Lab 257
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
8
THE DISTURBING GOVERNMENT‘S SECRET STORY OF THE
GERM LABORATORY
BY MICHAEL CHRISTOPHER CARROLL
8
Rift Valley Fever
In and out of rivers, streams of death in life, whose banks
were rotting into mud, whose waters, thickened with slime,
invaded the contorted mangroves, that seemed to writhe at us
in the extremity of an impotent despair. It was like a weary
pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares....I raised my head.
The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the
tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth
flowed somber under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the
heart of an immense darkness....
—JOSEPH CONRAD,
HEART OF DARKNESS
Contrary to what the public was led to believe, some animals on
Plum Island were kept alive after the virus outbreak. Though the
emergency plan that called for the sacrifice of every animal to prevent
disease transmission, the animals earmarked for the January 1979 Rift
Valley fever project were spared. “The only animals kept alive were the
mouse and guinea pig colonies,” said Dr. Graves at the time. Dr. Douglas Gregg, a Plum Island scientist working at the time of the outbreak,
remembers it differently.
“The Army was there testing sheep,” says Gregg. “They had just
been vaccinated outside, in the middle of the island, to save space. They
were the only animals that weren’t destroyed. Those animals were not
showing any signs of disease. They were saved, brought into the laboratory, and held there. And they continued experimenting with them
there in the lab, which they would have done anyway.”
It is hard to fathom that, after the hours toiled during “kill weekend,”
the virus hunters’ search for possible mainland spread, and the vigorous
decontamination efforts of both laboratory buildings and the 840-acre
island grounds, a single animal capable of spreading exotic viruses would
have been kept alive. But sixty sheep were. And they vaccinated the sheep
outdoors with Rift Valley fever vaccine—inactive viruses that could revert
to a virulent state and turn the test herd into virus incubators. This violated
the cardinal rule established by Plum Island’s first director, Doc Shahan: no
experiments shall take place outside the containment laboratory. “No virus
studies are conducted except in the enclosed laboratory buildings, and no
contact is possible with other livestock or with birds and insects.” Scientists
were taking an immense risk to free up laboratory space. After the outbreak,
Dr. Callis asked a panel of national biosafety experts a question: could animals vaccinated against foot-and-mouth disease virus (far less dangerous to
humans than Rift Valley fever virus) be held outside, to save space? The
experts said that animals could be injected with vaccines outside, but only if
they were genetically engineered vaccines of U.S. origin, essentially synthetics that didn’t contain actual virus. This reduced to nil the risk of reverting to
virulence and transmitting disease. But that wasn’t the case with Rift Valley
fever virus vaccine, which was authorized to be tested outdoors on Plum
Island.
The jagged Great Rift Valley runs along the eastern spine of Africa, the
result of a series of faults that first appeared when Africa separated
from the Arabian peninsula thirty million years ago. The Rift snakes some
four thousand miles, from Zambia in southern Africa up through Mozambique, Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda, and Ethiopia, and under the Red Sea to
the Jordan River valley. In Olduvai Gorge, deep within the lower reaches of
the Rift Valley, shadowed by towering volcanoes such as Kilimanjaro and
Mount Kenya, scientists unearthed the oldest fossils of the human species
Homo erectus, dating over 500,000 years. From this cradle of human existence has spawned some of the deadliest natural threats to human life
known to mankind.
On a farm near Lake Naivasha, heavy rains in July 1930 were followed
by 3,600 lambs and 1,200 ewes falling violently ill and dying within days.
Perplexed by the sudden tragedy, local veterinarians and scientists rushed
to the scene to examine the remains and take blood and tissue samples for
further study. Back at the lab, four staff members came into direct contact
with the tainted blood and contracted an acute febrile (fever producing)
disease that resembled sandfly fever. It turned out that every farmhand in the area had been suffering a similar ailment. To prove conclusively the
mysterious culprit was infectious to humans, the scientists inoculated a
man with a sick lamb’s blood, then used his serum to successfully pass disease on to healthy sheep. Further tests revealed that the offending agent was
a virus. More lab workers contracted the volatile disease, named the Rift
Valley fever virus, working on it back in England. One year later, the disease struck again while sixty miles from the original outbreak. Both cases
were matched to the same germ. The new germ wasn’t particularly deadly,
but it did cause severe sickness, and could cause blindness.
During World War II, Plum Island founder Dr. Hagan realized the terrific potential of Rift Valley fever as a germ warfare weapon. He put the
new virus at the top of the list of agents the Axis powers might use against
the Allies, along with anthrax, yellow fever, and botulism. Hagan deemed it
“particularly dangerous, since the virus was hardy” and “difficult to diagnose.” In addition to causing near-fatal 107-degree fevers and severe flu like
symptoms, it ruptured blood vessels and caused the eyes to hemorrhage
profusely. The bleeding blocked the optical nerve and often caused permanent blindness.
In a top-secret wartime report to George Merck, Hagan’s colleague Dr.
Thomas Rivers noted that the virus would make a fine weapon. “Rift Valley fever in humans does not kill people as a rule, yet a widespread epidemic would be demoralizing.” Rivers, a head scientist at Rockefeller (and
the boss of Dr. Richard Shope), also suggested use of a biological cocktail—
similar to a designer germ weapon the Nazis were designing—using mosquitoes. “It would be interesting to find out whether the same mosquitoes
could be simultaneously infected with Rift Valley fever, yellow fever, and
dengue fever viruses and be capable of producing concurrent epidemics in
a susceptible population. . . .”
After the war, the Army bio-warriors put Dr. Rivers’s plans into practice. Pentagon scientists briefed President Dwight D. Eisenhower on using
Rift Valley fever as a nonlethal biological weapon that would only “incapacitate” the enemy, rather than kill him. Used correctly, it could deter and
demoralize the enemy and, at the same time, spare buildings and infrastructure from incendiary bombs. The president approved funding in this new
area of weaponry, calling it “a splendid idea.” Research on incapacitating
germ agents began.
Starting experiments at its new Plum Island laboratory, the USDA
asked a South African scientist for instructions for handling Rift Valley
fever. He warned, “Never have we handled a virus which spreads so
quickly, easily, and rapidly as virulent as Rift Valley fever virus. . . . It is now
a special instruction here that this virus is handled in complete isolation.”
NAMRU-3
In October 1977, James Meegan, commander of United States Naval Medical Research Unit No. 3 (NAMRU-3), noticed thousands of Egyptians in
scattered parts of the country falling mysteriously ill. Some 200,000 people, young and old, flooded into hospitals with eye infections, fevers, and
myalgia. In the towns hardest hit, two-thirds of the populations contracted disease. Many contracted encephalitis (an acute inflammation of
the brain) and hemorrhagic fevers (uncontrolled internal bleeding). Hundreds were dying. An epidemic had erupted, coinciding with noticeable
large swarms of mosquitoes. Doctors feared it might be the Marburg virus
discovered in Germany in the late 1960s, the older brother of the Ebola
virus.
