Anthrax researcher dies

I'm actually quite interested to see how this case turns out. So far every article posted on CNN, BBC, etc. have been very lite on facts. Although I did some work for ECBC (the Fort Detrick bioweapons center) myself as a contractor, I didn't know Dr. Ivins.

From what the half-arsed articles say, the FBI's case is basically, "he swabbed some areas without getting official approval first, and it turned out the swabs did find anthrax in those areas, where it wasn't supposed to be." They declare this highly suspicious on the grounds that he should have gotten approval first.

O RLY? What if, say, his results demonstrated that the Fort Detrick containment system was a joke, and that there was no place safe in the whole building from the bugs they had stored there, and that the senior management knew this and put all the workers and contractors in danger on a daily basis because it would be Too Expensive to pack up the hazards, ship 'em to CDC, and re-engineer the whole entire lab complex from the ground up? What if his results would have caused a major scandal for the organization and about a zillion lawsuits? What if his boss, upon receiving Dr. Ivins' request for permission to swab those areas, realized what havoc a positive result would wreak, and therefore said Absolutely Not?

Anyone who thinks that senior managers don't knowingly pull shenanigans with highly dangerous stuff hasn't been out in the working world long enough. Talk to an environmental engineer who does fieldwork and Due Diligence for chemical company acquisitions. Talk to the industrial hygienists who clean up after regular everyday hazards in coal mines, chemical plants and steel mills on a daily basis. Just two years ago, about an hour up I-95 from me, a big paint manufacturer went kaboom, leaving naught but a giant crater where the building used to be. Turned out that management and their process engineers had knowingly created a faulty flammable liquid handling manufacturing method that resulted in the explosion. Miraculously, no one was killed, only injured. It would not surprise me one bit to find out that USAMRIID managers calculated the risk of what could happen if it turned out the cooties had indeed escaped the lab, and turned Dr. Ivins reasonable and concerned request down. And then decided to throw him under the bus. Unfortunately, government officials and senior managers with a lot of money and their own personal careers at stake, really don't have a great track record on accountability and integrity. They've got a great track record for scapegoating though. That's just the working world for you.

And sadly, I don't know that Agent Scully, with all her science, actually works at the FBI. You have to be a bit of a specialist even as a scientist to understand why a microbiologist might go around swabbing stuff after their boss told them it was a bad idea, and then understand what the molecular diagnostics mean and how to interpret them. Did the FBI have such a specialist review the sequencing results thoroughly, including the bioinformatic logarithms of the computer program used to analyze them, and troubleshoot accordingly? Were the sequences double-checked by some other method? What level of identity was considered a reasonable match, and how was that acceptable mismatch level calculated? Were they working from theory or from a library or what? Did the FBI know to ask this stuff? Or did they just take Dr. Ivins' boss' word for it that everything was done properly? Did they seize the notebooks and samples and try to re-create the results? If not, why not? I would think that the very first step in such an investigation would be to figure out who might be telling a tall tale, especially who might have a vested interest in blaming someone whose career is conveniently over, but then again I am not a criminal investigator. I don't even play one on TV.