualities.  The smallest are around 4-12 nanometers in size, while the largest can be 100 nanometers or larger.  They are called "fumed," "precipitated" or "colloidal,” depending on the way they are made.  As I discussed in Science magazine, these nanoparticles provide a physical barrier between the surfaces of spores, which, if left uncoated, would cling to each other because of phenomena called van der Waals forces and Coulombic forces (named after the 18th century Dutch and French scientists who first identified them).

    So the relevant science has been around for over two hundred years, and it is universally accepted.  Coating particles with additives like silica has been done, routinely, for decades.  The Army does it.  Corporations making paint, printer ink, phosphors for electronics, plastic sheet and film all do it.  Some graduate schools of engineering and physics do it, and now some pharmaceutical powder designers are doing it too.

Gary,

     Your argument is somewhat self-defeating.  You say that using silica is commonplace, not only among bioweaponeers but in numerous industries and scientific fields.  I have no doubt that is true, since fumed silica is a product that anyone can buy.  Just to prove it, Richard M. Smith went out and bought some, a product that is sold in woodworking and hardware stores as a thickening agent for epoxy glue.  But that merely shows that the anthrax did not have to be made in a bioweapons facility in order to have silica mixed with it. 

     As I understand it, your argument is that the anthrax could ONLY have been made in a bioweapons facility.  But here you say silica could have been added by almost anyone anywhere. 

    As far as I know, silica is not FDA-approved for human inhalation with good reason (silicosis is a lung disease caused by inhaling silica dust), but a medical professional named Denise DeLisle (who works with a well known and highly respected investigative journalist named Scott Malone) recently tracked down a patent granted July 2003 to a New Jersey biotech company using silica additives to make respirable aerosol powders for medicinal use.  This core technology is in widespread use around the world.

     Again you say the technology is widespread and not limited to bioweapons manufacturing.  I fully agree.  While silica may not be FDA-approved for human consumption, that doesn't mean that scientists wishing to view spores under an electron microscope wouldn't use silica to help separate the spores prior to viewing. 

    Here's why.  According to Cabot Industries, the makers of a fumed silica product named CAB-O-SIL®, adding silica to powders and colloids will create “surface irregularities” on larger particles, preventing “continuous contact between two surfaces leading to adhesion.”  In other words, the silica acts as a “spacer”—it is just wide enough keeping the surfaces of larger substrate particles like anthrax spores far enough away from each other (50+ angstroms) to be out of range from van der Waals and Coulombic forces.

     In reality, anthrax spores already have "surface irregularities".  Spores are a long way from being perfectly round or perfectly smooth.  Unlike many manufactured substances, under a scanning electron microscope the organic spores look like snowballs or hand-packed clay, with lots of irregularities and indentations.  The best image I have of the surface of a spore is HERE. 

     Since you trust in Richard Preston's book "The Demon in the Freezer" so much, here is his description of the spores:

      "The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks.  They remined him [Tom Geisbert] of grinning jack-o-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets, and Halloween goblin faces.  The anthrax particles had an eroded, pitted look, like meteorites fallen to earth.  Most chunks were very tiny, sometimes just one or two spores, but there were also boulders.  One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming.  It was an anthrax skull. 
     "The skulls were falling apart.  He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched.  This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions." 

     As stated above, spores are not perfectly round nor perfectly oval, so the diagrams you use in the Science article are not representative.  The surfaces of spores are already irregular.  Preston said they had "an eroded, pitted look".

    You can also leave the silica aggregates unattached to form a thin, movable layer on the surface of a spore.  This way the loose silica nanoparticles will slide and tumble like ball bearings, making the powder flow like water.  Based on the available information from military and intelligence sources, the silica in the Senate powder was affixed to the spores’ surfaces.

     That's where you need to provide sources and references.  Using silica to keep spores from sticking together is one thing, but to afix the silica to the spore is something else altogether.  The sources you use further down in this letter seem to indicate that the silica was NOT "affixed to the spores' surfaces"  (it oozed out and boiled, etc.). 

    Although nanoparticles add mass, volume and weight to spores, they greatly enhance their aerodynamics. 

     Yeah, sure.  Tell me another one.  You're going to need solid evidence on that one.

This is because silica nanoparticles have a unique architecture.  They are amorphous, which means their molecules are arranged in what appears to be a haphazard way.  They look different at different distances.  Under extreme magnification (350,000x), a single aggregate of fumed silica particles, like those you find in CAB-O-SIL®, looks like a squiggly chain of cotton balls.  If you reduce the magnification (50,000x), you can no longer see these cotton balls, or the chains for that matter—they now look like denuded grape stems.  No matter what you do, individual particles of fumed, colloidal or precipitated silica aggregate—these aggregates can look like flakes of dry skin, or, as Richard Preston described them in this book, The Demon in the Freezer, like “fried egg gunk, dripping off [Daschle] spores.”   According to the account in Preston’s book, this is what USAMRIID scientists Tom Geisbert and Peter Jahrling saw on the surface of the Daschle spores when they performed the initial electronmicroscopy — “fried egg gunk.”

     "denuded grape stems?"   That is exactly what the materials below and to the right of the spore look like in photo No. FA5679 that is found HERE.  I think you are convincing me that the "gunk" seen in photo # FA5682 found HERE could also be fumed silica. 

    Being good scientists, Geisbert and Jahrling declined to draw conclusions about the identity of this “gunk” until it was analyzed with an Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectrometer at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology.  The gunk turned out to be silica.

     I concede that the "fried egg gunk" seen by the scientists appears to have been silica.  But the question is whether or not the spores were coated.  No one ever said the spores were coated.   The wording of their comments (below) indicates otherwise.
 

WHY SILICA ADDS MASS, VOLUME & WEIGHT BUT STILL MAKE SPORES FLOAT
    As silica chemists explain it, these tiny chains of amorphous silica do the same job as the interlocking barbules on the vanes of a feather—they trap air—which is why larger particles coated with fumed, precipitated or colloidal silica will stay aloft in an atmosphere, but not in a vacuum.  Multi-spore particles, which invariably occur, can be much larger, and this was observed in the Senate powder.  The authors of a peer-reviewed paper published by the Journal of the American Medical Association made reference to the Senate powder, reporting the presence of agglomerates that exceeded “100 µm (micrometers) or more.”  But the authors point out that the agglomerates also “had a propensity to pulverize (i.e., disperse into smaller particles when disturbed.”  As Richard Preston described this phenomenon: “He (Tom Geisbert) could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched.  This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions.”

     Whether or not spores require coatings to prevent clusters of spores from falling apart is the question.  If they were created individually with a spray dryer and had no significant static charge, why would they stick together?  You say they would stick together because of van der Waals forces.  But van der Waals forces relate primarily to the way molecules of a single substance stick together - like water or liquified gases.  If spores stick together as solidly as you suggest, why aren't there any pictures of spores stuck together that way?  When I asked Stuart Jacobsen that question, he merely responded with insults and ridicule.  Spores do not consist of a single substance, nor are they perfectly smooth.  We know that static electricity will cause them to stick together, but we also know there are many ways to eliminate that problem. 

    In order to self-crumble, aerosol and pharmaceutical powder specialists say the particles that form these crumbly aggregates must contain an additive.  This is what the 100+ micrometer aggregates in the Senate powder did, they pulverized, so the silica in the Senate powder did, in fact, do its job quite well.

     An additive isn't necessarily a coating. 

    If you can create a particle from scratch (which you can't do with B. anthracis spores), you might not need an additive.  For instance, the Nektar Corporation in California makes inhalable medicinal powders without a flow agent.  This is because Nektar engineers created small particles of dried medicines like albuterol sulfate (an asmtha drug) that are cratered and pitted like tiny meteorites.  The irregular surfaces on these particles do the same job as the fumed silica does when coating the surface of particles like B. anthracis spores—they create an uneven surface to thwart surface adhesion forces.

     I think you just shot down your own argument.  Spores are NOT perfectly round, they DO have irregular surfaces.   And they ARE created from "scratch".  Or to put it more accurately, they are created as single entities.  One bacterium creates one spore and that spore is "cratered and pitted" when dried as a single entity.  Why would you think otherwise? 
 

WHY YOU CAN’T SEE INDIVIDUAL SILICA NANOPARTICLES ON SPORES
    The diameter of an anthrax spore is just under one micrometer, which is a millionth of a meter.  A colloidal silica nanoparticle can be as small as four nanometers or four billionths of a meter in diameter.  This is several orders of magnitude smaller than a polio virus or immunoglobulin and almost a billion times smaller than an anthrax spore.  As this is the case, it is unlikely that
an untrained eye could spot an individual nanoparticle of silica unless an electronmicroscopist, specifically trained to spot such things, had already zoomed in on the nanoparticle, revealing it at an extreme magnification.

     Actually, a typical spore is between 1 micron and 1.1 microns in diameter.  But let's use 1 micron for sake of simplicity.

     I'm not sure where you learned about numbers, but a billion is a thousand million. That means that, but if a spore is 1 micron in diameter and a silica nanoparticle is 4 nanometers in diameter, then the nanoparticle is 4 thousandths of the size of a spore - not "a billion times smaller".   Even if you use the British definition of a billion, you still can't get that answer.  Besides, 7 nanometers is more realistic as a minimum size for a nanoparticle of silica and they can be as large as 70 nanometers, with aggregates getting to 200-300 nanometers in size.  Such an aggregate would be a quarter the size of a spore!

     And the entire argument is nonsense since no one is talking about seeing an "individual nanoparticle of silica".  We're talking seeing coatings consisting of vast numbers of nanoparticles of silica - and unattached nanoparticles and aggregates, too. 

     Looking up the sizes of various viruses, I find that an ebola virus is about 100 nanometers in diameter and close to a micron in length.  And rhinovirus is a ball that is roughly 25 nanometers in diameter.  And a polio virus is roughly half the size of an ebola virus.  So, it's pretty big and could easily be seen next to an anthrax spore.