NAMRU-3 collected samples in one of the high-infection locations
and shipped the materials to Yale University’s Arbovirus Research Unit
(YARU). Dr. Robert Shope, head of YARU, found that Egyptian samples
reacted to antibodies of Rift Valley fever, an arbovirus, a family of viruses
that are communicated by bloodsucking insects. The diagnosis was surprising, since previous experience had shown Rift Valley fever to be rarely fatal.
Major C. J. Peters—the intrepid virus hunter from Fort Detrick featured in
Richard Preston’s harrowing chronicle of the Ebola virus, The Hot Zone—
called it a “unique situation. We didn’t know of any other virus that caused
such a wide range of illnesses.... They were like totally separate diseases.”
Shope was extremely uncomfortable with the thought of a now-lethal virus
strain in his Connecticut laboratories. “Rift Valley fever was not supposed
to be worked with in the United States—it’s a foreign animal disease,” he
recalls. “As soon as we found out what it was, we wrapped up work, disinfected the place, and sent the materials out to Plum Island.” The new Rift
Valley fever virus was carefully shipped across the Long Island Sound to
Plum Island and deposited in the virus library alongside five other earlier,
less deadly strains the Army had procured for the USDA:
STRAIN VIRUS CHEMICAL CORPS. ACCESSION NO. ORIGIN
Smithburn, Neurotropic Rift Valley 118 Entebbe, 1951
Smithburn, Attenuated
egg passage Rift Valley 119 South Africa, 1951
84674 Ovine, Virulent Rift Valley 120 Orange Free State, 1951
Van Wyk egg adapted Rift Valley 200A South Africa, 1952
Unknown strain Rift Valley 127 Kabete, 1947
OPERATION WHITECOAT
The commanding officer of Fort Detrick, Colonel Richard Barquist, asked
Major C. J. Peters to courier vaccine to NAMRU-3 in Cairo, test it on the
U.S. troops there, and trace the epidemiology of this strange new virus. The
seasoned virus hunter couldn’t resist the challenge; a decade later, this same
gutsy, aviator sunglasses–wearing scientist swaggered into a Reston, Virginia, monkey house and swiftly put down an outbreak of the feared Ebola
virus. Peters brought with him “Rift Valley Fever Vaccine, Formalin Inactivated, Tissue Culture Origin, NBDR-103, Lot 6,” an experimental
vaccine designed by the Army during the early days of Fort Detrick. Listed
in “Final Development” stage in the now-declassified 1977 congressional
report, U.S. Army Activity in the U.S. Biological Warfare Programs, it hadn’t
gone through extensive testing and it wasn’t licensed safe for use by the U.S.
Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
The only testing of this experimental vaccine occurred between 1958
and 1974 in the Army’s top-secret human guinea pig operation, codenamed Operation whitecoat. whitecoat was a milestone on two counts.
It was the first time the Army reached out to a religious organization to
form a singular military unit, and the first time it drafted humans for biological warfare experiments. At the urging of Theodore R. Flaiz, the physician who oversaw the worldwide health outreach of the Seventh-day
Adventist Church, 2,300 Adventists—nonsmokers and teetotalers all—
signed consent forms and volunteered to be deliberately infected, injected,
and exposed to concentrated virus and bacterial mists, genetically altered
germs, and investigational therapeutic treatment. Conscientious objectors
to the draft by virtue of their faith, their church endorsed this “service to
the nation” on the grounds that it saved lives in conventional battle.
In this case, Whitecoats (named for their standard issue white lab coats)
were injected and then challenged—like a mouse or sheep might be—with
live Rift Valley fever virus. In strict isolation, they were closely monitored,
poked, and prodded by scientists in white-hooded bio-spacesuits.1 Conducted in 1958, Operation whitecoat Project No. 58-2 tested three men
with Rift Valley fever virus who spent seventeen days in the hospital deliberately infected with the disease. Another three were tested in 1969 as part of
Project No. 69-9. In Project No. 69-10, twenty “volunteers” gave their arms
to needles and suffered through a nine-day hospital stay. Eight of the men
became so ill they had to be put on convalescent leave to recover. Further
details of these human vaccine tests remain classified.
1
Interestingly, one of the scientists prodding the WHITECOAT men was a young Dr. Robert Shope, who had
joined Fort Detrick’s Project WHITECOAT team in 1955 after finishing his schooling at Yale.
The Army knew full-scale human trials could not be conducted at home
without causing public uproar, but they could make use of a disease outbreak
in Egypt and obtain useful data through “peaceful” medical intervention.
“Rule One of biological warfare development,” said Peters in his book Virus
Hunter, “was that you don’t weaponize an agent until you have a vaccine or
other treatment for it. Otherwise, if the wind blows the wrong way or something else goes wrong, you’re in a whole bunch of trouble.” Egypt’s misfortune gave the United States the Rift Valley fever vaccine trial it wanted.
Peters went to Egypt and tested the experimental vaccine at NAMRU3 on young naval men and women who weren’t quite volunteers. Major
Peters simply said to the troops, “We think you ought to have it.” Naturally, they all responded exactly as they were trained to: “Yes, sir! Thank
you, sir.” Some three hundred Egyptians working for NAMRU, happy
with their steady paychecks, joined in the chorus. It may have worked,
since none contracted the fever.
Endemic in sub-Saharan Africa, Rift Valley fever somehow migrated to
the Nile delta on the Mediterranean Sea, and somehow morphed into a
hemorrhagic killer. While there were plenty of potential natural vectors,
including mosquitoes along Lake Nasser, most disturbing were reports the
germ was introduced intentionally. “There were a lot of scary possibilities
which couldn’t be definitively proved or disproved,” Dr. Peters said.
“[U]nless you caught some guy up on a hill with a blower and gas mask
generating aerosols from a can, you couldn’t be sure it came from man or
nature.” During this period, the Soviet Union and Egypt enjoyed a robust
economic and military relationship that included furnishing Egypt with all
kinds of weaponry. Further raising the specter of a man-made biological
event, be it accident or otherwise, it is now generally understood—due in
part to ex–biological warfare scientists who defected to the West—that the
Soviets conducted a immense germ warfare program at this time, which
included creating genetically engineered organisms (such as a strain of
antibiotic-resistant anthrax) designed for their ability to kill.
The new, deadly version of the Rift Valley fever virus is again on the
move. In September 2000, rampant outbreaks occurred on the Arabian
Peninsula in Saudi Arabia and Yemen—with the virus poised to extend into
Europe. The results of the initial Egyptian outbreak were devastating: 82
million in livestock infected, 200,000 humans infected, 18,000 of those
human cases clinically confirmed, along with over 700 deaths. A survey of
blood serum taken prior to 1977 proved the virus was not present in Egypt
before the epidemic.
