Roger Breeze drew responses out of people, whether they were his superiors, his scientists, or his support workers. A head Washington-based USDA official said, "Some people just think he's the best — and some don't." From that distant official's vantage point, Dr. Breeze was "innovative and dynamic." He had reworked Plum Island's entire scientific program, rebuilt the facility, and saved Plum Island from imminent demise.
Ed Hollreiser sees Breeze as a "strange guy, very cunning — he'd call me in for little chats and tell me things that he said he didn't wanted repeated, but he really wanted me to spread the word." Plum Island safety officer Tom Sawicki says, "Breeze was here for a reason, he did what he had to do, and a lot of people didn't like it." Fran Demorest says, "It was his stepping-stone. And he made enemies there."
Dr. Robert Shope, who had lived with Breeze for a time in Connecticut, takes a middle view. "He did some things that weren't too popular with his superiors at USDA. And he may have gotten rid of some people at Plum who were deadwood, and in that sense, he wasn't very popular. But I think he was part of the driving force of the island." When asked to compare him to his predecessor, Shope thought of Breeze as "a totally different type of person — and still is. He's a wheeler-dealer type, and Callis was very conservative and played by the book and that sort of thing. Just two different people."
"My problem with Roger," says Dr. Carol House, "is that he still has an influence. He still shows up at town meetings and stands in the back, hovering. He still has a large influence over there, and he has pulled potential [Plum Island director] candidates."
"Roger's very hard to talk about," Dr. Jim House says, slowly, measuring his words. "Not one of the brighter moments in Plum Island history. Roger had a way of manipulating situations so he was always politically on top. No matter what he did, he would come out smelling like a rose. He was very, very clever.
"He did make strides, enhancing the amount of molecular virology done, but he even took that to an extreme. He was somewhat of a visionary, and he's into biological warfare, his new thing now. But he didn't have the vision or skills as a manager to run Plum in a smooth and productive manner. I didn't have a lot of respect for him scientifically. He was selling genetically resistant animals, and we didn't do genetics of animals. We had this genetically resistant cow, and transgenic pigs. Of course that never went anywhere.
"A lack of perspective — of all the things you'd say about him, that would be the one — a lack of perspective."
The two research groups at Plum Island are without question the best of their kind in the world," boasts Dr. Breeze, "and that wasn't true when I went there. If there's one thing I do know about very, very well, it's how to motivate scientists to go beyond what they think they can do — that's what I do best." But in some cases, the science on Plum Island may actually have been set back. Proof of that, says Dr. Richard Endris, is that some three years after the four scientists had been dismissed, one of Dr. Breeze's new recruits reestablished and set up — from scratch and at great cost — the same African swine fever tick colony research that Breeze disbanded upon his arrival. As for the new laboratory facility, it included a new animal isolation wing, and a fancy sandstone two-story brick office complex slapped across the front of Lab 101. The brown brick and shiny glass fagade conceals the deteriorating 1956 laboratory facility behind it.
Retired from government service, John Boyle still follows the career path of his old boss. "You saw what happened after Roger left Plum Island — he became an associate area director, he then became an area director. Now he is a big-time guy in Washington." Dr. Breeze is the associate administrator for "special interagency programs" for Agricultural Research Service. With his boss, Floyd Horn, at the Department of Homeland Security, Breeze oversees a good part of the USDA's scientific research. Undoubtedly, the steep trajectory of his career path in America trumps the sluggish thirty-two-step ladder he left behind at Glasgow University.
Is it possible that Dr. Breeze was blinded by his own ambition? "He is a very talented guy, and cares very deeply," says Boyle. "I think he cares so much that maybe it even overrides his talent, because he is so tenacious, once he sets out to do something, it will get done. But he really cares about science — good science. It's why he took a liking to me, because I worked so hard to get him the ferryboat." Blinded by the glory of science, or blinded by unadulterated ambition — or perhaps both — Dr. Breeze's curriculum vitae soared while the people of Plum Island tumbled and the island itself crumbled.
In the wake of that unbridled progress, people's lives changed, and not necessarily for the better.
"If this place wasn't going to be different," Breeze told a reporter, reflecting on his tenure, "it was going to be gone."
For certain, Roger Breeze had made Plum Island different.
"Living with success," he says, "is harder than living with failure."
PART 4
THE FUTURE
14
The Homeland
The further you get into this, the more mind-boggling it will become.
Unfortunately, this story doesn't have a happy ending where the troubles work themselves out into tidy solutions. In fact, there is no ending. The island workforce walked out and went on strike in August 2002. The following June, President George W. Bush moved the laboratory from the USDA to the new Department of Homeland Security. The Plum Island saga gets more intriguing with each passing day.
Dr. Breeze physically departed Plum Island in 1995, but he continued calling the shots from his new office in Washington as a procession of faceless directors came and went. Breeze finally got his man in sixty-five-year-old Dr. David L. Huxsoll, whom he appointed Plum Island's director in June 2000. "Roger handpicked him," says one scientist familiar with the decision. "He has that biological warfare background that Roger likes. Breeze has always been into germ warfare. He loves the mystery, and the intrigue — he's really into it." Dr. Huxsoll grew up on a farm in the rural town of Aurora, Indiana, where he recalls being so attached as a child to his family's livestock, he cried for days when the fattened baby calves he had named and petted were sold at market. Like Dr. Callis, Huxsoll attended Purdue University, but the comparisons end there. After a brief vet practice stint in northern Illinois, Huxsoll was drafted into military service and embarked on a three-decade military career chasing diseases around the globe. Colonel Dr. Hux-soll was named commander of the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories in 1983, the first veterinarian to hold that command, bringing full circle the veterinarian connection to biological warfare that Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan began in 1941. "The most valuable thing out there," says Dr. Huxsoll, "it's not the gun, it's not the tank, it's not the jet fighter — it's man. So we do whatever can be done to prevent illness, and should illness occur, restore that person to operational status."
As Fort Detrick's[48] commander, Colonel Huxsoll saw heavy action during the now-infamous Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, featured in Richard Preston's The Hot Zone. He made the controversial decision to send the Army into a domestic matter that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) — lacking any hands-on expertise — was having a difficult time managing. "At that time, I considered everything, the potential hazards, and the
48
By this point, the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories had assumed a friendlier-sounding name: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.