     To help you visualize things, click HERE for a graphic showing spores and viruses and their relative sizes.

    To explain why this is so difficult, consider this account from The Demon in the Freezer.  When USAMRIID scientist, Tom Geisbert, examined the Daschle anthrax spores, he also looked for "bricks" of smallpox virus intermingled with the spores.  The smallpox virus, Variola major, is much smaller than a B. anthracis spore, so this was a difficult job.  “The task of finding a few particles of smallpox mixed into a million anthrax spores,” writes Preston, “was like walking a mile of stony gravel looking for a few diamonds in the rough.”

     Actually, a smallpox virus is a very LARGE virus.  The variola virus measures 260 by 150 nanometers.  So, it's roughly a quarter the size of an anthrax spore.  But "finding a few particles of smallpox mixed into a million anthrax spores" would still be like looking for a needle in a haystack when you can only see one square inch at a time.

    So it takes a practiced eye to recognize nano-sized particles under a scanning electron microscope (SEM).  Spotting aggregates is another matter.

     The evidence suggests otherwise.  And you use extreme examples to make your case, while the actual situation is far from your extreme examples.
 

WHY SILICA, NOT RAW SILICON, WAS PRESENT ON THE SURFACE OF THE ANTHRAX SPORES MAILED TO THE SENATE
    The combination of visual inspection and X-ray microanalysis identified silica aggregates in the Daschle anthrax powder—visuals alone could not do that.

    Geisbert and Jahrling saw large aggregates of something they couldn’t identify at first “boiling off” the Daschle anthrax spores.  According to Preston’s account: Geisbert zoomed in for a closer look and saw “some sort of goop clinging to the spores.”  Geisbert rastered over the spores surface to try and identify this goop that “…made the spores look like fried eggs — the spores were the yolks, and the goop was the white,” writes Preston.  “It was a kind of splatty stuff.”

     "'Boiling off' the Daschle anthrax spores" seems to suggest something very different from a coating.  We seem to be talking about something coming out of the spores.

    According to Preston, Geisbert then took “Polaroids” of these spores oozing some sort of additive (Did Drs. Meselson and Alibek see these same Polaroids?).

     "Oozing" is another term implying something coming OUT of the spores.  My dictionary defines "ooze" as "to flow out slowly or give forth moisture, as through small holes."  That is VERY different from a coating.

     On page 192 of Richard Preston's "The Demon In The Freezer" it says:

     "He [Tom Geisbert] spent the day with a group of technicians running tests with an X-ray machine to find out of the powder contained any metals or elements. By lunchtime, the machine had shown that there were two extra elements in the spores: silicon and oxygen.
     "Silicon oxide.
     "Silicon oxide is glass.
     "The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had put powdered glass, or silica, into the anthrax.  The silica was powdered so finely that under Geisbert's electron microscope it had looked like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores."

     (Professor Meselson saw several large, glossy electron micrographs of high quality which he believes were 8 1/2 by 11-inches in size.)

    When the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) analyzed this alleged additive, it got a signature.  According to AFIP, the signature was silica.

     Okay.  So, we've got some kind of substance containing silica oozing out of the spores.  NO silica coatings.  It appears that the spores were soaked in some silica solution and then spray dried.  But, after doing that and under the right conditions, some of the soaking material will ooze out of the spore coatings.  That makes a great deal of sense, since the silica would definitely help keep the spores from clogging the nozzle of the spray drier.  We're getting dangerously close to telling people how anthrax was made, but I can also see how most of the silica was removed from the spores during the spraying process, leaving only what had been absorbed into the spores' natural coatings.  Very interesting. 

    A large number of government officials and scientists all have stated, on-the-record, that the Senate anthrax powder contained silica.  They have never recanted their statements.  Nearly two years after AFIP’s elemental analysis of the Daschle powder showed the presence of silica on the anthrax spores, an AFIP spokesman says the institute stands by its findings.  A spokesperson at Fort Detrick says USAMRIID does not dispute anything in Preston’s account.

     You keep creating a "straw man argumgent" by implying that someone stated that there was NO silica in the anthrax.   Who ever said that?  Everyone agrees that there was silica present.  The dispute is over the form of the silica.  You say it must be a coating on the spores.  Others suggest that it could be from natural sources or from some drying process - or from both natural sources and a drying process.  From what you write and from what I now know, it definitely looks very likely that it came from some liquid substance used to aid drying the spores via a spray dryer.
 

WHY, UNLIKE FORT DETRICK’S GEISBERT AND JAHRLING, DRS. MESELSON AND ALIBEK DIDN’T SEE SILICA NANOPARTICLES ON THE SENATE SPORES
    I have no definitive answer for this.  I only know that Fort Detrick's account conflicts with that of Drs. Meselson and Alibek.

     The answer seems quite evident now.  The silica is there - absorbed inside the spores - in small amounts - and is only visible under the right conditions.  I don't know that much about how electron microscopes work, but I've read that "the specimen is placed inside the column part of the microscope. The column is then placed under vacuum so the electrons will not scatter".  That makes me wonder what effect the vacuum has upon what is being viewed.  Could it cause the silica to ooze out?  Does a higher resolution cause effects not seen with lower resolution? 
 

WHY THE PRESENCE OF SILICON IN STRUCTURES BENEATH A SPORE’S SURFACE HAS NO KNOWN RELEVANCE TO MAKING AEROSOLS
    Silica is used to defeat van der Waals and Coulombic forces on the surface of a spore.  To make spores disperse and help them to float, the additive must be on the spore’s exterior, not its interior.  Naturally occurring silicon atoms, embedded in the sub-surface spore coats and cortex, have no known effect on the adhesion forces affecting the surface of an anthrax spore’s
outermost layer, the exosporium.

     I think your viewpoint is seriously open to question.  Your facts are not valid, so your conclusions are incorrect.  If some silica solution oozes out of the spores coating under certain conditions that explains a great deal.  The ability for such an object as a spore to float is almost entirely related to weight. 

    So the internal components of the Senate anthrax spores could be drenched in silicon atoms, but they would not enable the spores to aerosolize or stay afloat. 

     The silica has nothing to do with making spores float.  And, because it weighs less, an uncoated spore would float better than a coated spore.  The spores is not perfectly round, and it already has irregularities, so additional irregularities won't help much.
 

WHY A TRILLION SPORES PER GRAM IS PRIMA FACIE EVIDENCE OF A COATING
    Various press accounts have reported the Senate anthrax powder contained a trillion spores per gram.  Some scientists dismiss this fact as something of little importance.  It is easy to purify B. anthracis spores and any preparation of pure spores will contain this concentration — 1x10^12 spores/gram because B. anthracis spores weigh approximately one trillionth of a gram.

     Correct. 

    This is an ivory tower construct built upon assumptions that ignore engineering realities.  There are a number of complex engineering tasks to be completed between purification and the final product—a powder comprised of micron-sized particles that behave, once they are airborne, like a gas.

     False.  First, only you are talking about "engineering".  Everyone else is talking about creating small quantities on the order of a few grams in a lab.  And that is easily within the capabilities of almost any microbiology lab.  Plus, while the spores might "act like a gas" because they are small and invisible to the naked eye, they are NOT a gas.  They are tiny spores or clusters of spores.  They are more like dust or smoke than a gas.

    The first step, purifying spores, involves, as many microbiologists and molecular biologists have pointed out, a process that is more laborious than it is ingenious—multiple centrifuging and washings will spin out extraneous cellular material and other detritus from the growth phrase.  You can also purify spores both other means, but multiple centifuging/washing is arguably the simplest way.

     Correct.

    Once the spores are spun down in a centrifuge, they will be compressed in a gooey pellet at the bottom of a test tube.  This pellet then must be dried, which yields a tiny cake of spores, and this dried cake must then be milled.  As long as that cake remains intact, you may have a trillion spores, but they are in the form of one very large chunk that no one could possibly inhale … even if they forced it up a nostril and tried to snort it.

     False.  Nonsense.  There are well-known alternatives to drying the "pellet".  Once the spores have been separated from the debris of sporulation and purified down to a gooey mass of wet spores via a centrifuge, those spores can then be mixed with some kind of silica-containing solution and spray dried to create a powder of dry, individual spores.

    Milling also will not produce a trillion spores per gram.  In the old U.S. biological warfare program, milling yielded 20 to 30 billion spores per gram.  In the old Soviet program, milling reportedly yielded about one hundred billion spores per gram.  This is because the processing of a germ powder (sporulation, the degree of purification and milling, adding an additive) can leave debris (e.g., residual media, vegetative cells, broken spores, larger agglomerates), all of which have mass, volume and weight.  The more debris you have in a gram of dried powder, the fewer spores you can have.  Two things can’t occupy the same space at the same time.  It’s a simple as that.

     The experts who have seen the spores have said that the spores were not milled.  It seems very clear that they were probably spray dried.  So, your point is moot.

    If you have close to a trillion discreet spores or CFU’s, something had to be done to those spores to keep them from clumping together into larger and larger agglomerates.  Without an additive, clumping is inevitable due to innate van der Waals and Coulombic forces on the surface of spores, and the additional electrostatic charge generated by friction (otherwise known as tribo-electric charging) in milling.

     False.  No milling was done.  Based upon your own evidence, there is no reason to believe that van der Waals forces play any significant role in causing spores to clump, and static electricity is easily controlled if no milling was used.  (And because of clumping, a trillion spores is not likely to create a trillion CFUs.)

    So milling alone will not give you a trillion spores per gram.  Somebody had to coat the surfaces of the Senate spores to make them “energetic,” to make them aerodynamic, and to make them each a discreet particle or colony forming unit … which, under certain conditions, might agglomerate, but could then “self-crumble” or "pulverize" when disturbed.

    Mother Nature doesn’t make a product like this.

     Neither did the anthrax refiner/mailer.  The anthrax refiner/mailer made a product that is very similar to what Mother Nature makes - except that he apparently used some silica solution during the drying process.
 

