The "Nothing Leaves" policy wasn't limited to animals. To prevent contamination, only humans, their street clothes, and their jewelry could leave Plum Island. Animal remains, spent vehicles, laboratory equipment, construction debris, paints, disinfectants, chemicals, biologicals, tires, radiation, and even food were either burned or buried in multiple landfills on the island. If it fit in the incinerator, it went to the charging room; if not, into a landfill pit. Not even books from the island's medical-veterinary library could be borrowed overnight. New York Telephone placed a dedicated truck on the island, and Ma Bell's repairman, Mr. Albert A. Aber-smith, kept four separate sets of tools, one for each laboratory module, and took four showers a day. On the rare occurrence a vehicle absolutely had to come to Plum Island from the mainland, its top and undercarriage were sprayed down with disinfectant, and the interior was wiped down. Then it had to drive through decontamination wheel baths and sit on the dock for two weeks minimum before it could return to the mainland with a clean bill of health. And even then, the safety office called and checked up on the vehicle after the first and second weeks on the mainland.
Some chafed at the innumerable safety rules and regulations; one called them "ludicrously careful." Doc Shahan would have none of it — if you didn't like it, then leave. "[W]e take no risks," he told a reporter. "We may be extreme, but I don't think so. It's better to be overcautious all the time than not cautious enough just once."
Speaking of the laboratory's intricate constructs, a Plum Island scientist said, "All of this planning and construction results from fear — fear which is not to be confused with cowardice — but rather the real realization of lurking dangers around us." The laboratory attempted to tame those fears. "It's the most complicated in the world," said West Point Army engineer Louis Genuario, describing Lab 101's revolutionary sheet-metal air-control system he helped design. "And the largest."[19]
Jabbing his smoldering pipe at a reporter, Doc Shahan boasted, "No other laboratory in the world can match ours for all-out security." Not Europe, certainly not Africa, and not even Fort Detrick, the Army's biological warfare headquarters. Shahan could make that statement with cool confidence: Plum Island was the latest and the greatest, an amalgamation of the best biological security techniques and state-of-the-art technology human knowledge could offer.
So when the USDA opened the Plum Island Animal Disease Center amid so much pomp and fanfare, it really was "The World's Safest Lab," as the USDA trumpeted in its opening-day press release.
Indeed, germs didn't have a chance.
DOC'S PRIZED POSSESSIONS
Early operations at Plum Island boomed during the prosperous 1950s. There were the early breakthroughs with brucellosis. There was the innovative propagation of foot-and-mouth disease virus in kidney cell cultures by Drs. Callis and Bachrach. But before any research could be done, Plum Island had to first get hold of the germs.
Doc Shahan referred to his viruses as his "prized possessions," and stored them on dry ice under lock and key. During a six-month period in 1953, Shahan and his Mexican campaign colleague, Colonel Mace, then the Army's biowarfare commander on Plum Island, secreted 131 strains of 13 different germs on the island, akin to Captain Kidd stowing his own pirate booty on adjacent Gardiner's Island some 300 years earlier. Shahan's and Mace's clandestine treasure trove was equally worthy of a white skull and crossbones emblazoned on a black flag.
Listed on the now-declassified "Inventory of Animal Viruses and Anti-sera Procured by the Cooperation Between the Chemical Corps and the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Stored at Plum Island" are the starter strains of the germs still housed on Plum Island: bluetongue, Rift Valley fever, African swine fever, fowl plague, sheep pox, Newcastle disease, goat pulmonitis, Mycobacterium butyricum, Teschens' disease, vesicular stomatitis, virus diarrhea of cattle, rinderpest, foot-and-mouth disease, and twelve ampoules (hermetically sealed, bulbous glass vessels) of a germ listed as "N."
How they got their hands on the viruses reads like a Ian Fleming novel. "It was sort of cloak-and-dagger business," recalled scientist Dr. George Cottral, Plum Island's first biological security officer. Shahan picked up the hot, live rinderpest from the Army's top-secret project 1,001 (named after the famous Arabian Nights tales) deep within the Kenyan jungle. He brought it with him to Great Britain's Pirbright virus laboratory near London, where he met up with Colonel Mace and Dr. Cottral. There the trio bought bovine and guinea pig tissues infected with six types of sixteen different strains of foot-and-mouth disease virus, forking over to the lab's director a U.S. Treasury check for $5,000. Federal law forbade the virus on mainland United States soil. So after overseeing its intricate packaging, Mace, Shahan, and Cottral rode back with the test tubes and ampoules across the Atlantic on a U.S. Navy freighter. They were placed carefully inside a heavy canvas bag, padlocked inside a strong wooden box, placed in a stainless steel box. The men kept it within their sight the whole trip. In the deep waters of Gardiner's Bay, just south of Plum Island, the freighter's screws came full stop and set anchor. Unloaded onto a tugboat (which looked like a dinghy next to the massive freighter) along with its three chap-erones was a shiny hinged metal box — glistening in the bright sunlight, stenciled property of the u.s. government on all sides. The tugboat slowly chugged to Plum Island harbor, where it put its precious cargo ashore.
Soon after, other viruses, similarly sealed, made the journey to Plum Island, hailing from the far corners of the globe — North and South Rhodesia, Nanking, Tokyo, India, Thailand, Palestine, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, Kenya Colony, Nakuru, Kabete, South Africa, Orange Free State, Entebbe, Nigeria, Sierra Leone; from nearer reaches — West Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, Mexico; and even from within the nation's borders— Fort Detrick and Cornell University (courtesy of Dr. Hagan). Each bug was frozen inside corked vials or ampoules, tucked in hinged metal canisters, and carefully packed in boxes bound with padlocked iron straps. The boxes were then locked in a dry ice cabinet, which itself was inside a bombproof vault. "I have trouble getting into the stuff myself," said Cottral, who held all dominion over the germs, speaking with the New York Herald Tribune in 1954.
That was biological security.
All research scientists share a thirst, a quest that is difficult to put into words. According to one, "The person first becomes knowledgeable in the subject, then greatly steeped in it, and finally comes to possess that which is the feel of the problem. So totally immersed…he is often in a position to render the greatest of possible scientific service, namely, the elucidation of facts previously unknown." Doc Shahan inspired his young scientists to reach for this almost spiritual place.
A year after the dedication, young Dr. Bachrach and Dr. Sidney Breese, a wizard in microscopy, announced a first: they had successfully photographed a virus using an electron microscope. Though the technology had been introduced in 1945, results were disappointing and photographic detail was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain. But recently, metallic shadowing helped add dimension and clarity to specimens, and Bachrach and Breese, after an untold number of miscues, snapped a crisp image on a plate glass negative. For the first time in the 443 years since it was first diagnosed and described by the Italian monk Hieronymus Frascastorius, one of the smallest creatures known to mankind, the foot-and-mouth disease virus, could be seen in striking detail. The micrographs revealed something never before witnessed: a spherically shaped gray ball, one-millionth of an inch in diameter and even smaller than the tiny polio virus. Other work proved that viruses were not all spherical in shape — they also came in tadpoles, rods, and cubes. Scientists could now advance with research and development at great speed.
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One reporter along for the dedication day ride had this to say about Genuario's creation: "I, for one, found the 5,000-square-foot room on the second floor where the ducts, filter chambers, electrical conduits and controls come together an excellent place for inducing nightmares."