Today, Egypt and two other Arab nations—Syria and Libya—refuse to
join the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which 165 other nations
have agreed to. Presumably another nonmember, the newly constituted Iraq, will join. In a 1994 Congressional Research Service report on biological warfare programs, Egypt was listed in the “suspected program” column.
Egypt’s reputed biological warfare germs include plague and anthrax bacteria, an ailment called “West Nile” fever virus, and a germ that infected
200,000 of its own people in 1977—the Rift Valley fever virus.
Like most other nations in the region, both friendly and unfriendly to
the United States, there has never been an independent inspection of
Egypt’s biological warfare capabilities.
IN OUR BACKYARD
While Egypt was the scene of the deadly outbreak, the American research
on Rift Valley fever took place on Plum Island. Dr. Gerry Eddy, a veterinarian and head of virology at Fort Detrick, obtained USDA permission to
work on the virus in 1977. Though even the milder Entebbe strain from the
1950s was labeled number six on the list of most dangerous viruses by the
secretary of agriculture, the Army’s Fort Detrick and the USDA’s Plum
Island did cooperative research on the killer strain, Zagazig 501, named
after one of the hardest hit villages in Egypt.
Until now, Plum Island had worked on five animal diseases fatal to people. This would be their sixth zoonotic—a germ capable of both animal and
human infection. However, unlike previous studies, Rift Valley fever came
on the heels of a confirmed human epidemic, so Colonel Eddy sent along the
experimental whitecoat vaccine that would ostensibly protect the staff
from exposure. The collaboration proved to the Army’s germ warriors they
didn’t need to run Plum Island themselves, not when the USDA gladly aided
when necessary. The vets were there for the Army during World War II and
they were there with them in the cold war. The key would be to see that minimal public interest over a “famine disease” in Egypt faded from memory.
But somebody talked. Somebody read the internal memo explaining
the proposed research, and Peters’s account of people in desert streets suffering from massive hemorrhaging, blindness, and encephalitic brain
seizures, with herds of cattle and droves of sheep carcasses strewn across
the countryside. Safety Officer Dr. Walker told over one hundred workers
in contact with Lab 257—lab techs, janitors, electricians, boiler operators,
clothes launderers, engineers—they had to sign health waivers and be
injected with a vaccine that wasn’t FDA approved. Though it was “voluntary,” there was really no turning it down, not if the workers wanted to
keep their current jobs. “You either took that shot or you had to go—or
push a lawn mower around the island for the rest of your days,” says a former worker. A few brave souls wrote the words “under protest” beneath
their signatures before being pricked with the syringe. Talk spread along
the island paths, in the cafeteria, and on the ferry. People began to worry.
At the 1978 annual summer retreat on Plum Island, Drs. Callis and
Walker took turns briefing the Plum Island outside advisory board on their
plans for Rift Valley fever—not only with the mild Entebbe strain, but on
the dangerous Zagazig 501 strain. Plum Island wanted to begin right away.
Dr. William Scherer headed up Plum Island’s board of consultants, outside scientific experts who met once a year on the island to offer collegial
advice and encouragement—“a dog and pony show,” as one member put it.
As chairman of Cornell University’s microbiology department and a member of the National Research Council, Dr. Scherer was the type of scientific
heavyweight Plum Island needed. He understood the meaning of viral
reservoirs, hosts, and vectors like few others.
“Jerry,” Dr. Bill Scherer began, brows furrowed. “You know there are some important things to consider with Rift Valley. Look at this place,” he said, extending his arm in a wide gesture. “You have swarms of insects flying around on this island. There’s a lot of water and marshy land here.” Scherer pointed out it would be much safer to wait until after mosquito season, and study the virus in the dead of winter. He offered to send entomologists, insect experts, to catalogue Plum Island’s pest population and determine the precise level of protection required.
Callis listened quietly and politely nodded. The research was scheduled to start in early October, past the normal insect season, but hardly in the middle of winter. As for the insect study, there just wasn’t enough time this year—they were too busy readying the virus experiments. Maybe next year. The consultants’ prescient advice unfortunately was just that: advice. It wasn’t binding. While the advisory group was “always concerned something would get loose from the laboratory,” recalls member Dr. Robert Shope, its counsel remained “mostly reactive.”
Soon thereafter, the Suffolk County Department of Health got a call from an anonymous Plum Island employee, Newsday got a hot tip from an anonymous source in the Department of Health, and a story ran on September 9, 1978. “You can’t keep anything secret today,” Dr. Callis complained grudgingly. After receiving word, Suffolk County’s health commissioner, Dr. David Harris, placed a concerned phone call to Plum Island. Harris wanted to know what the Rift Valley fever was and how it related to some illness going on in Egypt. Dr. Walker assured Harris that the disease caused only mild flu symptoms in people, and in Egypt some “complications” had resulted in a few deaths. Mosquitoes apparently had something to do with the disease. Walker said the virus study would begin the following month and wrap up by the end of March, well before the 1979 mosquito season. No mention was made of other insects known to transmit Rift Valley fever, such as flies and ticks.
As for the workers, Walker assured, everyone on Plum Island would be vaccinated, the virus be kept in the high-containment lab, and employees wear face respirators. If by some remote chance anyone should become infected, they will be airlifted by military plane to “The Slammer,” Fort Detrick’s human isolation ward. Employees suspected of infection would be locked down in an insect-proof building on Plum Island until a firm diagnosis. There was, of course, the possibility the work may go over schedule, Walker said. Harris graciously agreed to “institute extensive mosquito control measures” by spraying chemicals with crop-dusting airplanes should the research continue past the first of May.
Plum Island refused to acknowledge they had been given up by frightened employees. “As a professional courtesy,” Walker said, “if some new disease comes on [Plum Island] that is infectious to both animals and man, of course we would notify the health department.” But contacting local officials was far from standard policy for the federal enclave. In fact, Plum Island officials never before informed the county about its zoonotic disease research—on multiple strains of at least five different germs—or about what germs were stored in its cavernous freezers.
In a feature editorial on September 11, 1978, four days before the Plum Island virus outbreak, Newsday declared, “We consider the new openness a welcome innovation,” but “under no conditions do we think the lab should continue its Rift Valley fever research into a Long Island mosquito season.” Falsely soothing the public, Newsday told its readers “ The disease itself is not fatal, but it’s often accompanied by complications. . . .” In fact, the seven hundred people who died in Egypt didn’t fall prey to complications. In each case, it was the Rift Valley fever virus disease that either putrefied the victims’ organs or swelled their brains into lethal shock. Worse, reporting only fifty deaths in Egypt caused by the virus, the New York Times was off by a factor of fourteen.