THE LOGIC OF SPORE COATINGS
    One man’s logic is another man’s foolishness, so rather than make assertions based on what I find logical, let me instead pose a series of questions:

      If Mother Nature did, in fact, make naturally “energetic” and “aerogenic” B. anthracis spores, why is inhalation anthrax such a rare disease? 

     I find it bizarre that you would even ask such a question, since it shows how far from reality you are.  However, I'll try to explain: 

     Inhalation anthrax is a rare disease for many reasons which have nothing to do with being “energetic” and “aerogenic”.  First, its causes have been known for over a century.  So, any modern person who is likely to be in an environment where there are anthrax spores in the air will take precautions.  They'll use masks, they'll be up-to-date on their shots, they'll have adequate ventilation in their work area, etc.  Second, the human immune system will typically take care of small exposures, so a normal healthy person needs to inhale several thousand spores in order to be in serious danger of contracting inhalation anthrax.   Third, although there is a lot of debate about how long a spore can survive in sunlight, the top experts say only a day or two.  So, deadly spores don't just float around in the air forever.  Fourth, it's a disease of animals and the spores are normally found underground.  When an animal contracts anthrax by ingesting spores pulled up while eating grass, it begins vomiting and excreting fluids laden with B anthracis bacteria onto the ground.  It then dies and vultures may pick it apart, causing more bacteria to be exposed to the air as blood flows onto the ground.  When the bacteria is outside of the body, it can no longer survive, so it begins the process of sporulation - forming spores.  (The B anthracis bacteria needs to be exposed to air in order to sporulate.  It cannot sporulate inside a dead animal.)  The spores generally come to rest just a few centimeters under the ground where the liquids carried them.  There, protected from the UV rays in sunlight and mixed with dirt, vegetation and animal products, they can survive for a century or more.  A century later, some grazing animal may pull up the spores as it feeds on grass, it ingests the spores with the grass and contracts anthrax.  But while underground the spores are no significant danger to humans. 

     If coating small particles with additives is so unnecessary, why have governments and corporations spent vast sums of money over the past several decades to devise better ways of doing this?  Governments are legendary for wastage, but why would so many bottom-line oriented corporations spend the money if they didn’t have to? 

     They do it to prevent clumping and to make a more lethal product.  In a weapon, the spores are packed tightly into some container.  Packing will force the spores together, and since they are not totally devoid of liquids, they may stick together if stored for any period of time.  Using silica to keep the spores from sticking together is necessary because of the way the spores are packed.  If you don't pack the spores into a bomb, you don't have the problems associated with packing and storage.  The spores in the letters were not tightly packed. 

     If a regular gun can kill people, why develop a machine gun?  If a regular bomb can kill people, why develop an atomic bomb?  Answer: to be able kill more people very quickly.

     If small particles disperse and flow without additives, why do graduate schools of engineering and pharmaceutical science hire Ph.D.’s who specialize in coating particles?  Why not save the money from all these allegedly unnecessary salaries, medical and life insurance policies, and pension funds?  Who can afford such extravagance?  And why do these allegedly redundant Ph.D.’s publish articles about coating small particles in engineering journals like Powder Technology, which are expressly devoted to this discipline?  Are all of these peer-reviewed papers just the 21st century techno-babble version of selling snake oil? 

     There's a big difference between optimal distribution and normal distribution.  The additives make a better product.  But that doesn't mean that you won't get individual spores floating around in nature.

     If coating B. anthracis spores with silica is so unnecessary, why did the U.S., the Soviet Union, and possibly Iraq bother doing it?  Again, why waste the time and the money on something you don’t have to do? 

     It makes a much better product.  Anthrax is lethal in nature.  Man is just using additives to make it as lethal as possible.

     If raw bacillus spores will do the job, why does the U.S. Army also add silica to its anthrax simulant powders? 

     Same-o same-o.  They want a more lethal product.  They want something better than what nature provides.

     If untreated B. anthracis spores can disperse, aerosolize and stay airborne without treatment, why didn’t Dugway Proving Ground’s untreated spores behave like the Senate material? 

     Because they didn't make it the way the anthrax refiner/mailer made it.  They allowed the gooey blob of refined spores to dry into a cake instead of using a spray drier or some better method.  They were evidently proving that the anthrax was NOT made that way, rather than blindly looking for some new method of making anthrax - as you suggest.  Knowing that the anthrax could NOT be made that way will almost certainly be necessary in court to help prove a circumstantial case of exactly how it WAS made by the anthrax refiner/mailer. 

     It appears clear from your own explanations via the FAS CBW forum that your article in Science Magazine is really not a science article but a political article using fiction instead of fact.  You misunderstand the size of spores and totally failed to grasp the shape of spores.  And your own words show that when the size is understood and the pitted nature of the spore coatings is understood, then your theory falls apart as total nonsense. 

December 11, 2003 - Around 1:30 p.m. (CT) this afternoon, Gary Matsumoto posted another long letter about anthrax coatings to the Federation of American Scientists' CBW (Chemical & Biological Weapons) forum.  The subject of the posting says it's his "final posting" on the subject, but the letter poses numerous questions and ask for answers, so it may not be the final final.

It's going to take me at least a day to write a response, so I'll put his letter here when I post my response here. 

December 8, 2003 - I just updated the Coatings Page with new information and made a few corrections. The biggest change is exposing the fact that Matsumoto misleads people about the relative size of silica nanoparticles versus spores.

Someone sent me a .pdf file illustrating the size of silica nanoparticles.  It's HERE.

When compared to the spore images on the Coatings Page, it tells us is that a cluster of nanoparticles would be roughly a QUARTER the size of a spore.  That would hardly be invisible to experienced scientists viewing spores in a micrograph as Matsumoto suggested.

While Matsumoto may have viewed a micrograph of silica nanoparticles taken at a magnification "several hundred thousand times greater than the magnification employed to view, and photograph, a cluster of spores", the amount of magnification isn't what's important.  It's the relative size of a spore compared to a silica nanoparticle or cluster that is important.  Even at the smallest size of 7 nanometers, silica nanoparticles would still look like a sand coating on a chicken egg and would be CLEARLY visible.

It's either just carelessness on his part or Matsumoto deliberately twisted facts to make his political point.  Either way, I'm certain he's aware of the philosophy used by many politicians to promote their favorite causes: If you don't have facts, bury them in bullshit.

I feel certain there are other scientific inaccuracies in the Science Magazine article yet to be pointed out.  But this one alone would seem to be enough to prove that the article is bad science. 

December 7, 2003 - Reading Gary Matsumoto's article in Science Magazine over and over again only confirms to me that it is a political article and not a scientific article.  I may not be the right person to question Matsumoto's conclusions, but I seem to be the only one doing so.  One problem with a counter-argument is finding the right words, illustrations and facts to show that his conclusions are without scientific basis.  Another problem is being accepted as having the scientific background to challenge a report in such a prestigious scientific magazine.  I do not have the right credentials to be doing what I'm doing, but that has never stopped me in the past, and it doesn't stop me on this.

So, I've created a new supplemental page titled "Were the anthrax spores coated with silica or not?  The logic of the coating arguments" which is my evaluation of the Matsumoto article laid out in detail, complete with illustrations.  Hopefully, it will spur someone with the right credentials to present to the public enough solid facts to put the issue of coatings to rest once and for all.  Logic clearly isn't enough to accomplish that.  Authority and credentials are also required.

December 5, 2003 - Last night at around 5:50 p.m. Central Time, CNN Headline News repeated an interview segment I did on Wednesday about this site with Becky Worley of TechTV.  The CNN version was extremely complimentary.  I'm not all that certain I'm as "altruistic" as they suggested.  Mostly I work on this web site just to pacify my own insatiable curiosity.  However, it's nice to be flattered by Sophia Choi of CNN and Becky Worley of Tech TV (in a different interview, Becky called me "sweet").  And it was nice to hear such things from journalists just after another journalist Gary Matsumoto called me a "shrill boor".  As usual, reality is probably somewhere in the middle. 

Meanwhile, the debate between Gary Matsumoto and I over his article in Science Magazine seems to have reached the point where we are just standing nose to nose and glaring at each other with teeth on edge and fists clenched (figuratively speaking).  In a follow-up exchange to the earlier e-mails, some key points of contention came out.  Here is the basic exhange with Gary's comments in black and my responses inserted in red (plus a few added comments in brackets):

As for the media powder not containing silica, that is another one of your presumptions that the U.S. military would dispute.  Military sources say the media anthrax powder also contained silica.

Do you have a published source that says "the media anthrax powder also contained silica"?   If it's Richard Preston, see below.

Yes, you are correct that my article only looks at the Senate anthrax.  I intentionally focused on it because of its signature refinement.  When referring to the media anthrax, I think you have to exclude the material sent to the AMI building because federal authorities did not recover a sufficient amount of this material to make a meaningful analysis.

I'm not as certain as you about that.  One of the stated purposes of the second search of the AMI building in August and September of 2002 was to find enough spores to make comparisons.

"They also want to be able to compare spores in the building with anthrax spores found in letters to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy.

"'We are looking for large quantities of spores in order to chemically characterize those spores and compare them against the spores found in the Sens. Leahy and Daschle letters,' said Dwight Adams, assistant director of the FBI's laboratory division."

Source: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/reuters.html#rtr20826

That second search was "scientifically driven for a criminal investigation".

I do not know if the media anthrax (the stuff mailed to the NY Post, NBC, ABC and CBS) was truly of a lesser grade, as has been suggested in numerous press reports ... or if it was refined material that had been corrupted.

There is no reason to believe it was "corrupted".  The evidence says that it was simply dried, unrefined, sporulated anthrax.  My sources tell me that a ratio of 10 percent spores and 90 percent dead mother germs and dead germs which failed to sporulate is what you would get from an excellent sporulation run in a microbiology lab.

Scientists have been forcing anthrax to sporulate since Robert Koch first did it back in 1877.  It's not an unknown process.

