The Anthrax Letters: The Attacks That Shocked America (27 page)

Congressman Rush Holt, whose district includes Princeton, NJ, is critical of the FBI’s investigation, and he questions whether Bruce Ivins was guilty.

 

Exercise in a high-containment bio-laboratory—examining an anthrax-contaminated letter (under auspices of Dr. Nancy Connell, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey).

 

Exercise involving suspected toxic material (during an exchange between Israeli and American public safety officials).

 

Clean-up squad decontaminating their own outerwear outside anthrax-contaminated postal center in Hamilton, New Jersey. (Provided by the NJ Dept. of Health and Senior Services)

 

Cleaning up the loading dock of the anthrax-contaminated postal center in Hamilton, New Jersey. (Provided by the NJ Dept. of Health and Senior Services)

 

The issue of destroying the stocks of
variola
had been put on hold. Now the more immediate question was whether smallpox, like anthrax, might actually be used as a weapon. The wall that Henderson once thought he had pushed back forever was pushing back at him.

I
t was 9 a.m., and Nancy Connell took the elevator to the basement level of the medical school. Thirty yards down a long quiet corridor she passed a door marked “Caution: Irradiator Room” and another labeled “Stock Room.” In the bowels of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey in Newark, she turned left at a sign for the Center for the Study of Emerging Pathogens. A card swipe unlocked a door stamped with two red biohazard symbols and a capitalized instruction: Please Make Sure This Door Is Closed Completely Behind You! Fifteen feet farther another swipe opened a second door, to a subterranean suite of offices and laboratories.

Connell, a professor of microbiology at UMDNJ, greeted Paula Trzop, one of her research technicians, at the front desk. Paula handed her a stack of messages, and Connell headed down the hall to her small office. She laid her bulging briefcase on the desk and checked her e-mail. The month was October, one year after the discovery of the anthrax letters, and several list servers were abuzz with stories about the incidents. One reproduced an article from the
Wall Street Journal
, “Armchair Sleuths Seek Anthrax Sender.” She read the article and shook her head, dismayed that the perpetrator was still on the loose. Thirty minutes later she ambled across the hallway. Jessica Mann, another technician, was hunched over a laboratory bench, organizing data from the previous day’s experiment. “Hi, Nancy, almost done,” she said.

Mann was engaged in the Connell lab’s most sensitive project. A chirpy 24-year-old, she had been out of college for 3 years and intended to return to study toward a doctorate. But now she was manager of Connell’s new high-security laboratory in which experiments with anthrax, plague, and other potential biological warfare agents are conducted. Connell was supervising a 2-year effort to develop a method to quickly determine if someone is infected with any of these bugs. Her work was being funded by $3 million in grants from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). When Connell mentioned the project, her eyebrows rose in wonderment. “I still can hardly believe I’m doing this,” she told me.

A few years earlier Connell’s study would have been impossible—the research technology she was using did not exist. But neither could she have imagined herself a principal investigator of an Army-backed program. Connell’s skepticism of the military was too deep seated. Yet now she was the recipient of grants that supported her work with potential germ weapons, and, to boot, she was named director of the university’s Center for BioDefense. The center is receiving an additional $4.5 million from the Pentagon to develop education and training programs and to plan responses to bioterrorism. Brendan McCluskey, the center’s deputy director, largely oversees the development of the training and response plans. The head of the hospital’s emergency medical services, he holds a graduate degree in microbiology and teaches a course on biological terrorism with Connell. McCluskey, with crew cut and solid frame, presents a rugged appearance. But he acknowledged a profound fear of the tiniest of weapons—germs. “I worry a lot about that stuff,” he said. “It’s very scary.”

Nancy Connell, 49, pondered the road to her current positions. As a youngster she lived with her mother and two sisters in New York City. Guided by her mother’s sense of social justice, she went to schools where there was a lot of activism for social causes—first, Saint Hilda’s, an Episcopal school on the Upper West Side and then the Oakwood Friends School, a Quaker boarding school in Poughkeepsie. “In those days we were always protesting and marching about something.” She thought back to her teens when she joined classmates in demonstrations against the Vietnam War and marched for women’s rights, civil rights, and antinukes. For Nancy social justice meant supporting efforts to allocate more money for welfare and less for the military. “When we boycotted our classes,” she chuckled, “it didn’t mean much anyway because the faculty was boycotting, too.”

Connell’s social concerns have always been expressed by polite participation, never confrontation. Her brown eyes narrowed when she considered the world’s ills, but her demeanor remained calm, influenced by her devotion to things cultural. At Middlebury College, she majored in music and classics. By the time she graduated in 1975, she was an accomplished cellist and could speak and read Latin and Greek.

After college, Connell took some science courses and worked as a research technician and loved doing both. She studied cell biology at Harvard Medical School where in 1989 she earned her Ph.D. “I was a post-doc at the Albert Einstein Medical school when I began to work with a virulent organism,
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
,” she said. “That was really exciting.” She continued investigating the TB bacterium’s genetic activity after joining the faculty at UMDNJ in 1993. Meanwhile, much of her social activism had become channeled into a cause related to her field. “For some time now, I’ve been working to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention, the treaty that bans these weapons.”

During her years at Harvard, Connell was a member of the Council for Responsible Genetics and chaired its committee against the military use of biological research. She helped gather signatures for petitions, including a pledge by scientists not to engage in research “that will further the development of chemical and biological warfare agents.” Her worries about germ weapons drew her to support strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention. “You know, the Convention does not provide for verifying whether a country is cheating,” Connell said. In 2002 the Bush administration opposed negotiating a protocol that would allow for international inspections. It believed that inspectors could easily be fooled. “I think that’s a mistake,” she said. “The right kind of inspections would make cheating much less likely.”