Then the Plum Island virus outbreak occurred. Callis and Walker realized there was no way they could clean up the island in two weeks’ time, vaccinate one hundred employees, and begin the Rift Valley fever project with Fort Detrick. “We really can’t think about it until we get the island back together,” said Walker. But, he added, “We intend to go on with the project” as soon as test animals arrived. Apparently, many of those animals were already there.
One man who refused to be played by Plum Island or misled by media reports was Suffolk county executive John V. N. Klein. Hailed as an “honest country gentlemen,” the young public servant had a promising political future, and the charge of a county of over 1.3 million people. A week after the outbreak, Klein resolved to take matters into his own hands. Going over Callis’s head with a two-page appeal to Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, he spoke of a “grave concern” and “apprehension” over “the potential spread of disease once exposure has taken place.” Exercising strict protocol, Secretary Bergland didn’t respond to the county executive’s dispatch, but instead referred it to a USDA research office underling. The acting associate deputy director of the Federal Research, Science, and Education Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, T. B. Kinney, a name of unknown gender, wrote a three-page letter accompanied by glossy Plum Island brochures, all extolling the virtues of animal research, while addressing none of Klein’s worries. His letter made no mention of Fort Detrick’s, Colonel Eddy’s, or Major Peters’s involvement, or that the study was in reality Army biological warfare research.
John Klein nearly hit the roof as he read Kinney’s letter. The feds were stonewalling him. Plum Island and the USDA had no regard for state or local government, or for the public. The facts were almost too fantastic to be true: a biological research laboratory flatly pronounced it was going to fiddle with a deadly virus on a ranch full of animals, days after germs were proven and acknowledged to have escaped their lab! This time, Klein would not mince words. The experiments raised “a basic and profound issue with respect to the relationship between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the people of Suffolk County,” he wrote Secretary Bergland. “I cannot any longer permit this administration of county government and the people it represents to remain unaware of the total spectrum of activities carried on on Plum Island. . . .” Klein requested a personal meeting with Bergland.
“The People,” Klein exclaimed, “can no longer exist ‘in the dark’ on this issue and must have the right of being fully informed with the opportunity to object . . . to any activity deemed inconsistent with the interests of the people of Suffolk. . . .” Without an opportunity to be heard, to be recognized, to be adequately represented with such base interests at stake, Klein all but promised that a Boston Tea Party would ensue in the local waters off Plum Island. Indeed, the public began to foment, pelting Plum Island with scores of phone calls and letters objecting to the precarious research; and the editorial boards of newspapers weighed in as well. Local groups organized town meetings, hailed Klein’s decisive actions, and blasted the feds’ proposed research. “How tragic would be the irony,” proclaimed one resident, “if an agency established to control and find cures for diseases caused instead their proliferation?”
There was no reply from Secretary Bergland. Incensed, Klein felt that come hell or high water, Plum Island would not start this project without his direct input, whether it meant a federal lawsuit or a local picket demonstration. He fired a final warning shot by way of telegram:
TELEX CABLE
U.S SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE BERGLAND
REPEAT REQUEST OF MY LETTER OCTOBER 26 FOR PROMPT MEETING WITH YOU RELATIVE TO PLUM ISLAND LAB EXPERIMENTATION STOP IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT DIRECT AND PERMANENT MECHANISM OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN USDA AND SUFFOLK COUNTY RESPECTING PLUM ISLAND BE ESTABLISHED IMMEDIATELY STOP THE PEOPLE OF SUFFOLK ARE ENTITLED TO NO LESS THAN FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF EXPERIMENTATION WITHIN SUFFOLK COUNTY AND WITHIN ONE AND ONE QUARTER MILES OF INTERSTATE FERRY TO CONNECTICUT STOP PLEASE RESPOND PROMPTLY WITH DATE FOR MEETING WITH YOU STOP
JOHN V N KLEIN
Days after the telegram, Klein received a Washington-ordered phone call from Dr. Jerry J. Callis, director of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
“Come on over,” said Dr. Callis in a low Georgia drawl. “Come see how safe we are over here.”
BEYOND THE GATES
Minutes before 7:00 a.m., Klein’s entourage drove through the barbed-wire checkpoint at the Orient Point lot to board the ferry. It was the dreariest of Mondays—gray skies, rainy, and bone-chilling cold. Klein’s group included township supervisors, the county health commissioner, the county attorney, and ten reporters, including newsmen from the New York Times and Newsday. In the guard building, they took turns reading and signing the visitor affidavit required to board the boat. With their signatures, each acknowledged they might be detained in the event of emergency, and promised to obey the safety officer and not come into contact with animals after leaving Plum Island. Two burly, gray-haired security officers called the group to attention. “There are no cameras, no tape recorders taken to the island,” warned the older of the two. “I know you can have these little things in your pocket... we’ll make sure on the boat you won’t have one on you.”
The journey took about thirty minutes through the bumpy chop of Plum Gut. Awaiting them at the harbor guardhouse was the mutton chop side burned Callis, in a dapper checked suit and dark tie punctuated with shimmering lodestars. He greeted the landing party warmly, then shepherded them onto the bus, which roared away toward the old Army parade ground. On the way through the woods, past the marshy wetlands, Callis lectured the group on the island’s three-hundred-year history. With impeccable timing, he brought his story to a close as the bus pulled alongside the double doors of the old white Army chapel. The heavenly spire and the pews and crucifix had been removed long ago; the smell of frankincense and myrrh had given way to a deep musty odor. Inside the brown-paneled chapel were the laboratory chiefs, assistant director Graves and safety officer Walker. Shades were pulled down over the long rectangular windows, and a staffer dimmed the lights and turned on the projector so Callis could begin the presentation.
Klein and his team shifted uncomfortably in their folding chairs in the dark as Callis narrated a colorful slide show. As Callis clicked away, he informed the group about the current breadth of America’s livestock (“136 million cattle, 25 million swine, 25 million sheep, 25 million goats, 8 million horses”); the history of foot-and-mouth virus outbreaks in North America—two-thirds of it anyway (“Mexico outbreak 1948, Canada 1952”); the USDA’s careful, thoughtful selection of Plum Island in 1952 (“a coastal island separated by deep navigable waters”); and so on.
“I want to talk about biological warfare,” said Callis. Everyone perked up. A dozing reporter in the back row stirred. “We don’t do any of it on Plum Island.” He clicked the slide button again, and large black-and-white headlines emblazoned across the chapel walls:
u.s. tests germ warfare off l.i. the virus hunters of forbidden island animal disease detectives work on island of no return plum island for mankind, or against it?
“I solicit your assistance in dispelling these very unfortunate errors,” appealed an unhappy Callis. “It’s not good for the United States to have these perpetuated.” Finally, facing the spin control head-on, the dam broke. A reporter asked about Karl Grossman’s AP wire story seven years before in which Plum Island admitted a hand in biological warfare.