Yes, a lesser grade powder can contain an additive like silica.  BT pesticide powders all use additives, including bentonite, but are less refined.  Refinement involves a range of factors, including particle size, electrostatic interactions, residual debris from milling (if the material wasn't spray-dried or processed by even more advanced methods) or from media components, not to mention the addition of diluents and flow agents like silica.

Actually, for the purposes of this discussion, refinement consists of only ONE factor: purity.  The Senate envelopes contained "pure spores" or nearly "pure spores".  That's been stated by everyone who has seen the attack anthrax or pictures of the attack anthrax.  Other factors, such as debris, dilutants and additives are not refinement factors but represent (1) an intentional or unintentional incomplete job of refinement or (2) things done to the spores after refinement.  Refined spores by definition are pure spores.

It is also a matter of percentages.  All small particle engineering creates a range of particle sizes; a certain percentage of these particles will be bigger, some will be the optimal size, and some will be smaller.  It's a curve.  Getting a narrow particle range is partly a matter of processing and partly a matter of the way those particles are collected.  You can segregate particles by size during collection.

For our purposes here, a spore is a "particle" that is about one micron in diameter. That's the way Nature makes them.  They don't come in any other size.  Spores may clump together for various reasons, but if you have pure spores, your "particles" are single spores.  For our purposes, to avoid misunderstandings, "clumps" should be defined as clumps, not particles.  The clumps of spores in the Senate anthrax fell apart when touched, so I don't think the clumps qualify as particles.

As I stated earlier, there may be silicon atoms present in the B. anthracis spores mailed to the Senate, and wild spores, in rare instances, may get aerosolized, but neither of these possibilities make a whit of difference when it comes to the elemental content of the Senate spores as determined by the Army's laboratories.

Ah, but it makes all the difference in the world.  Yesterday I quoted from a NewsDay article which said in part,

"Recent studies suggest that even spores prepared without anti-clumping chemicals - if small enough - may be able to spread more efficiently in a closed space than had previously been thought possible. Further, scientists said, the fine-grained, readily inhaled character of the Daschle anthrax sample need not require production in a state-sponsored lab."

Source: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#nd011227

Purified spores do not fly like the Senate powder or the U.S. Army simulant.

That's a supposition.  How can a spore WITH a coating float better in the air than a spore WITHOUT a coating - since the coating adds weight?

Silica is primarily an anti-clumping agent.  It helps increase the number of single spores which will fly around when dispersed.  But each single spore should fly less well than an uncoated spore.

It's my understanding that static electricty can be present in any tiny particle, such as a natural spore.  And it can come from many sources.

Simple purification, as I explained in my article, is done by repeated centrifugation and washings in de-ionized water.  This produces a moist pellet of pure spores that must be subsequently dried and broken up into small particles for inhalation.  Breaking up this pellet involves friction and thus generates a de facto tribo-charging and electrostatic force.  Electrostatic force is just one factor that creates clumping.  So purifying spores alone does not create a good aerosol, let alone the world class powder mailed to Senators Daschle and Leahy ...a powder so exceptional it behaved like a gas.

See the NewsDay article above.

The Dugway reverse engineering attempt last winter proves this point.  The material made by Dugway was pure spores, but it was crudely milled and contained no additive.  This material, again made from pure spores, did not come anywhere close to matching the Senate powder, or, as far as I know, the allegedly lesser grade media powder.

If the Dugway powder was "milled", then it was NOT made the same way as the attack anthrax.  I believe Meselson, Alibek and Patrick have all stated that they saw NO signs of milling in the Senate anthrax. That is something that would definitely be seen in an electon micrograph.

A 23 year-old paper reporting data from one crop of B. cereus spores does not in any way shape or form constitute scientific evidence that refutes AFIP's spectrometer data.  It is only evidence that X-ray microanalysis found silicon in one batch of B. cereus spores, and that's all .  Any trained scientist will tell you that.  Even the authors of this paper raised questions about the provenence of the silicon they detected.  "Contamination from glassware" was just one suggestion in the paper.

Actually, the paper says, "Since there was considerable variation in silicon content both within and between different spore preparations, we considered it unlikely that the effect could be due entirely to contamination."  [I goofed.  I should have also pointed out that a finding is not invalidated by time, it's invalidated by new facts.} 

The bottom line is this.  The Army scientists who performed the electronmicroscopy say they saw an additive on the Daschle spores.  The Army scientists who performed the spectroscopy on the additive say it was silica.

Actually, the AFIP article says,

“Ft Detrick sought our assistance to determine the specific components of the anthrax found in the Daschle letter,” said Florabel G. Mullick, MD, ScD, SES, AFIP Principal Deputy Director and department chair. AFIP experts utilized an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (an instrument used to detect the presence of otherwise-unseen chemicals through characteristic wavelengths of X-ray light) to confirm the previously unidentifiable substance as silica."

Source: http://www.afip.org/cgi-bin/whatsnew.cgi/current.html?article=115

The word "additive" does not appear anywhere in the article.  It merely comments upon what silica has been used for in OTHER anthrax preparations.

Your use of the word "additive" just twists things to support a belief.

Two scientists, Meselson and Alibek, say they did not see the individual CAB-O-SIL particles that I described in The Washington Post.  They never said, as far as I am aware, that their visual examination of electronmicrographs enabled them to conclusively rule out the presence of an additive.  I have never heard either Meselson or Alibek dispute the discovery of an additive by USAMRIID's Tom Geisbert or Peter Jahrling, as recounted in Mr. Preston's book.

Aren't  you rationalizing?  When people say that they saw no signs of silica, you respond that the particles are too small to be seen. When someone says they saw "fried-egg gunk", you say it must be silica.

We haven't heard any expert say what form of silica would look "like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores".  According to Professor Meselson, if fumed silica had been used, under an electron microscope it "would look like cotton balls strung together into strands that branch out in every direction."

Check out this site:
http://db2.photoresearchers.com/cgi-bin/query.cgi?key=anthrax&match=full&pg=4

Image #FA5679 - second row, first picture from the left.  I see what looks like "fried-egg gunk".  Is it silica?

The USAMRIID experts were unfamiliar with dried anthrax and didn't know what to expect.  We don't know if what they told Mr. Preston was what Mr. Preston actually wrote.  Everything gets interpreted. I asked Mr. Preston about some statements he made about the MEDIA anthrax, and he replied:

"I'm afraid I have no fresh information on the media anthrax.  My report on it in The Demon in the Freezer is simply based on contemporaneous impressions of the anthrax from (anonymous) sources who would not have had the full picture of the material, because that has only come later with analysis by FBI-contracted scientists and labs, and they are being extraordinarily close-mouthed about what they're finding, as you know.  As one of my sources explained to me, the FBI has pointed out to its participating scientists that to talk about federal evidence is a federal felony.  I would not be surprised if my description of the media anthrax is incorrect, nor would I be surprised if it was basically correct."

In general, your analyses are grossly unscientific because they make too many leaps of logic.  You cannot draw conclusions about the AFIP spectroscopy data from the results of a totally unrelated experiment ... especially one from a quarter century ago that relied on a previous generation's technology.

I'm not drawing any conclusions from either the AFIP article or the 1980 paper on Bacillus cereus.  I'm just looking for a working hypothesis that explains ALL the known data.   The anthrax contains silicon.  That's known.  How it got there is unknown.

The silica chemist I quoted in my article, Dr. Jonathan Bass, says the X-ray microanalysis spectrometers from 23 years ago were insufficiently sensitive to detect oxygen.  If true, the scientists who published the 1980 J. of Bact. paper would have been incapable of discerning whether the silicon atoms they detected were from silica (which is silicon and oxygen), a silicate or silicic acid.  In short, it is an almost meaningless comparison.

Irrespective of any spin propagated by individual FBI officials about additive-free anthrax spores, you would do well to consider two things.  The officials who have stated, on-the-record, that there is silica in the Senate anthrax powder include a White House spokesman and cabinet secretary, as well as scientists from the U.S. Army, the CDC and the EPA.  In two years, the FBI has steadfastly declined to state, on-the-record, that all of these government officials and scientists got it wrong.  The FBI has never refuted the AFIP data.  It has never attacked Preston.  It has muzzled Geisbert and Jahrling, but never challenged what they had to say.

As a journalist you should know that because the FBI does not give out information about a case, you cannot conclude that they don't have any information.  If they got into any of these arguments, they would be giving out information that might be harmful to their case.  Besides, no one has said the AFIP report was wrong.  What is being said is that many INTERPRETATIONS of the [AFIP] report are wrong because the [AFIP] report does not say what the [various] interpretations [of the AFIP report] imply.

Nothing you have said in your presumptuous and snide emails would pass muster in scientific peer review.

I'm not so sure about that.  I came to the subject with an open mind.  I stand by my findings, and if anyone finds a factual error, I'm happy to listen.  And I'm always hunting for new facts.  Opinons, however, are not facts, and neither are misinterpretations.

The materials engineering required to make a high quality aerosol with bacillus spores involves disciplines like colloid chemistry and physics; microbiology is the easy part.  A college freshman taking organic chemistry, molecular biology and physics should be able to tell you about van der Waals forces, and possibly even Coulombic forces (although a freshman armed with such knowledge could not engineer a a high-grade pharmaceutical powder).  But you dispute these well-established scientific principles dating back to the 18th century as some sort of fabricated mumbo jumbo.

Check the NewsDay article above.  It states very clearly that a lot of beliefs need to be adjusted: "spores prepared without anti-clumping chemicals - if small enough - may be able to spread more efficiently in a closed space than had previously been thought possible."

In short, you don't know what you're talking about.  If anyone actually listened to you bloviate on scientific matters, I'd say you were a public menace.  But most people know better than to listen to you, I think, because you advertise your ignorance with every one of your stupefyingly arrogant and intemperate insults. If you are going to hold forth on science, I recommend that you actually learn some of it first, especially before you presume to lecture the entire world about it.

I'm not lecturing the world.  My web site is my interpretation of what I've been able to learn about the anthrax case though two solid years of research.  It's presented on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.  I'm just looking for facts that I've missed.  [Besides, Becky Worley says I'm "sweet" and Sophia Choi wonders if I'm "altruistic".]

