When Science Goes Wrong (29 page)

In theory, analysis of the late victims’ locations during the outbreak could resolve this issue: if victims such as Dayanov had been away from Chkalovskiy during the first week of April and then returned to the high-risk zone before becoming ill, that would suggest that they acquired their infection from secondary aerosols. Such cases were not found, but the numbers are too small to make a definitive judgment on this basis. Thus, the question of how the victims in the tail of the outbreak acquired their infection remains unresolved.

How exactly did the anthrax release come about? In 1999, Ken Alibek, the defector who ran the Soviet germ-warfare programme, came out with his own book (written with Stephen Handelman), titled
Biohazard
. In it, Alibek presented a detailed account of what he was told happened
:

On the last Friday of March 1979, a technician in the anthrax drying plant at Compound 19, the biological arms production facility in Sverdlovsk, scribbled a quick note for his supervisor before going home. ‘Filter clogged so I’ve removed it. Replacement necessary,’ the note said.

Compound 19 was the Fifteenth Directorate’s busiest production plant. Three shifts operated around the clock, manufacturing a dry anthrax weapon for the Soviet arsenal. It was stressful and dangerous work. The fermented anthrax cultures had to be separated from their liquid base and dried before they could be ground up into a fine powder for use in aerosol form, and there were always spores floating in the air. Workers were given regular vaccinations, but the large filters clamped over the exhaust pipes were all that stood between the anthrax dust and the outside world.

After each shift, the big drying machines were shut down briefly for maintenance checks. A clogged air filter was not an unusual occurrence, but it had to be replaced immediately.

Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolai Chernyshov, supervisor of the afternoon shift that day, was in as much of a hurry to get home as his workers. Under the army’s rules, he should have recorded the information about the defective filter in the logbook for the next shift, but perhaps the importance of the technician’s note didn’t register in his mind, or perhaps he was simply overtired.

When the night shift manager came on duty, he scanned the logbook. Finding nothing unusual, he gave the command to start the machines up again. A fine dust containing anthrax spores and chemical additives swept through the exhaust pipes into the night air.

In attributing the accident to a failure to replace a filter, Alibek’s account meshed well with the statement made by a Russian general to
Izvestiya
in 1991, as described earlier. On the other hand, there are details that are inconsistent with the findings of the Meselson group, most notably the date and time of the anthrax release. If the Meselson group is right, Friday March 30 is definitively ruled out, because the wind was blowing in the exact opposite direction – toward the northwest – on that day, which would have carried the lethal plume toward downtown Sverdlovsk and away from the Chkalovskiy district. Also, the military reservists were not in the area at any time on that day.

In a 2006 interview, I asked Alibek how he came by the information about the accident that he presented in his book. He said that it was told to him by a senior scientist by the name of Mikhail Kuzmitsch during a two-hour train ride in 1983. Kuzmitsch was working in the anthrax plant at the time of the accident. When I pressed him about the inconsistencies with Meselson’s account, he replied with the kind of non-answer that surely reflected decades of training in the Soviet bureaucracy. ‘I respect his work,’ he said, ‘and he respects mine.’

I suggested a possible resolution, which was that the removal of the filter did happen at the end of the day shift on Friday as Kuzmitsch told him, but that the plant lay idle over the weekend and wasn’t started up until Monday, so that the release was delayed until that day. Alibek agreed that this was a possibility, and added that he wasn’t sure whether the plant would have been running through the weekend.

In her book, Jeanne Guillemin gave Alibek the same treatment she meted out to Peter Gumbel: she took him to task for the apparent errors in his account, and suggested that they threw his entire explanation for what had happened into doubt. Meselson took a mellower view of the matter. He reminded me that details such as dates can easily change as they are stored in memory or reported to others. ‘The fundamentals are correct,’ he said. ‘The only thing we disagree about is the day of the week – a pretty small detail.’

Given that the origin of the anthrax outbreak in the germ warfare institute has been admitted by the president of Russia, described in detail by the onetime boss of the Soviet germ warfare programme, and proven by Meselson’s research, one might think that there would be universal acceptance of this explanation. Jeanne Guillemin told me, however, that a book on infectious diseases distributed recently by the Russian Ministry of Health attributes the outbreak to – yes – tainted meat.

As far as is known, Russia and the United States (and the United Kingdom) now adhere to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention and no longer have any military stocks of anthrax or other pathogens. The country whose continued engagement in production of biological weapons has aroused the greatest concern is Iraq. Although Iraq signed the convention in 1972, Saddam Hussein instituted a biological weapons programme soon after he came to power in 1979; it included the manufacture of anthrax, plague, botulinum toxin and aflatoxin, albeit in nothing like the quantities reported for the Soviet Union. Saddam was apparently deterred from using these weapons during the 1991 Gulf War by the threat of overwhelming military reprisals on the part of the United States. In the diplomatic battles preceding the 2003 invasion of Iraq, his alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction, including bacterial weapons, was a central issue, but none were found either by UN inspectors before the invasion or by the US/British forces afterward. Apparently, Saddam had been telling the truth when he said that he had terminated those programmes and destroyed existing stocks of biological agents.