“I’m not knowledgeable about defense,” said Callis, mindful that the Rift Valley fever project—the reason for his slide show—was a joint affair with the Army’s Fort Detrick biological warfare facility, a fact unknown to his audience. Klein stood up. He’d had enough.
“Dr. Callis, please explain this Rift Valley fever program to us. Can we put into place a program to know what you are working with that poses a risk to humans and discuss your safety measures? We cannot continue to learn of your work by accident,” Klein scolded.
Rift Valley fever was spreading through Africa into the Sinai Peninsula, Callis replied, focusing his answer not on safety, but on an urgent need for research. “Last week we heard it was in Nigeria.” One look at the expressions on the local officials’ faces told their response.
Nigeria? Who cares? they thought. Nigeria is the other side of the world! In Africa! What about our people—the people RIGHT HERE? Not acknowledging the nonverbal clues, Callis continued on, noting that Plum Island had a distinguished advisory board. He even extended an olive branch: one county health official would be permitted to attend their annual meeting on Plum Island. This, thought Callis, was a generous offer from an island unaccustomed to sharing its activities with anyone. He clicked quickly through several more slides until he reached one of selected zoonotic diseases. Some of these, he casually mentioned, had been investigated on Plum Island in the past. Though Callis attempted to gloss over this, Klein and the reporters sharply interrupted.
“Which germs did you work on? Which ones affect humans? What types of illnesses? Are any of them fatal?” Five of the diseases—virulent influenza, Coxsackie B-5 virus, louping ill, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and Rift Valley fever—were lethal to humans. Five more—Newcastle disease, vesicular stomatitis virus, contagious ecthyma, foot-and-mouth disease, and Nairobi sheep disease—caused human illnesses. No mention was made of the other viruses and bacteria studied or the scope of the vast Plum Island germ library.
“Has anyone been infected in the lab?” Six had taken ill from accidental exposures, Callis said. Three people had contracted Newcastle disease, two caught vesicular stomatitis, and one caught foot-and-mouth disease. There were no fatalities to date.
Discussion turned to the outbreak. Sounding all too rehearsed, Plum Island officials assured the group that every effort was being made to test systems and ensure virus agent containment.
“We’ve had twenty-four years of safe work,” Callis said to his tormentors. “Let’s not get it out of proportion now.”
After the slide show, the scientists led the tour to the ominous-looking Lab 257, before directing them into the perimeter guardhouse. Each guest forked over his personal items—watches, wallets, wedding rings, coins, paper notes, pencils—which were placed in small gray envelopes personalized with their initials.
“You have to go into the lab like Mother Nature brought you into this world,” Callis drily quipped to his tour group. Everyone was ordered to strip in the change room and don white coveralls, white socks, and white sneakers. Then, with the door behind them closed and air-sealed, the door at the opposite side of the room was depressurized. It hissed loudly, then opened into a maze of hallways, dimly illuminated with fluorescent light. After observing farm animals in various stages of different infections, the group stripped naked and waited single file to take decontamination showers before leaving the lab, following the same strict procedures required of workers in the early days. As they changed back into their street clothes, Walker peeled two Band-Aids off a reporter’s fingers, informing him that the crevices harbored viruses.
Dr. Callis saw the group of fifteen men to the harbor and graciously thanked them for their interest. Did the press learn anything new in this, the second glimpse of Plum Island? “The whole thing was pretty redundant,” says one attendee, comparing the tour with the earlier 1971 press junket. Another observed “a serious lack of mission at the island. . . . One would expect to find a sense of pride and accomplishment among the workers there. Based on our conversations, such is not the case.”
After the grand tour, Klein reflected on the experience. “Now it turns out, there’s a whole laundry list of such diseases they’ve been researching.” Had Klein known the true condition of the facilities Plum Island was concealing; or that the insect study recommended by the advisory board was snubbed; or that the study was a joint affair with the Army; or the deadly effects of human exposure to the Rift Valley fever virus; or the true number of casualties that the new Zagazig 501 strain wrought upon Egypt—things might have been different. Instead, without precaution the work went full steam ahead. Of Klein and his visit, Dr. Callis says twenty years later, “I didn’t give a damn.” The federal government wasn’t going to be told what it could and could not do by some local politicians.
Try as he might, county executive John V. N. Klein didn’t slice through the veil of secrecy over Plum Island. A noble failure, it had little if any impact on the island’s activities. After the 1978 virus outbreak and the flap over Rift Valley fever virus, the island dropped the “World’s Safest Lab” moniker. In fact, it dropped public contact altogether. The gates would not reopen until another Plum Island biological debacle fifteen years later.
THE RIFT VALLEY FEVER EXPERIMENT
Unlike bacteria, which can be seen easily under a traditional microscope, viruses are too small to be detected. To measure the concentration of viruses, scientists use the plaque-reduction method, whereby a visibly clear area in a culture dish, called a plaque, is left behind after the virus destroys the healthy culture cells. By measuring the plaque—essentially the damage the invisible viruses have done—you can get an idea of the titer, or how virulent and concentrated the virus is. Viruses are measured in plaque-forming units, or PFUs. In the Plum Island study of the deadly strain of the Rift Valley fever virus, the lab techs took a starter culture of African green monkey kidney cells out of the freezer and propagated them in culture plates using a growth medium of amino acids and heated calf fetus serum. To brew large quantities of virus, they fed Zagazig 501-plus on the monkey cells they cultured inside sterilized fermenters, not unlike the ones seen at a microbrew pub. Zagazig 501 was the Rift Valley fever strain pulled from a fatal hemorrhagic human case during the Egyptian outbreak. Peters added some kick at Fort Detrick—the plus—when he passed the virus through two sets of lung cell cultures taken from rhesus monkey fetuses. It was potent as hell. From the fermenter, they decanted the slurry into hundreds of 1-milliliter ampoules and stored them in nitrogen-cooled freezers at minus 70 degrees Celsius. They thawed each ampoule immediately before pacing briskly through the “hot corridor” to the animal room to inject a test animal.
Rift Valley fever virus affects its victim much like the well-known Ebola virus. Ten of the sixty sheep were used as controls, meaning they were not afforded the luxury of a vaccine. Twelve hours after the unlucky ones are exposed to the virus, viremia—the onslaught of a virus infection within the body—begins. Their temperatures rise sharply and their hearts beat rapidly in an attempt to circulate an immune response to parts of the body suffering from localized attack. But their immune systems cannot counter the multiplying germ. The blood circulates viruses to all quarters of the body, where they attach to the surface of organ and membrane cells, then infiltrate those cells. Within the cytoplasm, the virus hijacks the cell’s machinery and replicates itself exponentially. Inside of one hour the cells lyse, or burst, unleashing thousands of new baby viruses upon neighboring healthy cells, where they attach and repeat the vicious cycle ad infinitum. The exploded cells cause edema, or large buildups of fluid in the connective tissues throughout the body. The sheep spasm and lose their gait, leaning up against the cell-block wall of the windowless room to stay upright. A pregnant ewe spontaneously aborts her young onto the floor in a grotesque scene. The sheep vomit blood and discharge red-tinged mucus from their noses. The dizziness in their heads makes them slide, one by one, down the wall and onto the concrete floor. [talk about inhumane geez DC]
Within forty-eight hours, eight will be dead. Samples of each animal’s blood-riddled excreta are taken to see if the virus passed through. The two that make it to recovery are then killed, along with the fifty sheep in the test flock. Each is lifted onto a cart by an animal handler and wheeled into the necropsy room. On kill day, veterinarians necropsy (animal autopsy) each of the animals under bright examination lights, snap photos of the diseased internal organs for later analysis, clip tissue samples from here and there, and send the carcasses down the chute to the incinerator charging room.
