Top Anthrax Scientists made Contradictory Statements

A yardstick for measuring the quality of anthrax emerged more than two years ago when William C. Patrick III, a longtime federal consultant and one of the nation's top experts on biological weapons, wrote a report assessing the possible risks if terrorists were to send anthrax through the mail. Based on the difficulty of developing advanced anthrax, he predicted that the terrorist germs would be one-20th as concentrated as what the government developed and what recently turned letters into munitions.

"The quality of the spores is very good," said a federal science adviser who shared the Patrick report with The New York Times. "This is very high-quality stuff" - equal, he said, in concentration to that produced by the U.S. military before it abandoned germ weapons.

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Ken Alibek, a former top official in the Soviet germ weapons program, who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Va., said that it was routinely possible to create dry anthrax that contained 100 billion spores per gram and that, with some effort, 500 billion was possible.

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Still, the 500 billion figure is half the concentration that the American government and whoever sent the letters are said to have achieved. "I don't think they're manufacturing this in caves," Alibek said of the terror anthrax. "It's coming from another source."

For nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the mail attacks that have killed five people, government sources say.

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But some experiments require live anthrax, milled to the tiny particle size expected on a battlefield, to test both decontamination techniques and biological agent detection systems, the sources say.

Anthrax is also grown at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, where it is used chiefly to test the effectiveness of vaccines in animals.

But that medical program uses a wet aerosol fog of anthrax rather than the dry powder used in the attacks and at Dugway, according to interviews and medical journal articles based on the research.

If the U.S. anthrax was very pure but not specially weaponized, could it have been made by amateurs? In small quantities, yes, according to both Alibek and Meselson. 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."

Meselson concurs. "It's something that could be done by a fair number of people." The necessary glassware, culturing media, centrifuges, and so on "would exist in a large number of places, both hospitals and laboratories -- widespread."