From: Matthew Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed Nov 5, 2003 12:58:23 PM US/Pacific Subject: US Crackdown on bioterror research backfiring
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99994345
This week, a respected biologist was led into a Texas courtroom. He faces no
fewer than 68 charges and could end up in jail for the rest of his life. Has
the FBI finally caught the anthrax attacker?
No. Thomas Butler merely reported that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone
missing from his laboratory at Texas Tech University in Lubbock. Many of
Butler's colleagues believe the justice authorities are making an example of
him as part of a wider effort to ensure that scientists take more care with
material terrorists might exploit.
...
The climate of fear created by the Butler case is even threatening the US's
ability to detect bioterrorist activity. New Scientist has been told that
labs in one state are no longer reporting routine incidents of animals
poisoned with ricin, a deadly toxin found in castor beans, for fear of
federal investigation.
And if any terrorist ever does make off with dangerous bacteria, it will be
a brave scientist who tells the FBI. As one put it: "I don't want to end up
in a cell with Tom Butler."
...
Other rules are simply badly thought out or inconsistent. One part of the
regulations states that clinical labs that grow new cultures of select
agents must destroy them within seven days, one researcher complains. But
another part requires labs to get permission before destroying any cultures
- and this takes more than seven days.
Such problems leave scientists feeling that compliance is simply impossible.
"Every single lab involved in select agents has violated the regulations
somehow," says one. "The FBI can come in and find you out of compliance
whenever it chooses."
...
Even military labs are not immune. "I have had to autoclave three freezers
of Venezuelan equine encephalitis," says Peter Jahrling of the US Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland,
because regulators had wanted a full account of each sample by a deadline he
could not meet.
...
"If I am required to inventory every vial, even if it is in a locked freezer
behind five layers of security, then be held criminally accountable for any
mysterious disappearance when it is almost certainly only sloppy record
keeping," says another researcher, "then I'll work on Paramecium [a pond
protist] and leave the select agents to someone else."