The initial experiment was a success. The human vaccine produced immunity in all of the vaccinated sheep and warded off the virus.
With the April 1 safety deadline met, the Plum Island scientists decided to push their luck. They revaccinated employees and continued the groundbreaking research, extending the study through the end of April and into the start of the mosquito season. Supplanting the ubiquitous foot-and mouth disease virus work, Rift Valley fever fast became the island’s germ of choice. Eight Shetland ponies injected with Rift Valley fever were observed daily and their rectal temperatures recorded for forty days to see if they were susceptible hosts or carriers. Necropsied on day forty-one, the ponies showed no internal signs of disease or clinical signs. However, the vets found that the Arabian horses maintained low levels of viremia, and, as such, were potential reservoirs to infect biting mosquitoes.
Next, they brought in another sixty-three sheep for a third Rift Valley fever project. This study revealed that infected sheep could pass USDA food inspections for human consumption. Drs. Dardiri and Walker observed the virus lingering in spleen tissues, but reasoned that “the spleen is not normally eaten.” The scientists also announced in a press release that they produced “antigens and reagents” for future use. Put more plainly, they were brewing Zagazig 501 virus in gross quantities on Plum Island.
As the studies progressed, tensions eased between the Plum Island and Suffolk County officials. Together they drew up emergency plans for hurricanes, civil disobedience (like violent animal rights demonstrations), fires, sabotage, radiological incidents, and unauthorized removal of an exotic pathogen. But the détente was short-lived.
Dr. Martin Mayer, the county’s disease control chief, got a call from an investigative reporter over the weekend of April 29. Did he know Plum Island extended research until May 8, eight days into the mosquito season and six weeks after they promised to conclude? “No, I’m completely unaware,” Mayer said. He called the island first thing Monday morning, and Walker promised him they would be finished—honestly, this time—by week’s end. “A couple of extra days aren’t going to hurt,” conceded Mayer, calling it a “minor” deviation. Yet mosquitoes in the region were hatching and beginning to fly, according to the county’s mosquito control chief, who told Newsday the pests would not be swarming for another week or two over “dry areas” like Plum Island. This “dry area” boasted three freshwater swamp beds covering 120 acres of an 843-acre island, and over twenty different species of mosquitoes called Plum Island home. Dr. Callis said the project ran late because researchers were in the middle of their studies.
While Plum Island faced three ongoing investigations—one for a virus outbreak, one for a construction fiasco, and one for criminal fraud—scientists uncorked vials of deadly Zagazig 501 (and its progeny) and infected cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and even seals. Few of the air filter, incinerator, and negative airflow repairs were complete.
The labs were vulnerable, and the USDA was compounding the risk.
A TROUBLING SCENARIO
Discussing Rift Valley fever—over a decade before the West Nile virus became part of the American lexicon—Dr. C. J. Peters and Plum Island director Dr. Roger G. Breeze wrote, “The most probable routes of introduction of Rift Valley fever into the United States are via a viremic person who will be bitten by a mosquito or an infected mosquito aboard a plane. The infected mosquito will then infect a susceptible animal in which the virus will be amplified for the infection of more mosquitoes.”
But what if the virus performed an end run, not from the nation’s international airports, but from within, set free from a poorly run top-secret facility where it was kept in large quantities? What might have happened? And how?
It’s a Thursday in early May, just a few days before the Rift Valley fever virus experiments concluded:
As Long Islanders open windows, inviting the crisp spring air to fill their homes, and venture outdoors to garden, mosquito larvae begin to stir, hatching from their eggs. Soon the winged creatures take flight and begin to feed. On Plum Island, scientists there are wrapping up a large-scale study of Rift Valley fever. Seven young Plum Island Culex pipiens, Aedes vexans, and Aedes atropalpus mosquitoes fly into Lab 101 through a three-quarter-inch gap between an old air filter and the roof. Two of them buzz their way into an animal experimentation room. Two more find the “hot zone” corridor. One flies into the clean corridor. The remaining two meet their demise in an exhaust fan.
The first two head straight for two test sheep dying of Rift Valley fever virus (the Zagazig 501 strain), and take a blood meal. Viruses disseminate into the insects’ midgut and move to their tiny salivary glands. Two days later, an animal handler, Jeff, opens the air-lock door to check on the sheep. As he opens the door, the two mosquitoes in the corridor rush into the animal room. While he draws blood from one of the ailing sheep, one stings him on the arm while the other bites the sheep. Busy holding the frightened animal steady, he doesn’t feel the pinprick. The mosquito takes an ample blood feast, leaving behind virus in the unknowing man. As Jeff opens the door to leave, the mosquitoes rush out. In the “hot corridor,” one of the scientists on her way out of containment brushes by the animal handler. “Have a good night, Jeff,” she says to him. “You too, Jane.” One mosquito targets her and bites her on the neck. She brushes her collar, thinking the irritation is from the lab-coat tag rubbing against her skin.
That evening, Jane meets her family at Claudio’s in Greenport, their favorite seafood restaurant. It’s balmy outside, and the wait is long but worth the wait. While the couple chit-chat outside and ask the kids about school, a few mosquitoes zone in on them. “Damn gnats,” Jane’s husband complains, swatting away a small swarm. “We’re getting eaten alive by bugs! Guess summer’s officially here, huh?”
Back in the lab, the four mosquitoes buzzing around in Lab 101 die. A sole survivor makes its way outside through a hole in a rubber gasket attached to the room’s air filter. It flies with purpose to the outside animal pen for a new meal of sheep blood.
Separately, one of the doses of experimental vaccine used to vaccinate the sheep outdoors is contaminated with live virus. The dose was injected into a ewe the day before. The ewes aren’t scheduled for laboratory testing until after the weekend.
Two fuses are lit.
