anthrax
revere | August 11, 2008Questions about the FBI's case against popping up like mushrooms after a rain. There are too many to address in just one post. Meryl Nass's site has cataloged a number of them and Glenn Greenwald's latest installment others. We've weighed in a couple of times (here and here) and now want to add some additional thoughts about the official version of how the alleged anthrax attacker, Dr. Bruce Ivins, died.
Dr. Ivins was found unconscious at his home and taken to a hospital, where he died three days later. We don't know if he ever regained consciousness. Let's assume he didn't. There was no…
revere | August 8, 2008I've been looking at the documents deposited online by the Department of Justice making their case against Dr.Bruce E. Ivins, the Army scientist they allege is the lone anthrax attack culprit. My perusal of their case leaves a mixed impression. If their portrayal of his mental condition is at all accurate - and it is difficult to judge on the basis of the highly selected quotes from emails and hearsay evidence of unnamed sources -- then Ivins certainly is a plausible suspect. Selected leaking of information, not all of it verified could also make him a convenient and plausible patsy. I have…
mikethemadbiologist | August 7, 2008Yesterday, I mentioned my doubts about there being two anthrax strains used in the 2001 attacks. Thanks to an article identified by reader TomJoe, I'm convinced that there was only one anthrax strain involved, if the only evidence for the existence of two strains is that there is a DNA inversion.
Just to remind everyone, this is what I mean by a DNA inversion:
In many bacteria, inversions are used as regulatory mechanisms--when the DNA is in one direction, nearby genes are turned on, and when in the other, they're turned off. Like so (this is a made up example for illustrative purposes only…
mikethemadbiologist | August 6, 2008In reading this NY Times story about the anthrax investigation, this statement about how the presence of an inversion (a region of flipped DNA) puzzled me (italics mine):
The genome of various stocks of the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks were almost identical in all the 5 million chemical letters of their DNA. But researchers found enough differences in the attack strain to provide a reasonable chance of identifying its source.
The chief difference was that a stretch of DNA was flipped head to tail in some bacteria in the attack strain, but not in any other samples.
Further, the…
revere | August 4, 2008The unfolding anthrax story may not unfold much because the government seems to be in a hurry to keep it folded. They claim -- not officially but through the news media -- to have found the nutjob who did it. He had opportunity, means and motive (he was a nutjob). Now he's dead and can't defend himself. Case closed. Maybe. But neither the news media nor the government who feeds them crapola have track records for credibility, so I'm not yet willing to lay this vicious homicide automatically on his grave. Yes, we are getting all sorts of leaked info but then we got a lot of leaked info when…