I present facts so that people can make their own judgements.  I don't recall anyone ever sending me an e-mail saying that they agree with everything I write.  But I've received a LOT of e-mails from people who compliment me on the site and all the information it provides - people from NSA, EPA, FBI and elsewhere.

The biggest difference between your article and my web site is that I look at the WHOLE picture regarding the anthrax attacks.  It's about everything from the letters and envelopes to the locations to the sequence of events.  And scientific details about anthrax are a tiny part of it.

I don't just select a specific aspect of the anthrax case which I can interpret to fit some theory that the powder MUST have been industrialized.  If you look at ALL the evidence, the anthrax was clearly made in a standard lab somewhere in New Jersey by an experience microbiologist.

You show your prejudice with the opening words of your article: "Although the investigation seems focused on the idea that the Senate powder could have been 'homemade', some experts say that's improbable."

There is NO reason to believe the FBI is focused on the idea that the powder was "homemade".  That's just a denegrating term you use to ridicule the idea that it didn't require a massive government program to make the Senate anthrax.  You want people to think that the FBI believes it was made in a bucket in a garage.

And your experts are merely saying that's "improbable".  I.e., they have different opinions.  If any of your experts is saying that the anthrax could NOT have been made in a small lab, then you need to contact Meselson, Alibek and Patrick who have all publically said that the anthrax was simply done:

"Meselson concurs that the anthrax evinces no sign of special coating or processing. 'There is no evidence that I know of,' he told me, 'that it was treated in any special way.'"

"It could be done, Alibek says, with 'a very simple, nonindustrial process -- a very primitive process -- that could let you get a trillion spores in one gram. You can't make hundreds of kilos, but you could make hundreds of grams at this concentration.'"

Source:  http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#nj020601

"Patrick, who holds patents for techniques used to make weapons-grade anthrax, said that the type of spores mailed to the offices of Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Patrick J. Leahy, D-Vt., could have been processed in a crude laboratory 'as long as you are dealing with small quantities of material.'”

Source:  http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/ap.html#ap011221

You need to pay more attention to facts and less attention to interpretations which support your beliefs.

December 3, 2003 - Gary Matsumoto posted a response to my comments about his article in Science Magazine.  The posting was to the Federation of American Scientists CBW forum, so I see no reason why a copy can't be also placed here:

3 December 2003

My name is Gary Matsumoto.  I am the author of the Science magazine article published this week under the title: Anthrax Powder: State of the Art?

Over the past few days I have been alternately entertained and appalled by the emails of Mr. Ed Lake which have grown progressively more shrill with each passing day.  Mr. Lake has been boorish and he is entitled to be a boor, but he has also been grotesquely inaccurate, and to the extent that he is trying to tell other people what to think on a matter of national security, he is obligated to make a minimal effort get his facts straight.  As he seems to take that obligation lightly, I feel it is necessary to offer the following response.

* The scientists who performed the electronmicroscopy and elemental analyses on the Senate anthrax powder have stated, on-the-record, that there was silica present; 

* Two of those scientists, Tom Geisbert and Peter Jahrling of the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), saw silica nanoparticles on the Daschle anthrax spores that looked, as author Richard Preston described it in his book, The Demon in the Freezer, "like fried-egg gunk, dripping off the spores"; 

* There are several detailed descriptions of these silica nanoparticles in Preston's book.  Although Geisbert and Jahrling have not been allowed to communicate with anyone other than Preston, Fort Detrick spokesperson, Caree Vanderlinden, told me that USAMRIID does not dispute the facts in Preston's book; 

* The 2001 Canadian military study, which assessed the risk posed by anthrax spores delivered by mail, used the U.S. Army's anthrax simulant that I described in my article.  The Bacillus globigii spores were coated in silica nanoparticles; they also appeared to be energetic (without passing through a sorting machine, which has been cited as a potential source of static electricity), swiftly disseminating through a simulated office space in less than two minutes.  The BG spore's energetic behavior was prima facie evidence of an electrostatic charge.  The spore concentration reported by the Canadians (1x10^11/gram or 100+ billion spores/gram) tells you that they received the Army's newest batch of simulant made by Chris Hansen. According to military sources, the Army's older batch of simulant contained a much lower spore concentration (1-5x10^9/gram or 1 to 5 billion spores/gram); the older simulant stock also contained silica; 

* Mr. Lake is correct in saying that the simulant used in the Canadian study, donated by Dugway Proving Ground and treated with silica , behaved like the Daschle anthrax powder; 

* Dr. Matthew Meselson of Harvard has previously stated that he did not see silica nanoparticles on the Daschle spores as I described them in an October 2002 Washington Post article co-wrotten with Guy Gugliotta.  This hairsplitting distinction may offer one possible explanation for the discrepancy between the Geisbert/Jahrling accounts, and those of Meselson/Alibek.  In the Post article, Guy and I described an individual particle of CAB-O-SIL (a fumed silica) at a magnification of 350,000x, which is several hundred thousand times greater than the magnification employed to view, and photograph, a cluster of spores.  As it is the molecular structure of a silica nanoparticle that make it an ideal dispersing agent, Guy and I deemed it necessary to provide, in words, a close-up view.  At 350,000x, one can discern the ultrastructure of a single silica nanoparticle, but the surface of a spore would be completely obscured--the scanning distance would be too close.  So, unless Meselson/Alibek were viewing electronmicrographs at this extreme magnification, they would not see what I described;

* Individual silica nanoparticles can look different from CAB-O-SIL; it depends on how they were processed.  Individual silica nanoparticles can be as small as 5 nanometers in diameter (smaller than a polio virus); agglomerates can appear as Preston describes them, like the "splatty goop or gunk" of a fried egg white;

* The presence of silica is not determined by the visual examination of electronmicrographs.  It is a determination made with laboratory instruments such as the Thermo-Noran Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometer used by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology to analyze the Daschle spores.  This instrument is precise and generates unambiguous data; 

* Other instruments, equally precise, would be used to determine the presence of a silane coupling agent; 

* As I reported in my article, various news organizations reported the presence of an unidentified substance in the Senate powder, in addition to silica.  In her book, The Killer Strain, Washington Post correspondent Marilyn Thompson said "the silica also appeared to contain a chemical additive to aid in bonding."  My reportage is consistent with these accounts, and advances this particular part of the story; 

* The possible presence of silicon atoms embedded in the internal structures of Bacillus spores is irrelevant when it comes to making an aerosol.  To make a refined aerosol, an additive needs to be on the surface of a spore's outer envelope (the exosporium) to block adhesiveness due to van der Waals forces and the Coulombic fields surrounding various point charges on a particle.  The spore's internal structures could be drenched in naturally-occurring silicon atoms (assuming that such atoms do occur naturally), and those atoms would not prevent clumping, or make a spore more"aerogenic."  Untreated spores do not behave like the Senate material or the U.S. Army anthrax simulant.  They behave like the coarse, non-energetic powder produced by Dugway Proving Ground's reverse engineering attempts earlier this year, which was made, allegedly at the FBI's specific request, without an additive.; 

* There is another critical difference between the X-Ray microanalysis data in the 1980 J. of Bact. paper that reported silicon in the cortex and spore coats of B. cereus spores and the energy dispersive X-Ray fluorescence spectroscopy that detected silica on the surface of B. anthracis spores.  The B. cereus spores were cryosectioned in order to detect elements inside of the bacilli.  The J. of Bact. paper's "silicon map" shows the alleged location of the silicon atoms--"the cortex/coat."  I have been told that the AFIP spectroscopy examined the surfaces of whole B. anthracis spores mailed to Senator Daschle.

In a separate email, Mr. Milton Leitenberg, argues that through syntactical contrivance I misled him, and others, into thinking that chemist, Dr. Stuart Jacobsen, was part of "the FBI reference group dealing with Amerithrax events."  I respectfully disagree.  I made no references whatsoever to this group in my article.  Dr. Jacobsen was not a source for any information concerning the engineering specifications of the Senate powder, the U.S. Army simulant powder, or the dried anthrax made by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick prior to the cancellation of the U.S. biological warfare program.  Dr. Jacobsen provided expert comment on the coating of small particles with silica nanoparticles and a coupling agent, which he was eminently qualified to do as he engineered coated particles during a project for the U.S. Defense Department.

As Leitenberg correctly states, I told him some time ago that I would not disclose information that reveals how to engineer an anthrax powder.  I understand his concern, and I take this specific criticism of my article quite seriously.  I do not believe, however, that I published anything resembling a blueprint for a BW aerosol.  No one could go out and make a refined anthrax powder based on my Science article.

Finally, Mr. Leitenberg suggests that "the parameters listed by the JAMA authors were a generic description of "weapons grade," material and not a description of the Amerithrax samples."  Again, I disagree.  The authors of the JAMA paper clearly state that the "parameters" in question (i.e.., "high spore concentration, uniform particle size, low electrostatic charge, treated to reduce clumping.") referred to material "such as that used in the 2001 attacks."  In other words, those parameters did, in fact, describe the Senate powder.  This interpretation is buttressed by the fact that at the time JAMA published this paper, May 2002, various government officials had already ascribed the above characteristics to the Senate powder in press conferences and other on-the-record briefings.

There is, in fact, no such thing as a "generic description" of weapons grade material, because no such material exists.  The various anthrax weapons known to U.S. intelligence are heterogenous in composition and their characteristics.  The specifications of the Senate powder, as I pointed out in my article, did not resemble the former U.S. weapon, which had a much lower spore concentration ... was lyophilized, milled and contained no additive.  There are no known parameters for an Iraqi anthrax powder as no such powder has been discovered.  Weapons inspectors have never recovered an Iraqi anthrax weapon, wet or dry.  According to Dr. Richard Spertzel, UNSCOM inspectors have only found DNA from the Vollum 1B strain, but no samples from an actual weapon.  In previous interviews that I have conducted with Dr. Ken Alibek, he said the anthrax powder produced by the former Soviet Union contained no electrostatic charge.