Earlier that afternoon, Jeff finishes tending to the ill animals in the test rooms. He spends a few extra moments comforting them with pats and coos. Then he showers out of containment and takes the ferry home to Long Island. The next morning, he wakes up and shakes off a little nausea. “Maybe there was something wrong with that fish Bobby caught and cooked up for dinner,” he thinks. Convinced the feeling will pass soon enough, he readies for work and drives to the Orient Point ferry dock. While waiting to board the boat, a mosquito flies over and bites him on the leg. Preoccupied with his queasiness, he doesn’t notice and climbs aboard the Plum Island ferry. Jeff shakes off his sluggishness, finishes work, and heads home for the weekend. He figures he must have mild food poisoning, and he’ll beat it by Monday for sure.
Over the weekend, virus replication rages inside the two sheep—the one bitten by the mosquito and the other with the contaminated vaccine. They’re both viral amplifiers, virus-manufacturing facilities literally spewing infectious particles. Swarms of mosquitoes from the marshes and landfills are in the animal pens now, biting the two sheep and the other animals.
A feeding frenzy begins.
Hovering near the island’s harbor, a swarm takes a ride to Orient Point on the afternoon ferry and continues the journey on Long Island. Some catch the cross-sound ferry to New London, Connecticut. Others bite Canadian geese and gulls flying south to perch on Hamptons beaches. As the birds head toward Connecticut, they are bitten again by more hungry mosquitoes. People are migrating, too. America’s well-to-do are traveling to Long Island’s East End to spend their weekend in share-houses, bungalows, and waterfront country estates. Locals are hiking, cycling, swimming, and fishing in the environs.
The insects spread far and wide and bite more “amplifiers”—pets, livestock, and people. The mosquito that bit Jeff at the Orient Point dock splatters on the windshield of a car. But the one that nabbed Jane outside of Claudio’s bites another patron the same night, and then a golden retriever.
The cycle continues.
On Friday afternoon, the Rift Valley fever virus travels to Jeff’s lymph nodes, which engorge with virus. Through the lymph and the bloodstream, the virus surges through his body all day Saturday as he pops open a Bud and watches the NBA playoffs. He’s sluggish all day. The day lulls slowly into night. On Sunday morning, instead of feeling better, things take a turn for the worse. Jeff’s temperature spikes to 105 degrees. The nausea, chills, headache, and achy-weak feeling intensify. He becomes dizzy in the afternoon, doubles over in the kitchen, and vomits. This is where the flu like symptoms end and Rift Valley fever begins. Jeff, who’s never been afraid of heights, has vertigo just standing up. His eyes are suddenly sensitive to light, so he draws shut the blinds. His stomach feels strangely full, though he hasn’t been able to hold anything down since breakfast Friday. The fullness turns to pain, and his eyes hurt more and more. He realizes this is far more serious than mild food poisoning or some twenty-four-hour bug. He hates doctors, but now he relents. Summoning the strength to drive to the hospital in Greenport, Jeff checks into the emergency room.
Unlike other hemorrhagic fevers like the Ebola virus, Rift Valley fever has a special affinity for the liver, where it concentrates necrosis, the destruction of cells. Each virus is 100 nanometers long (500,000 could fit on the head of a sewing pin) and has an envelope that binds to the wall of a liver cell and enters it. Inside Jeff’s liver cell, the envelope opens and releases a second shell, which in turn releases three strands of nucleic acid that unfurl and replicate inside the cell, until the pressure of the baby viruses against the cell wall forces it to burst. Dead tissue is mottled with yellow blotches and blood. His lungs and spleen are attacked, too. The gallbladder swells to four times its usual size, congested with fluid and blood.
Jeff staggers dizzily into the emergency ward and he’s admitted immediately. The doctor on duty pulls the curtain closed and helps his patient sit up. Contact with the virus is easy enough—through the skin via the mouth and nose, inhaled directly into lungs, or by the bite of a mosquito. Weak and semi delirious, Jeff coughs without covering his mouth and sends virus particles through the air. The doctor’s next breath draws them into his own lungs.
The virus breaks down the integrity of Jeff’s smaller blood vessels, and when they give way there is noticeable bleeding. Jeff has his first bloody nose, which lasts for an hour even though the nurse applies pressure and tilts his head. While the nurse controls the nosebleed, her skin comes into contact with his blood. Vessels in his small and large intestines begin to collapse. That evening, he defecates diarrhea and dark blood. Blood shows up in his urine. Hemorrhaging in his eye covers parts of the retina and the optical nerve so that Jeff goes blind in his right eye and can see only shadows through his left. Hematomas appear on his torso, broken blood vessels near the skin. Capillaries near the skin collapse and cause red dots on his arms and legs.
The medical staff is perplexed. The ER doctor calls in the head of infectious disease to have a look. Their patient is slipping out of consciousness; he can no longer speak. Before they can do anything meaningful, they need to know what they’re dealing with. Jeff’s blood test results are in, and alarmingly, the results indicate nothing—or nothing that the hospital has the capability to test for. The two MDs argue about the situation as they frantically flip through their Merck Manuals. Could this be a viral hemorrhagic fever? Could it be Ebola virus? With no established course of treatment, there’s little the doctors can do. They place an emergency call to the county health department and warn them of their preliminary diagnosis. Despite futile efforts, within twelve hours Jeff suffers near total vascular collapse. He goes into a state of shock and loses pulse. The medical team rushes to his side and tries desperately to revive him.
It’s too late. Jeff’s gone.
Next morning, the doctors and nurse contract flu like symptoms themselves. If they are bitten by an insect out in the parking lot or in their backyard, or if they breathe on another family member or use the telephone, the virus will gain more momentum.
As Jeff lay on his deathbed, Jane began to suffer a severe headache. A migraine, she figures. But on Sunday night, she suffers a seizure. Panicstricken, her husband rushes her to the hospital, the same one Jeff went to. In her case, the Rift Valley fever virus chooses to cross the blood barrier and enter neurons, and it attacks her brain. Edema, cell fluid from the broken-up neurons, swells and inflames her healthy brain tissues. Hemorrhages occur. The emergency room doctor on the second shift doesn’t connect Jane’s symptoms with the patient who died earlier. That was an isolated case with no confirmed diagnosis. Instead, this doctor guesses Jane’s ailment is a case of encephalitis—like West Nile virus—and administers Acyclovir intravenously (as prescribed in her Merck Manual) to help ease the brain inflammation. It works, but moments later she lapses into a life-threatening coma. Jane manages to pull through, “lucky” to have contracted the encephalitis brand of Rift Valley infection, instead of the hemorrhagic fever that stole Jeff’s last breath hours before.
Meantime, Laura, the other patron at Claudio’s bitten while in line, feels nausea as she readies to leave her summer cottage—where she’s been tilling the garden and picking out new kitchen cabinets—for work Monday morning. “Maybe I’m pregnant,” Laura hopes to herself. They’ve been trying for a baby for months now. With an extra spring in her step, she walks to the train station to catch the train to Manhattan. “I’ll be fine,” she thinks, smiling. “If it’s what I think it is, a little morning queasiness is nothing.” At work that day, she slices her finger on the paper cutter; a co-worker rushes to her aid. Now he has come in contact with the virus running through Laura’s veins. He lives across the Hudson River, in Metuchen, New Jersey.
