The government closed Lab 257 for good in the spring of 1995. They cited the building's outdated biocontainment facilities and crumbling old age — eighty-four strenuous years of service under its belt, forty-one of them as a exotic germ laboratory — as reasons for the shutdown. All of Lab 257's laboratory operations were consolidated within the other research facility, Lab 101 on the island's northwest shore.
Although scheduled to be fully decontaminated and demolished in 1996, Lab 257 still stands today, rotting from weathered decay, harboring who knows what deep within. On one of my voyages to Plum Island, I had an opportunity to investigate it up close. It was an eerie, postapocalyptic scene. Corrugated metal plates clamored loudly against the lab's wall. Scores of rusty pipes sprouted out of the flat tar roof. A lonely two-story skeletal extension was partially connected to the near side of the building, exposing rusted beams. Pipes snaked around the insides, some twisting into air vents, others ending in midair with no connection. Two short, thick pipes rose along the side of the building, like turbines in a ship's boiler room.
The door to the gatehouse hung open, creaking away in the whistling wind. I carefully inched inside. On the right was a padlocked wooden box marked suggestions. The guard's desk, straight ahead, was covered with a thick coat of soot. There was a flip calendar on the desk, one page half-turned over — paused on January 13, 1995. The clock overhead, stopped dead at 9:12 and some seconds. Leatherbound logbooks were piled haphazardly in the middle of the desk, just below the calendar. Sand blown in from the beach was piled in five-inch drifts at the floor's corners. It was a ghost lab.
Nailed to the door leading into the lab compound were rusted warning signs, stamped BIOHAZARD. They were signs reminiscent of Lab 257's shadowy past.
And a mile away, Lab 101 marched — and continues to march — on.
15
A Plum Island Prescription
For all of its warts, we still need Plum Island. Or a place like what Plum Island ought to be, where America can fight the emerging threat of biological terrorism against the nation's food supply— called agroterrorism in the new parlance. Back in the 1970s, a biological warfare expert told the Newsday investigative duo Cummings and Fetherston, "If you want to use biological warfare, you would be much better at striking livestock. If you use nerve gas on an army, you just kill the soldiers. If you destroy or damage a country's food supply, you strike at everyone." Those in power didn't listen then, but after the 2001 anthrax attacks that infected eleven and murdered five, bioterrorism became a new vocabulary word. Floyd Horn, shifted from USDA research czar to agroterror chief at the Department of Homeland Security, said this of the threat
in May 2002:
It is dead serious, and we really are at war. They want to get us, they want to get our economy, they want to kill us, they want to make us sick, get us out of the global marketplace and they want us to get out of their part of the world. And they have very few constraints about how they want to go about it….
When people lose their faith in government to protect the food supply, there's big trouble. This is ice cream for the average terrorist, and it's something we have to worry about every day here.
When Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood was caught red-handed in Kabul, Afghanistan, with a dossier on Plum Island, Horn's startling warning became a grim reality.
Tom Ridge, secretary of the DHS, said in June 2003, "I understand completely that [Plum Island] is the first line of defense in agroterrorism. I mean, that's where we're going to see the contaminants. That's where we're going to identify the pathogens…." And, said another DHS official, the aim of Plum Island "is not just science, it's protecting U.S. agriculture from agroterrorism." If this is what DHS chiefs expect from Plum Island, they may end up shortchanged.
Karl Grossman used to think it was a joke. Always the thorn in Plum Island's side, he playfully wrote in a 1995 column, "As to what nation has been interested in poisoning America's pigs and assassinating our chickens, that has been very unclear." But after September 11, 2001, and revelations of an Iraqi anti-agricultural and antipersonnel germ warfare program, Karl has had a change of heart. "After September 11th, it seems to me — finally— that with these people doing crazy things, that al Qaeda and the Islamic extremist movement attacking food and livestock is a real possibility. We are dealing with a challenging, inventive, and nutty enemy. So the defensive biological warfare mission on Plum Island suddenly has — and I don't know if it should be on Plum Island, that's another issue — but the mission itself suddenly has validity."
While calls to improve homeland defense are focused on airports and biological attacks on people, a ready-made terrorist opportunity lurks elsewhere. A terrorist could use germs targeted at animals, but like Rift Valley fever, the animal viruses could be zoonotic agents that infect animals and people simultaneously. Infecting domestic (and wild) animal populations that act as vectors would spread and amplify the disease in the very same manner that Lyme disease, West Nile virus, and Dutch duck plague spread from the New York area to the rest of the nation in a matter of years. Economically speaking, a nonzoonotic virus — one affecting only animals — directed against domestic livestock would be nearly as damaging.
Though we require it to live, food is a luxury taken for granted in America. For millions of urban, suburban, and exurban dwellers, food comes from the sparkling clean thirty-five-aisle supermarket, or the Friday's chain bistro in the shopping mall, or the McDonald's just off the highway exit. Rarely do we ever think about where our food comes from. It's that ignorance that terrorists will look to exploit. Recent events serve as a harbinger for things that may come.
It would be very easy to destroy the American food supply. In fact, if you wanted to, you could do it all by yourself. I sat down with a veterinarian-microbiologist named "Todd Barker" and discussed this possibility. "It's amazing what lab equipment you can buy on-line," says Todd. Websites like www.labjunk.com sell old equipment at bargain-basement prices, and from there you can start assembling your very own kitchen laboratory. Over the Internet, you can purchase anaerobic fermenters, a good centrifuge, a pressure cooker, bacterial media, and a milling device. A crude kitchen lab environment will be messy and things tend to spill, so you would want to go to a feedstore out west to pick up antibiotics and vaccines meant for cattle. "You'll get a sore arm and a reaction," says Todd of the crude animal prophylactics. But it will still protect you while you're playing mad scientist.
Then you will need a starter germ, and all that takes is some fake letterhead. "You could write someone and say you are a scientist from a phony lab, and you need it to test and make a diagnosis — and you'll get it. It's a common courtesy." If that doesn't come through, you can always go abroad and obtain viruses like foot-and-mouth disease virus and rinderpest in European and African countries where they are endemic, like Dr. Erich Traub did in Turkey during World War II for SS Reichsfuhrer Himmler. If those two options fail, you can try to follow the Long Island researchers who recently created the first synthetic live virus (polio virus, to be exact): by using genetic recipes available over the Internet and mail-ordering the component gene snippets.
Then you set your target. Modern agribusiness presents the nation's most vulnerable bioterrorism target. In the last fifteen years, virtually all livestock farms have been vertically integrated. Take swine, for example. There is no national tag system. Pigs go into a sale barn where they mix with thousands of other pigs and then ship out. Every pig that is reared and fattened for slaughter has some one thousand miles of travel on it. They go from Arkansas to North Carolina to Indiana, then to market in Chicago. Over twelve thousand pigs move out of North Carolina a day, and they head out for contract barns in ten different states; if it has to, a pig producer will move pigs two thousand miles to a contract barn with an open slot. Two weeks later, it's off to twenty-odd swine-producing states. Using sophisticated computer inventory systems, it is no more difficult than Home Depot moving hardware inventory between store locations.