FORT DETRICK (USAMRIID) Under Focus:
On Biowarfare's Frontline
Martin Enserink
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
FORT DETRICK, MARYLAND--To outsiders, the research at this Army base an hour north of Washington, D.C., has always seemed slightly sinister. During World War II, scientists here embarked on a large, top-secret program to develop biological weapons that could kill thousands, even millions. Although that was ended in 1969 and scientists switched to purely defensive research, rumors about clandestine experiments in underground labs persist to this day. Even in the scientific world, the researchers have remained the odd ones out, studying exotic diseases that might cripple an army but have actually infected few people and that most other researchers cared little about.
Now, everything is different. In the post-9/11 world, the expertise built up at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the main research institute at Fort Detrick, has proven invaluable--and suddenly everyone is grateful. The lab is working closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to help unmask whoever sent the anthrax letters last fall; the so-called Brokaw, Daschle, and Leahy letters were sent here to be investigated; and the lab serves as the repository for anthrax strains subpoenaed from other labs. Tens of thousands popped Cipro last fall because USAMRIID's Arthur Friedlander showed it could protect monkeys from anthrax.
The institute is garnering some scientific respect, too. After two recent visits, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) in Bethesda, Maryland, says he was "quite surprised" by the lab's expertise and technical capabilities. Fauci hopes to collaborate closely with the lab now that President George W. Bush has requested a whopping $1.7 billion in new bioterrorism funds for NIAID. "This has pulled us out of the intellectual backwaters and into the mainstream," says senior USAMRIID researcher Peter Jahrling, who studies smallpox and viral hemorrhagic fevers.
But at the same time that USAMRIID is helping in the bioterror investigation, the institute is under intense scrutiny as the potential source of the anthrax--and perhaps even the terrorist. The research strain called Ames, used in the letters, made its debut here after being isolated from a Texas cow, although it was subsequently sent on to more than a dozen other labs. The powder's sophistication suggests to some that the bioterrorist had connections to the earlier offensive biowarfare program, and the FBI has recently started giving employees lie detector tests. To complicate matters further, the lab has gone through several high- profile PR hiccups in recent months-- including a finding of anthrax spores outside a high-containment facility that is still under investigation.
...But another recent incident is being taken much more seriously. Last month, USAMRIID revealed that live anthrax spores had been found outside the high-containment facility where they are studied. The discovery was made after one of Friedlander's fellow anthrax researchers was found secretly testing environmental samples outside the high-containment area, which is not routinely done and was seen as suspicious. Three of his samples, taken in a locker room, an office, and a hallway, turned out to be positive. Eitzen says the FBI is currently investigating the incident, and Paul Keim's lab at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff is determining the genetic fingerprint of the spores to find out where they came from. It's unclear whether there's a connection to the bioterrorism investigation, most of which is going on in another part of the lab, says Eitzen; the scientist might simply have been concerned about possible contamination.
...Jahrling and his colleagues have pioneered a groundbreaking, although controversial, series of experiments with the variola virus, which causes smallpox (Science, 15 March, p. 2001). Because an international treaty bans moving smallpox outside the only two labs where it's officially stored, the work was carried out at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. It has resulted in the first--albeit crude--animal model of variola. In addition, the group has identified an antiviral compound, cidofovir, that might be used to treat smallpox. Another example of "first-class work," says Top, are the studies by USAMRIID's Connie Schmaljohn, a world expert in the field of hantaviruses.
...Some researchers have also become frustrated, says Burke, with the fact that many promising vaccines--USAMRIID has candidates for anthrax, smallpox, plague, staphylococcal enterotoxin, and botulinum toxin--still haven't made it to human tests or the Food and Drug Administration. The responsibility for that rests with a government office called the Joint Vaccine Acquisition Program, which for a variety of reasons has failed to deliver and is widely considered a failure (Science, 19 October 2001, p. 498). What's needed to get the drugs and vaccines that the military needs is much more money, says Burke: "Industry would recognize that in a second." |