The Science article is the culmination of a year-long investigation.  Several staff editors and correspondents reviewed it.  The magazine also took the unusual step of having scientists critique the article, which is standard practice for peer-reviewed scientific papers, but not news articles.  Five Ph.D. scientists who specialize in B. anthracis , biotechnology and molecular chemistry reviewed the article for publication.  All endorsed the scientific content.

In general, I think it is a dubious practice to extrapolate occult meanings from an author's syntax, or to impute ulterior motives merely because an author reports facts that inconveniently skewer a pet theory.  When in doubt, ask.  The Science article is not a Dead Sea scroll.  The authors, and his editors, are alive and willing to answer questions.

-Gary Matsumoto-

Gary,

I concede that you may be right in that the Canadian BG simulant was coated with silica.  It seems silly to use as a simulant for such a test a powder that a terrorist cannot easily make in a small lab, but people often do silly things.  The Canadian tests definitely could have used a simulant that Dugway had in stock for when Dugway wanted to simulate the use of WEAPONIZED anthrax as created in a large industrialized facility.

However, the MEDIA anthrax was reportedly unrefined anthrax.  It was 90 percent dead mother germs and dead germs which failed to sporulate.  It was only 10 percent spores.

Yet, the Media anthax killed Bob Stevens, infected Ernesto Blanco and caused Stephanie Dailey to test positive (via a nasal swab) for exposure.  And it apparently also killed Kathy Nguyen with inhalation anthrax.

While you may argue that it COULD HAVE BEEN some different anthrax from the rest of the media mailings, we KNOW that the spores in the New York media anthrax could be aerosolized without problems because the police officer who took the NBC letter to the NYDOH lab was contaminated, and so were two lab technicians.  I.e., nasal swabs showed they had inhaled aerosolized spores.

The question then is:  Is it reasonable to believe that the MEDIA anthrax was also coated with silica - even though it wasn't even refined?  The entire AMI building was contaminated by it.

It seems to me that your article focuses only on the Senate anthrax.  You have to look at the WHOLE PICTURE.

Aerosolized spores occur in nature.  Many thousands have been killed by naturally aerosolized spores over the millenia.  As recently as 1966, Norbert Lemoine, a 46-year-old worker at a machine shop across the alley from the Arms Textile Mill in New Hampshire died after contracting inhalation anthrax, presumably from spores that had wafted over from the mill building.

Source: http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anthraxoutbreakNHmill.html

You may believe that there were silica nanoparticles on the anthrax, but the fact remains that you do NOT need something like that to cause spores to aerosolize.  And there ARE other explanations for why a spectragraph detected silicon in the powder in the Daschle letter.  The two that have been suggested are some naturally occuring silicon as described in a 1980 paper about Bacillus cereus spores, or the use of some primative drying process that involved silica.

Here's something else for you to consider:

"Even as investigators search for ways to narrow the probe, science is providing information that challenges some assumptions about how lethal anthrax spores behave.  Recent studies suggest that even spores prepared without anti-clumping chemicals - if small enough - may be able to spread more efficiently in a closed space than had previously been thought possible. Further, scientists said, the fine-grained, readily inhaled character of the Daschle anthrax sample need not require production in a state-sponsored lab."

Source: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#nd011227

(snip)  so you do your research and I'll do mine, and we'll see who is right when the facts about the attack anthrax become known.

Meanwhile, feel free to comment on my analysis anywhere you like, as I will certainly be commenting further about yours.

Ed

December 3, 2003 - A True Believer in the theory that Dr. Hatfill is the anthrax killer pointed out to me that yesterday's AP article - which is now in many newspapers around the country - includes this comment:

The officials, however, cautioned against drawing the conclusion that Hatfill no longer was of interest to investigators.

Meanwhile, I can see that I need to create a new supplemental page about coatings on the anthrax.  The subject keeps coming up, and I keep writing the same things over and over in this "Updates and Thoughts" section.  By creating a new supplemental page I can also use illustrations to clarify the situation, and I can make corrections when necessary instead of writing something totally new every time the subject comes up.  I'll begin work on the new supplemental page today. 

December 2, 2003 - I'm not sure what to make of the AP report saying that the FBI can't disclose details about how the anthrax was made for fear of giving terrorists information to make bioweapons.  While I certainly wouldn't want to give information about making bioweapons to terrorists, I wonder if the absurd report in Science Magazine by Gary Matsumoto had anything to do with this new article.  The basis for the article is the FBI's response to Dr. Hatfill's lawsuit which the FBI filed on November 21 - almost two weeks ago.  Scott Shane also mentioned the FBI response in his Baltimore Sun article on November 28. 
     The impression I get is that the media fell for the Science article and thought it was significant to the case.  Or maybe Dr. Hatfill's lawyer thought it was significant.  Or the media thought that Dr. Hatfill's lawyers thought ...  Whatever. 
     The Science article can be summed up this way:  It's crap.  It proves nothing.  It's nonsense.  It just twists facts in an attempt to verify a belief. 
     Here is the logic as I see it:

1.  Professor Matthew Meselson of Harvard and former bioweaponeer Ken Alibek have both seen large, clear electron micrographs of the Daschle anthrax.   They have reported that they saw NO coating on the spores.

2.  There is virtually no way a scientist can make a mistake and not notice coatings of fumed silica or a silica coating or glass particles or anything like that on a micrograph - particularly if they were specifically looking for such things - which Meselson and Alibek almost certainly were.  As an illustration, click HERE for a picture of uncoated spores and HERE for a picture of Bt spores coated with starch and other materials.

3.  No one has ever said that they have seen a coating on the attack anthrax!

4.  The Matsumoto article in Science is not based upon anyone seeing coatings.  It is based upon findings that the element silicon was found when the spores were examined with a spectragraph.  A spectragraph does not take pictures.  It produces a readout that shows what elements are present in the substance.  Silicon was detected.

5.  Matsumoto and Jacobsen believe that the spores were coated, and they produced their Science Magazine report based upon the spectrographic analysis - assuming that the presence of silicon means the presence of a coating - while ignoring the reports by people who actually saw the spores and what they look like. 

6.  There is a valid question that needs to be asked:  How can a spectragraph detect silicon if there is no silcon-based material in the micrograph images?  Two possible answers have been given by Meselson and Alibek:  (1) There is natural silicon in the natural coating of the spores.  A 1980 scientific report on the coatings of Bacillus cereus showed the presence of silicon.  And Bacillus cereus is very similar to Bacillus anthracis, so the silicon could be from the same natural causes.  Or, (2) the person who made the anthrax could have dried it using some crude technique involving silica which left traces which were absorbed into the natural coatings  of the spores.  In short, silica was there but it was inside the spores' natural coating. 

7.  The Science article simply ignores these explanations and says that the spores were coated - without any proof that they were coated.  In effect, they are saying that Meselson and Alibek are deliberately lying.   And William Patrick III must be lying, too, since he also says that the spores showed no signs of any such "industrialized" processing.

8.  Why is this important?  Because, if the spores were coated, that would indicate a large manufacturing facility probably made them.   If they spores were not coated, then they could have been made in a small lab. 

9.  So, if your political agenda says that the spores must have been made by some illegal U.S. government program or by Iraq, then you want the spores to be coated.

10.  And if you want the truth, you look at the evidence.

December 1, 2003 - It now appears that the Canadian Study was declassified a couple years ago, but I failed to notice it or I failed to realize its significance at the time.  It came to my attention because over the weekend it was posted as something "new" on a couple anthrax forums.   It's still "new" to people who haven't seen it before (or who forgot about it), and it has gained new relevance because of the Science article.  Also, perhaps because I mentioned that Stuart Jacobsen posted under a pseudonym to the FreeRepublic.com forum, he had all of his postings deleted from that forum.  That's why the link I gave now points to a message that says the "thread has been pulled".

November 30, 2003 - The Canadian Study titled "Risk assessment of Anthrax Threat Letters" produced shortly before the anthrax attacks has now been declassified.  It's a very good antidote to the misinformation in the Science article, since the Canadian researchers began with the idea that if someone actually sent anthrax through the mails it would be exactly like the anthrax found in the Senate letters, i.e., anthrax made via standard small lab techniques and not coated with silica.  They used a standard anthrax simulant, Bacillus globigii, a harmless cousin of anthrax, and the same simulant William Patrick III uses in demonstrations and Dr. Hatfill used in his classes.  Details:

1.  The study was done because of all the anthrax hoaxes that had been happening for the prior couple years.  (So any idea that a hoax occurring around the same time as the anthrax letters had to be connected to the anthrax letters is clearly pure nonsense.  Anthrax hoaxes had become a common occurrence at the time of 9-11.)  The purpose of the study was to determine how the powder would spread around if someone actually did send anthrax through the mails and the letter was opened by the recipient.

2.  The study doesn't seem to even consider that the powder could escape through the paper.  It seems to assume that if the corners of the envelope are sealed, then the powder cannot escape.  It took a real anthrax attack to teach experts what "assume" means (it makes an ass out of u and me).

3.  The testers used the "pharmaceutical fold" to wrap the letter around the powder - which probably just means that that is what almost anyone would use - unless they had an IQ in the single digits.

4.  There is no mention of the Bacillus globigii being coated with silica.  The test was about the type of anthrax a terrorist might be able to make, so it's a near certainty that there was NO coating on the Bacillus globigii.  Yet, the powder inside spread very well when opened.  In fact, it acted almost exactly like the anthrax used in the attacks.

5.  The stock Bacillus globigii powder used as the simulant was around a trillion spores per gram - the same as the anthrax in the Senate letters.

6.  The stock Bacillus globigii powder used as the simulant was around 100 percent viable - i.e., very very few dead spores.  (That should interest the "expert" who has stated to me with great force that only a tiny fraction of the spores could be viable.)

And it's stock stuff - something any well-trained microbiologist could make in a regular lab.  After all, what would be the point of doing such a test if you used spores which could only be made in a massive govenment-sponsored bioweapons lab?