Connell also favored strict regulations for U.S. laboratories that handle dangerous microorganisms. In May 1999 she testified before the oversight subcommittee of the House of Representatives Commerce Committee. The hearing was on “Bioterrorism in America: Assessing the Adequacy of the Federal Law Relating to Dangerous Biological Agents.”

Congressman Richard Burr of North Carolina asked, “Dr. Connell, you stated in your testimony that academia has not done as good a job as private commercial labs with respect to safety and security. Can you expand on that?” Connell responded, “There has been a lag, but I do think [academic institutions] are catching up.” Improvement began, she believes, after universities started receiving fines “for noncompliance in various areas of safety.”

The hearing dealt with a central concern of the scientific community and beyond—the tug between unfettered scientific inquiry and the need for security. Ronald Atlas, then president-elect of the American Society for Microbiology, testified that too much regulation could stifle laboratory investigators. A law had been enacted in 1996 that required institutions to register with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention if they transferred pathogens to other laboratories. That rule, he said, had already inhibited research: “My conversations in the scientific community indicate . . . that a number of individuals are simply not shipping. They are not exchanging.”

Connell was unimpressed. When Congressman Burr asked if further restrictions might not discourage research, she responded, “I think it is irrelevant.” She made her larger point against the backdrop of the threat of bioterrorism: “I think that a committed principal investigator who wants to work on an organism will work on the organism and will go through the necessary paperwork.” She lauded the tradition of scientific exchange but said that inconvenience was warranted because “the world is different now.”

Days after Connell appeared before the House committee, she was at a university luncheon seated next to one of UMDNJ’s vice presidents, Dr. Lawrence Feldman. “Nancy, I heard you were in Washington last week at a House session on bioterrorism. I was down there, too,” he said. “I know. I heard you were testifying to help get some money for the university for a biodefense program,” Connell said.

Feldman acknowledged that that had been the goal of his testimony, adding that he had seen a request for proposals from the Department of Defense. “They’re looking for research related to biodefense. We ought to be doing more at the university about the threat of biological warfare.” Connell asked what he had in mind. “We don’t have a handle on how much laboratory work related to biodefense is going on in the university,” he responded. “How would you like to organize an effort to find out? And maybe think about applying for a grant yourself?”

Connell was silent. The offer from a top university administrator was flattering, and it seemed to open an opportunity for advancement. Deep inside she had always wanted to make a mark, to be famous. But ambition at what cost? Feldman’s proposal was too much to digest at the moment. “Larry, I appreciate your suggestion. I’d like to think about it.” When Feldman made the offer, he knew that Connell’s interest in bioweapons was to ban them, not to work with them. But given her knowledge of germ warfare policies and her expertise with a respiratory pathogen—TB—he told her she would be the perfect person to spearhead biodefense research at the university. Still, he understood her dilemma. “Sure,” he smiled. “Get back to me.”

During the next few days, Connell could concentrate on little else. “I kept thinking about the offer. I talked to a few colleagues about it, but mostly I just thought.” She also understood that the specter of bioterrorism was growing and that there was a place for science in the fight against it. The words she had recited in Congress the previous week suddenly had new resonance: “The world is different now.” Connell believed she could make a contribution. She picked up the phone. “Larry? This is Nancy Connell. I’ve given your offer a lot of thought. OK, I’ll try it.”

As a prelude to the establishment of a biodefense center, Connell first addressed the inquiry that Feldman had posed. “I contacted every single department chair in every school at UMDNJ.” There were 40 of them.

As it happened, plans were under way to construct a special containment laboratory to accommodate Connell and others who were working with tuberculosis bacteria. The facility, known as a biosafety level-3 lab, would be suitable for work on most potential warfare agents as well.

At the same time, along with other scientists expert on genomics and public health, Connell developed a proposal for a 1-year grant titled “Selective Host Transcriptional Response to Virulent Organisms as a Signature Profile of Infection: Application to ‘Listed Agents.’” She would be the lead coinvestigator with Jerrold Ellner, a renowned immunologist who was soon to become chair of the Department of Medicine. The “listed agents” were
Bacillus anthracis, Yersinia pestis, Burkholderia mallei, Francisella tularensis,
and
Mycobacterium tuberculosis
. All but the TB organism are considered possible bacterial weapons. The others cause anthrax, plague, glanders, and tularemia.

The aim would be to identify which genes in the host are activated when these bacteria cause infection. A DNA template, or chip, could then be developed to detect each of these infections by sampling blood from individuals thought to be infected. Thus, a fixed record showing which human genes have been turned on could be used as an identification card for anthrax infection. Similarly, distinctive cards could be developed for each of the other bugs. The idea is that by comparing the profiles of activated genes, say, from a sample of blood, it might become possible in hours, or minutes, to determine if the blood has been infected and by which organism. Current techniques can take days before a disease is confirmed.

In March 2000 a letter arrived from USAMRIID informing Ellner and Connell that their proposal had been accepted. Soon after, they submitted a second proposal, this one for a similar study involving four disease-causing viruses: influenza, dengue, hantaan, and monkeypox (which is related to smallpox, though not as dangerous to humans). Approval was quickly granted pending completion of the first study. The grant for the first study had been $1.3 million and for the second $1.7 million. Although the money was now available, the organisms were not. Regulatory red tape and the discovery of anthrax contamination outside the door of a USAMRIID laboratory had put deliveries months behind schedule.