In the dark days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the American people were put in a state of even greater alarm by a series of small-scale but deadly attacks involving anthrax. Several letters containing anthrax in powder form were mailed to national news organisations and politicians. The intended targets, who included NBC television news anchor Tom Brokaw, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and Senator Patrick Leahy, escaped harm, but 22 other people contracted anthrax infections and five of them died. In August 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft named Steven Hatfill, a former Army bioweapons researcher, as a ‘person of interest’ in the investigation of the attacks, but in March 2008 Hatfill was officially exonerated, and he received a multimillion-dollar settlement from the Justice Department. The FBI then focused on another suspect, Bruce Ivins, a senior biodefence researcher at Fort Detrick who had himself participated in the investigation of the anthrax attacks. Ivins committed suicide in July 2008. Shortly thereafter the Justice Department announced its conclusion that Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the anthrax mailings. Ivins had a history of mental instability, but the exact motivation for his actions remains a matter of speculation.

Another accident involving the airborne release of a virus from a laboratory occurred in England less than a year before the Sverdlovsk incident. The virus was smallpox, and the release was not from a military facility but from the laboratory of Henry Bedson, a smallpox researcher at the University of Birmingham.

Janet Parker, a 40-year-old medical photographer who worked on the floor above Bedson’s laboratory, apparently inhaled virus particles that had entered her workspace through the building’s ventilation system. Parker died – the last person on Earth to be killed by smallpox, which was eliminated in the wild in 1977. A few days after her diagnosis, but before she died, Henry Bedson walked down to the potting shed at the bottom of his garden and committed suicide by slashing his own throat.

FORENSIC SCIENCE: The Wrong Man

ON FRIDAY, OCTOBER 30, 1998, a 16-year-old African American youth by the name of Josiah Sutton walked to a neighbourhood convenience store at the corner of Fondren Road and West Bellfort Street on the southwest side of Houston, Texas. He was accompanied by his friend Gregory Adams. Although they were behaving innocently enough, the two youths were stopped by police, handcuffed and placed in the back of a squad car. Sutton didn’t see freedom again for four and a half years.

Five days earlier, sometime after midnight on the night of October 25, a 41-year-old rape victim arrived at a Houston hospital. After medical treatment and the taking of forensic samples, she gave investigators the following account of what had happened: at about 11pm, she was parking her car outside her apartment complex on Fondren Road when she was approached by two African American teenagers, one of whom was armed with a gun. They forced her back into the vehicle and drove it to a deserted location where they forced her to engage in oral and vaginal intercourse with both of them. She said that two other men approached the parked vehicle and witnessed the rape, but did nothing to help her and in fact chatted casually with the attackers. They even suggested at one point that the rapists should take care not to leave fingerprints. After the rape, the two attackers drove her to the southern outskirts of Houston and left her in a field.

The woman described her two attackers to police. They were black, and no more than 20 years old. The one who had held the gun to her head, and who had driven her car, wore a baseball cap with the peak turned sideway; he was about 5ft 7in tall and weighed about 9st 6lbs – significantly smaller than herself (she was 5ft 10in tall and weighed more than 14 stones. The other man, the woman said, was about the same height as the first, but even skinnier – about 8st 5lbs. He had been wearing a skullcap.

After several days spent recovering at another location, the woman returned to her home. On the Friday, as she was driving her car in her neighbourhood, she saw Josiah Sutton and Gregory Adams on their way to the convenience store. She noticed that Sutton was wearing a baseball cap turned sideways and Adams a skullcap. Relying in part on these features, she recognised them as her attackers and drove to the Fondren police station to report the sighting. A police officer immediately located the two men and arrested them. Then, while they were sitting handcuffed in the back of a police car, the police brought the woman by. She viewed the men from inside her own car, which was stopped about 10ft from the police car, and positively identified Sutton as the man with the gun, and Adams as her other attacker.

This was despite the fact that Sutton was six feet tall and weighed 14st 2lb – five inches and 65lbs more than her previous estimate.

The two youths were detained, and the next day they were charged with kidnapping and rape. Both protested their innocence. They volunteered to give blood samples for DNA testing, and these were taken. It took the Houston Police Department’s Crime Lab several months to process the DNA; during this waiting period, Josiah Sutton was ordered to stand trial as an adult and was moved from juvenile hall to the county jail.

This wasn’t Josiah’s first time in trouble. According to an account in the
Houston Chronicle
, he had quite a difficult upbringing. His father had left home when Josiah was about six years old and was, at the time, in jail on drugs charges. His mother, Carol Batie, had to raise Josiah and his four younger siblings on her own with a low-income job, supplemented later by a small amount of money that Josiah earned by cutting hair. In 1997, Josiah failed his freshman year in high school. The following July, he was arrested for illegal possession of a gun and sentenced to probation, but he violated the terms of his probation by failing to meet with his probation officer. He switched to a new school but was suspended for fighting, and later he dropped out of school altogether. His girlfriend became pregnant. By October, Josiah seemed to be on a downward spiral that could easily have culminated in a serious brush with the law. Nevertheless, during his time in the county jail he continued to maintain his innocence and he expressed confidence that he would be exonerated by the results of the DNA analysis.

Meanwhile, in the Crime Lab, the DNA study was being done by Christy Kim, who had 20 years’ experience as a forensic analyst. Kim had four samples that might contain the perpetrator’s DNA. These were a swab from the victim’s vagina, combings from her pubic hair, a stained portion of her jeans and a stain – identified as semen – from the back seat of her car, where the rape had occurred. In addition, Kim had blood samples from the victim as well as from the two suspects, Sutton and Adams. Thus, her first task was to determine whether the DNA present in Sutton’s and Adams’s blood samples matched that found in any of the four evidentiary samples. If it did, her second task was to determine, using statistical techniques, how strongly the match pointed to Sutton or Adams as the perpetrator.