November 28, 2003 (slightly revised Nov. 29) - A new article in Science Magazine titled "Anthrax Powder - State of The Art?" by Gary Matsumoto should have been printed in Bad Science Magazine ... if there is such a thing.  The theme of the article is that the Senate anthrax "represented the state of the art in bioweapons refinement".   Matsumoto admits that many experts totally disagree, but he plods forward with his theory anyway.  And to help him make his case he has found someone who believes as he does.  He uses as a supporting "expert" electronics researcher, chemist Stuart Jacobsen of Texas, who is known to many followers of the anthrax case through his angry and bombastic postings on the FreeRepublic.com discussion forum and other forums under various pseudonyms.  One of Jacobsen's favorite theories is explained in the article:

Anthrax spores cling to one another if they get too close; sticky chains of proteins and sugar molecules on their surfaces latch onto each other, drawn by van der Waals forces that operate at a distance of a few tens of angstroms. Untreated spores clump into larger particles that are too heavy to stay airborne or reach the narrowest passages in the lung.

According to the Science article by Matsumoto and Jacobsen, they believe that only a massive government progam can refine pure spores.  That would seem to mean that  all photographs of pure spores must be of spores refined as part of a massive government program. 

But, in reality, any good microbiologist can refine anthrax spores in small quantities -as would be needed for a micrograph.  And that is where the conflict lies.  Matsumoto and Jacobsen assume that industrialized processes were used to make the attack anthrax.  They use as sources people who worked with industrialized processes and who were never able to achieve such purity with industrialized processess.  In reality, the attack anthrax was almost certainly refined using fairly routine processes common in microbiology labs to separate spores from debris - in small quantities. 

It's truly bad science to build a theory of how the anthrax was made using only testimony from "experts" who don't know how to make pure anthrax with industrialized processes - while ignoring the experts who routinely do such things in small quantities with standard lab equipment.  After all, the attack anthrax was a small quantity - thank God. 

Of greater interest to me than reading Matsumoto and Jacobsen endlessly repeat their ill-conceived theories about silica coatings on the anthrax is the mention Matsumoto makes of the Battelle Memorial Institute:

As subcontractors, Battelle scientists have made anthrax powders for use by the Army and U. S. intelligence agencies, but rarely by Fort Detrick, which specializes in vaccine development. Charles Dasey, spokesperson for the parent agency, the U. S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command, says that as far as he is aware, the only dried anthrax spores made at Fort Detrick since it stopped making weapons were made by Battelle scientists working there for DARPA. This material, made in a biosafety level 3 suite in the Diagnostic Systems Division, contained killed Ames strain at a concentration of 326 million spores per gram -- several orders of magnitude less concentrated than the Senate powder and crude by current standards.

Meanwhile, Scott Shane at The Baltimore Sun has written a review of the Science article titled "Additive use could shift theory in anthrax case" which also includes information about the rampant rumors that something is happening in the Dr. Hatfill case.  The subtitle of the article is "FBI's interest in Hatfill seems to have dropped off".   There definitely seems to be something happening in the Dr. Hatfill case, but I'm not certain that either of these articles shows the right picture.  Coatings are not the key.  There almost certainly was no coating on the anthrax.  But if there's emerging evidence that Battelle was the source of the anthrax, that would go a long way toward proving that Dr. Hatfill was not the person who sent the anthrax letters. 

November 26, 2003 - Someone sent me this summary of the Swiss Radio program about
anthrax:

"The beginning of that Swiss radio show talks a lot about your theories.  Then it mentions the fact that the US government had already imagined a bio-weapon attack because some guy wrote a sci-fi book called Cobra.  Then the guy starts talking about a Swiss professor of history called Sarasin who said that there are many examples in history of people thinking of foreigners as microbes.  He talks about how the Jews were called microbes by the Nazis and how people thought the Jews brought the black plague to Europe.  Then the say that high American officials already had taken the anthrax antidote immediately after September 11.  The main thesis of this professor is that we used the fear of anthrax as a primary reason to attack both Afghanistan and Iraq.  Then they interview the American (Gallo?) who helped first identify AIDS.  He discussed the Soviet bioweapons threat  The point is that we have a ready-made early warning system that dates back to the Cold War.    The guy Sarasin goes pretty much off the deep end analyzing our national psyche; he spends a lot of time talking about society's anxieties and so on.  A central part of his thesis is that anthrax was more frightening for the American psyche than the 9/11 attacks.  He quotes you to towards the end of that article about how invisible microbes are scary and also that you think something will be found out within the next year.  It ends with a quote form Ari Fleischer saying that the President is satisfied that we are doing the best we can to find out who spread the anthrax."

From the tiny bit I can understand from a few semesters of learning German in high school a half century ago, it sounds very fascinating.  It opens with me talking and ends with me talking, and in the middle it has such people as John Ashcroft, George W. Bush, Tom Ridge and (I think) a Swiss historian named Philipp Sarasin.

I'd certainly like to get some information about what the program says - what the tone of it is, what the conclusions are, etc.

Does anyone reading this speak German?  If so, a review or summary of the program would be appreciated.  E-mail me at detect@newsguy.com.

November 25, 2003 - This morning it occurred to me that it's been 3 months since Dr. Hatfill's lawyers filed the lawsuit against the FBI, John Ashcroft and others.  I wondered if that might explain all the rumors going around that something is about to happen in the Dr. Hatfill case.  Theoretically, the Plaintiffs must respond to the suit.  And there is a time limit.  But according to Cornell University's web site, it's 60 days:

(A) The United States, an agency of the United States, or an officer or employee of the United States sued in an official capacity, shall serve an answer to the complaint or cross-claim - or a reply to a counterclaim - within 60 days after the United States attorney is served with the pleading asserting the claim.

(B) An officer or employee of the United States sued in an individual capacity for acts or omissions occurring in connection with the performance of duties on behalf of the United States shall serve an answer to the complaint or cross-claim - or a reply to a counterclaim - within 60 days after service on the officer or employee, or service on the United States attorney, whichever is later.

Meanwhile, the rumors are rampant that something is up in the Dr. Hatfill case, and that the news will break sometime in the next 10 days - probably after Thanksgiving.   It appears that everyone in the media knows something about it, but no one is reporting anything.   Since the media never had a problem reporting rumors when they suggested Dr. Hatfill was guilty of something, one might be able to safely conclude that the news will favor Dr. Hatfill in some way.  And because it apparently favors Dr. Hatfill, the media is waiting until they can see something in writing or until they can hear someone in authority (either some government official or Dr. Hatfill's lawyers) actually spell it all out in detail during a news conference. 

November 21, 2003 - Nearly two years ago people informed me that the New York Post is located in the same building as the Fox Network.  It just sank in.  I'm not sure if it means anything, but the fact that the anthrax mailer targeted NBC, CBS and ABC, but not FOX, could be explained by the fact that he targeted The New York Post which is in the same building as FOX.  He was "killing two birds with one stone" - so to speak.  There might be other significance to the fact that FOX and the Post are in the same building - like who would know that? - but it would all be speculation.  However, I changed the Targets Section of this page to note that Fox and the Post are located in the same building. 

November 21, 2003 - The current (December 2003) issue of "Reader's Digest" digests and excretes Don Foster's Vanity Fair article which clearly points the finger at Dr. Hatfill as being the anthrax mailer.  Since Reader's Digest's circulation is roughly 12 million Middle Americans, versus Vanity Fair's circulation of roughly 1.1 million elite readers, the Digest reprint should vastly increase any damages Dr. Hatfill's lawyers may demand if and when they ever file their long-promised lawsuits.

November 20, 2003 - While looking at the times between the date of the earliest likely exposure and date of the first symptoms for each of the media anthrax cases, I noticed a minor error on my attack chart which I corrected (it showed 5 days between the 18th and the 22nd instead of 3 days).  I also found that if Bob Stevens was exposed to the anthrax via the J-Lo letter on the 19th, then it took him longer to show symptoms than any other victim of the first attack, and also longer than any of the victims of the second attack - with the possible exception of David Hose who was exposed to the delayed Leahy letter.  That would seem to be yet another nail in the coffin of the much-discredited notion that the J-Lo letter contained the anthrax.  And it's yet another indicator that the anthrax was actually in the letter opened by Stephanie Dailey on September 25. 

November 18, 2003 - A new article by Cliff Kincaid at "Accuracy in Media" (AIM) is titled "New Development in Anthrax Case", but it's really just a rehash of the old old theory that al Qaeda was behind the anthrax attacks.  The "new development" consists of one old "fact": that 9-11 hijacker Mohammed Atta was communicating by code with a terrorist contact in Germany that he called "Jenny."  This "fact" from an October 9, 2002, feature on "60 Minutes" was just noticed by a True Believer, and it's the current hot topic in discussions of the anthrax case on the Internet. 
     The AIM article acknowledges that the FBI dismisses the J-Lo letter as being unconnected, but, because the CDC once saw a possible connection between the J-Lo letter and the anthrax, we're supposed to believe that noticing the code name "Jenny" is a vital "new development", and the FBI should immediately get to work on it. 
     In short, if the FBI hasn't found the evidence that the True Believers believe exists, then the FBI just hasn't looked hard enough in the right places.  All the evidence that points elsewhere is immaterial.  If the FBI can't prove that al Qaeda did not send the anthrax letters, then that means they did.  Or so the True Believers believe. 

November 18, 2003 - According to information on The Swiss Radio Web site, my interview as part of "Die Anthrax-Story" has been delayed a week to November 25. 

November 12, 2003 - Yesterday I finished  reading Robert Graysmith’s book "Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer", and I was pleasantly surprised.  While I had been told that it is primarily a "rehash" of newspaper articles, and it is that, it is still a good overview of the attacks with countless details for flavoring.

Graysmith credits my web site as an "invaluable resource", and while reading the book I occasionally felt that I was reading my own words.  Yet, as if to prove that everyone interprets facts differently, he begins his book in what I consider to be "fantasy land" by accepting as valid the notion that the J-Lo letter contained the AMI anthrax.  And he even mentions it again in the very last paragraph as being the "Holy Grail" for the case.

