By Jack Dolan And Dave Altimari
The Hartford Courant
Lab specimens of anthrax spores, Ebola virus and other pathogens disappeared from the Army’s biological warfare research facility in the early 1990s, documents from an internal Army inquiry show.
The U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID, at Fort Detrick, Md., is believed to be the original source of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the mail attacks in the fall.
The 1992 inquiry also found evidence that someone secretly was entering a laboratory late at night to conduct unauthorized research, apparently involving anthrax. A numerical counter on a piece of lab equipment had been rolled back to hide work done by the mystery researcher, who left the misspelled label "antrax" in the machine’s electronic memory, according to the documents obtained by The Hartford Courant.
Experts disagree on whether the lost specimens pose a danger. An Army spokeswoman said they do not because they effectively would have been killed by chemicals in preparation for microscopic study. A prominent molecular biologist said, however, that resilient anthrax spores could be retrieved from a treated specimen.
In addition, two former scientists said that as recently as 1997, when they left, controls at Fort Detrick were so lax it wouldn’t have been hard for someone with security clearance for its handful of labs to smuggle out biological specimens.
It is unclear whether Ames was among the strains of anthrax in the 27 sets of specimens reported missing at Fort Detrick after an inventory in 1992. The Army spokeswoman, Caree Vander-Linden, said that at least some of the lost anthrax was not Ames.
But a former lab technician who worked with some of the anthrax later reported missing said all he ever handled was the Ames strain.
Meanwhile, one of the 27 sets of specimens has been found and is in the lab — an Army spokesperson said it might have been in use when the inventory was taken. The fate of the rest, some containing samples no larger than a pencil point, remains unclear.
In addition to anthrax and Ebola, the specimens included hanta virus, simian AIDS and two that were labeled "unknown" — an Army euphemism for classified research.
Vander-Linden said last week that in addition to the one complete specimen set, some samples from several others were located, but she could not provide a fuller accounting because of incomplete records regarding the disposal of specimens.
The 27 specimens were reported missing in February 1992, after a new officer, Lt. Col. Michael Langford, took command of what was viewed by Fort Detrick brass as a dysfunctional pathology lab. Langford, who no longer works at Fort Detrick, said he ordered an inventory after he recognized there was "little or no organization" and "little or no accountability" in the lab.
A factor in Langford’s decision to order an inventory was his suspicion — never proved — that someone in the lab had been tampering with records of specimens to conceal unauthorized research. As he explained later to Army investigators, he asked a lab technician, Charles Brown, to "make a list of everything that was missing."
"It turned out that there was quite a bit of stuff that was unaccounted for, which only verifies that there needs to be some kind of accountability down there," Langford told investigators, according to a transcript of his April 1992 interview.
More troubling to Langford was what investigators called "surreptitious" work being done in the pathology lab.
Dr. Mary Beth Downs told investigators that she had come to work several times in January and February of 1992 to find that someone had been in the lab at odd hours, clumsily using the sophisticated electron microscope to conduct some kind of off-the-books research.
After one weekend that February, Downs discovered that someone had been in the lab using the microscope to take photos of slides, and apparently had forgotten to reset a feature on the microscope that imprints each photo with a label. After taking a few pictures of her own slides that morning, Downs was surprised to see "Antrax 005" emblazoned on her negatives.
Downs also noted that an automatic counter on the camera, like an odometer on a car, had been rolled back to hide the fact that pictures had been taken over the weekend.
Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack’s, according to a report filed by a security guard.
Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior by Zack, Rippy, Brown and others who worked in the pathology division.
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