Was Ivins the anthrax killer?
newscientist.com
Every reporter who covered the US anthrax attacks of 2001 has been over the list of possible suspects in their heads hundreds of times. It would probably be an anthrax scientist who'd worked in US military labs, and before the attacks, there weren't that many. So it was probably someone we'd met.
But I don't know anyone who suspected Bruce Ivins of mailing anthrax spores to US media outlets and senators, killing five people. He committed suicide this week, apparently because he was about to be accused of precisely that.
I met him at the 1998 meeting of the world's then small anthrax research community in Plymouth, England. One night I found myself at dinner with Ivins and his lab. His students clearly regarded him as a great guy, a bit eccentric but not in a bad way.
He'd had a Guinness, which "made me a virtual zombie" he later told me, as he rarely drank alcohol. But after a reviving Coke, he and a number of us took a stroll through the midnight streets of Plymouth, singing snatches of old WW1 songs. He'd written a funny song about guinea worm, another disease his lab worked on. "Your partner in song" was how he signed an email to me in 2000.
Ivins committed suicide with an overdose of codeine and acetamenophen (Tylenol) last Tuesday. According to media reports, he'd been acting stressed since the US government exonerated the previous suspect in the anthrax attacks.
He'd been barred from the lab, and was reportedly about to be involuntarily retired. He and his extended family had been questioned, and his home raided twice - a colleague described it to reporters as "hounded" - since the FBI re-launched the investigation into the attacks under new leadership in 2006. He was hospitalised for depression in July, say reports.
Little wonder, especially since a colleague told reporters he was out of money for legal fees, and was "much more emotionally labile, in terms of sensitivity to things, than most scientists. He was very thin-skinned." That sounds like the guy I met.
Was this another victim of pressure from a frustrated FBI desperate to fight the bioterrorists they are sure lurk in US labs?
Like Tom Butler? Or was someone interested in making it seem that Ivins committed suicide? Like some people believe about the British bioweapons expert David Kelly?
Only hours after the suicide was announced, an investigative site posted court papers imposing a restraining order on Ivins in July after he allegedly threatened a psychological counsellor, who was due to testify on 1 August at a grand jury investigation of the attacks.
The papers describe "a history dating to his graduate days of homicidal threats, actions, plans, threats and actions". That would be 30 or 40 years ago. Was there really someone with a psychiatric history like that at the main US biodefense lab, USAMRIID, and he wasn't investigated before?
Ivins would certainly have had the access to the strain of anthrax used for the attacks, and the expertise to brew it up. It's not at all impossible that the conclusion everyone is being asked to jump to, that Ivins killed himself because he was about to be nailed, is true.
But I want to see some pretty good empirical evidence about where those spores came from before I'll believe my partner in song was the attacker.
Debora MacKenzie, Brussels correspondent |