That "flaw" points out a larger problem.  Every book I’ve read about the anthrax case - and most articles about - it begin with the Bob Stevens case.  Seven people had contracted anthrax before Bob Stevens began to show symptoms.  So, beginning with the Bob Stevens case just shows how the case unfolded in the media and doesn’t show how the crime really happened and when key events occurred. 

Nevertheless, the book has some valuable details.

I don't know if anyone else but me ever pointed out that Leahy and Daschle were probably targeted because of their opposition to the Patriot Act, but Graysmith really picked up on it and explored it.  In his book he added some facts that I'd missed.  On pages 416 & 417 he writes:

"His motive had most likely been to influence a Congressional vote on a tough version of the Patriot Act that had passed on October 12, 2001.  The timing and choice of targets suggests that Senators Daschle and Leahy were impediments to the bill in its most invasive form.  On October 4, Leahy, who had opposed Ashcroft's nomination as Attorney General, had been attacked by several conservative talk shows as the bill's lead opposition.  If Amerithrax's letters to the senators, mailed on October 8, had not gotten wet, blurring the zip code, they would have arrived in time to potentially influence the vote."

Graysmith is wrong about when and how the Daschle letter got wet (it was an accident at USAMRIID when they were photographing the letter), but he could be right about the anthrax mailer wanting to influence the vote on the Patriot Act.

He’s wrong on lots of his facts. On page 50 he writes, "Using the coded [on the envelopes], the Postal Service was able to locate the box where the anthrax mail originated."  In reality, it was only through testing of nearly every possible mail box that they found the right one - a year after the mailing.  And he seems to think that most or all the letters got wet somehow.  And on page 147 he says that "The Post sample turned out to be nearly pure spores."   I seriously doubt that.   He thinks the anthrax mailer sent the Assaad letter.  Bah!  Humbug!  On page 186 he says that the Ames strain was "perfected" at Iowa State University.  And on and on.   His understanding of the facts disagrees with my understanding of the facts quite often, but we also agree on many items.  And he does supply information that I may have missed or forgotten or just never knew before.

He states several times that UV light from the sun will kill anthrax spores "within minutes".   It’s probably more like hours or a few days.   But he can be forgiven, since I’ve had e-mails from scientists who believe UV light is virtually harmless to anthrax spores. 

I was pleased to read that between September 25, 2001, when the AMI anthrax letter was opened and October 7 when the AMI building was closed down, "Janitorial crews vacuumed and cleaned each of those days".   The book also says, "Spores fell not just in the mailroom, but also in such remote places as atop a room divider, in a nook between banks of shelves, and on computer monitors."   And no anthrax spores were found in the air conditioning system.  That is all totally consistent with vacuum cleaners having spread the spores around - particular if the air conditioning system was turned off at night.  (Graysmith makes no mention of AMI’s vacuum cleaners.)

The book also states several times that one reason for going back into the AMI building a year after the attack was to find spores to compare to the other spores.   The FBI knew it was the same strain and the same DNA, but were the spores processed exactly the same way as the other media spores.  The FBI hasn’t released any results on that. 

I was also pleased to read that bloodhounds have been used to track a person traveling by car.  In one case the dogs were let out at off-ramps of a highway to sniff around until they picked up the scent of which off-ramp the dogs used.   Graysmith writes, "You see, the cells exfoliate off your body and go out the exhaust and out the window and then eventually, those skin cells and hair falls to the street and that’s what the bloodhounds get by with."   That sounds almost unbelievable, but it fits with my theory that the bloodhounds were used to figure out where Dr. Hatfill had gone when the FBI lost their tail on him.   So, I’ll accept it until I see proof that it’s nonsense.

Graysmith seems to think that Dr. Hatfill is a suspect only because the FBI has no other suspect and they need to be able to show the public they are accomplishing something.  That’s a very popular belief, but I don’t share it.  I think the FBI just needed to show a few specific amateur detectives - and the people who those amateur detectives got stirred up - that they were doing something. 

But it was a worthwhile read.

One person e-mailed me to say I shouldn’t be stopping work on my own book to read someone else’s book, but I think it was a well-spent 3 or 4 days.  The book brought to light no facts about the case that changed anything in my book, but it did help me realize how my book is different from all others.

One of the e-mail queries I’d sent to literary agents came back with this information, "I recently tried to sell a book on the same subject by some very well informed journalists, but was unable to find a suitable publisher.  Publishers feared that the market for an anthrax book has already been cannibalized by other WMD books, like Judith Miller's."

WMD book?  My book isn’t a WMD book!  And I’ve also become tired of WMD books.  Graysmith’s book has chapters about the effects of the disease, about the history of USAMRIID and the various tests they’ve done, about unrelated hoaxes, about the Sverdlovsk incident, about postal inspectors, about Jewell and Wen Ho Lee and about Aum Shinrikyo.  It even has a chapter about the Texas cow which begins, "The cow chewed gravely under the Texas sun, tossing her head to jerk off clumps of grass.  A breeze rustled the yellow pasture and ruffled her short-haired coat."  Gimme a break!

So, reading Graysmith’s book helped.  The first two sentences of my book will now be "This is not a WMD book.  It is not a book about Weapons of Mass Destruction.  It’s a book which examines the evidence in a murder case where someone used anthrax to kill five innocent people and injure 17 others during September and October 2001." 

November 12, 2003 - Today, someone who still believes al Qaeda was behind the anthrax attacks told me that in Senator Daschle's new book he states that anyone who thinks the anthrax mailer wasn't trying to kill people is naïve.  That would apply to me.  Perhaps it would also apply to Michael Mason, the new head of the FBI'sWashington Field Office, Michael Mason, since Reuters wrote this recently:

     Of the possibility that a scientist wanted to issue a wake-up call about the bioterrorism threat and it went out of control, FBI Assistant Director Michael Mason told a news conference, "That's a possible theory, but it's all conjecture." 
     Asked why there had been no other attacks, Mason said, "I suppose the leading thought might be the person didn't intend to cause harm, and did." 

Reporters kept asking me what it felt like to know that someone was trying to kill me.  I was obviously a target, but I wasn't sure how to interpret it.
     I don't know if the perpetrator(s) had any clear expectation that the mail would reach me, but it was clear that they were trying to kill someone.  Those who argued that the persons who did this were merely trying to send a wake-up call to the government about the threat of bioterrorism - and did not intend to kill anyone - are in my judgement, naive.  This wasn't a statement.  It was the largest bioweapons attack in United States history. 

On the other hand, the correct answer would seem to depend upon how much the anthrax mailer was upset by Senators Daschle's and Leahy's efforts to "water down" the Patriot Act.  And only the anthrax mailer knows that for certain.

November 11, 2003 - I broke one of my own long-established rules when I reported what someone told me without verifying it for myself.  The actual statement in Tom Daschle's book about the tape on the letter is on page 147 and reads as follows:

"Contrary to later media reports, the letter was not heavily taped and didn't appear unusual in any way."

November 9, 2003 - Although I haven't read the book myself, I'm told that Senator Tom Daschle's new book "Like No Other Time : The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever" says that the anthrax letter received at his office was not taped shut and that the newspaper accounts were all wrong.   A year ago I'd looked long and hard at the pictures of the Leahy letter on the FBI site, even magnifying them many times, but I could find no clear indication that there was any tape on the back of that envelope.
     So, what does that mean?  Were only the media letters taped shut?  Or were none of the letters taped shut?  There's no sign of taping visible on any pictures of the envelopes. 
     And how can we even be asking such a question two years after the mailings? 
     I seem to be spending half my time arguing with people about whether or not the spores were coated.  Richard Spertzel is still going around telling everyone that the spores must have been coated - even though experts who have actually seen pictures of the spores say they were not coated.
     And when not arguing with people about the coatings, I'm arguing with people about the J-Lo letter.  Many people still insist that the J-Lo letter contained the AMI anthrax, that it was probably mailed from Florida.  (Some even continue to believe that it was delivered to AMI prior to 9-11, even though they have no remaining source to back up such a belief.)  Robert Graysmith's new book opens with several chapters describing how the J-Lo letter killed Bob Stevens.  And even the CDC seems to still believe that the anthrax could have been in the J-Lo letter - simply because people they interviewed at AMI believed it. 
      What purpose is served by allowing so many misunderstandings about the anthrax and the anthrax letters to continue? 

November 8, 2003 - My copy of Robert Graysmith's book "Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer" arrived today.  Wow!  418 pages with small margins!  And that's not including the 17 pages listing "Sources" and an 18 page index.  (This site is described on page 420 as "An invaluable resource and clearinghouse for every idea on the Ameri- thrax case", and the index shows I'm mentioned on page 93, where I'm quoted about how and why the letters were cropped.) 

It's going to take me awhile to go through 418 pages with a highlighter, so I won't be working on my own book for awhile.

November 7, 2003 - The news seems to be filled with anthrax stories this morning because some equipment that routinely monitors the air at the Naval Automated Processing Facility in the District of Columbia indicated the presence of "small amounts of biological pathogens, possibly anthrax."  The key phrase in the AP article about the incident seems to be:

"One sample tested positive for anthrax and seven tested negative"

Meanwhile, there is an interesting article about the anthrax case in The Sydney Morning Herald.  It contains an interesting quote from Professor Martin Hugh-Jones about Dr. Hatfill:

"Hatfill is just a jerk and an idiot and is paying for it". [Hugh-Jones] said he was "willing to bet" he didn't do it.

"My whole point was to make certain they were investigating some evidence that I learnt about from people with more knowledge than I in the case but who couldn't talk."

But Spertzel, who has worked with Hatfill, is one of the few experts who does not believe the perpetrator was a US scientist. A former UN weapons inspector who is still convinced Saddam Hussein kept an active bio-weapons program, he is convinced Iraq is the most likely anthrax source. And the failure of the WMD search in that country has not dissuaded him.

November 4, 2003 - This morning I was interviewed for a <