That same morning, Sunny, the golden retriever nabbed by the same mosquito as Laura, collapses on the living room floor. The owner of the spry three-year-old knows immediately that something is wrong. He carries Sunny outside, lays her gently on the bed of his Jeep, and rushes her to the vet. The vet takes a look at her and shakes his head in doubt. He instructs the lab tech to draw a blood sample. “The test should tell us something,” he says in a comforting voice. But by the next day, Sunny succumbs to an unknown. The lab tech develops a bad cough and has sharp pains in her stomach that evening. She calls in sick the next day. She is one of hundreds already in direct contact with an infected friend, relative, or co-worker.
And this is just the beginning.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Plum Island scientists voice their own fears, in a piece submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences, only a few years after their experiments:
Introduction of Rift Valley fever virus into northern North America in the spring, when mosquito activity is on the rise, would pose a greater threat than an introduction in the late fall, when a frost would kill the mosquito population and potentially end the outbreak. Numerous North American mosquito species are competent laboratory vectors of Rift Valley fever virus. The development of an epizootic [disease in large numbers of animals] / epidemic also requires the prevalence of amplifying hosts, such as cattle, sheep, and goats [and people], with levels of viremia high enough to infect vectors.
A self-indictment. The record shows Plum Island was well aware of the dangers posed by its research in a dilapidated laboratory facility.
The virus outbreak forced Plum Island to renew its commitment to biological safety—but this transformation took years to effect. Brushing off a reporter’s question about the virus outbreak that truly occurred and the decision to continue research, one of the lab chiefs replied matter-of-factly, “Rift Valley fever is transmitted only by mosquito. For our security to break down, a mosquito would have to get into the lab, bite an infected animal, get out through our intricate security system, and bite a susceptible man or animal. We think that possibility is extremely unlikely.”
The documented holes in the roof of the “intricate security system” of the USDA-described “World’s Safest Lab” shifts this glib assessment from “extremely unlikely” to frighteningly possible. It is easy to see how a second outbreak could have occurred on Plum Island, one of unimaginable ramifications.
In the meantime, the deadly Rift Valley fever virus research charged ahead.
Fortunately, they got away with it.
Working for Nobel laureate Wendell Meredith Stanley after the war, Dr. Bachrach was the first to isolate the polio virus. He was also the first to photograph polio with the lab’s primitive electron microscope—though Stanley, according to scientific traditions, received credit for both as lead researcher. These accomplishments led to the development of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine and the end of the virus as a menace. Soon after, the promising young biochemist accepted Doc Shahan’s generous offer to come to Plum Island. The parallel paths of Jerry Callis and Howard Bachrach represent two threads running through Plum Island’s history. Both Callis, the youngest of ten siblings on a rural Georgia farm, and Bachrach, whose father owned a boys’ haberdashery in Minnesota, were drafted by the USDA to learn handson science in Europe while America prepared to research exotic animal germs for the first time. While the outgoing Dr. Callis was a tall, officious administrator type, one who relished giving authoritative speeches about scientific research, the bespectacled Bachrach was a gnomesized scientist who preferred tinkering on the workbench in the windowless lab fortress. When Callis was elevated to director in the early 1960s, Bachrach was named chief scientist. “Callis was very supportive of Howard,” says Dr. Robert Shope.
Dr. Bachrach had been using chemicals in the mid-1970s to fractionate viruses, or break them up into component protein pieces. He theorized that one or more of a virus’s proteins might provide enough of a “signature” to fool an immune system into creating a response, triggering immune memory cells and thus providing protection from being subsequently infected by the real germ. Vaccines, traditionally killed or weakened viruses that provided immunity, always left open the danger of reverting to virulence and causing disease to the host. But if an inanimate viral subunit vaccine could be designed, not only would it never revert to a virulence, but it would eliminate vaccine contaminants that sometimes caused harmful side effects. He discovered that the foot-and-mouth disease virus’s capsid, or shell, was made up of four distinct proteins that latched on to healthy cells to infiltrate and infect them. After many years of trial and error, in 1975 Bachrach found his subunit protein: VP3. When he injected this third capsid protein into pigs, it protected them from a later challenge with the virus.
This was a bittersweet discovery, however, because extracting and producing VP3 in large quantities was too complicated to be practical.
That is, until genetic engineering came into the picture.
Scientists figured out how to manipulate DNA, molecule chains coded in specific patterns that instruct cells how to build proteins. By snipping portions of DNA that made insulin and splicing those portions into cells, they caused the cells to manufacture large amounts of synthetic insulin. Insulin, traditionally extracted from animals, was at last widely available to diabetics, helping them lead normal everyday lives. Scientists called the technique gene splicing or recombinant DNA, and it promised to advance microbiology to infinite heights. In the world of disease prevention it held even greater promise. This new technology, thought Bachrach, could produce VP3 en masse! Dr. Callis agreed with the chief scientist. He presented Bachrach’s proposed work to a special committee at the National Institutes of Health to obtain their approval. The NIH liked the idea of using an animal virus as opposed to a human virus—the stakes were lower, and there was less of a chance that an accident or an unexpected new resultant germ would attack human populations.
In 1981, aided by three assistants on loan from the brand-new San Francisco–based biotechnology company Genentech, Bachrach entered the air lock, donned his white lab coat, and went to work in Lab 101.1 The infective part of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (called the virion) consists of eight thousand nucleotide building blocks, housed inside the capsid. These blocks code the information for the virus’s proteins. Dr. Bachrach knew that VP3 was made up of protein numbers 8 through 211. Using special enzymes, he pasted the DNA building blocks that coded for the VP3 proteins into a plasmid. A plasmid is a small ring of DNA that acts as a transporter, or magic carpet. The plasmid was then spliced into an E. coli bacterium, a benign microbe found in the human digestive tract. Lodged inside the bacterium, the plasmid directed the E. coli to assemble VP3 protein molecules; it essentially taught a living germ how to cobble together a foreign protein. When the E. coli replicated, the DNA instructions to make VP3 also replicated with it. Bachrach grew the modified bacteria—now an entirely new life form—in large kettles, and the newfangled bacteria grew easily in unlimited amounts as unmodified E. coli normally would. Each new E. coli produced an astonishing two million VP3 proteins.
1 Genentech was founded by scientist Herbert Boyer, the co-inventor of recombinant DNA in 1973. The company spawned the biotech business, an industry valued at over $430 billion today.
Seven weeks into the project, they extracted the synthesized VP3 from the vats of slurry. Healthy cows and pigs were vaccinated with it, then held in animal rooms with disease-carrying swine infected with a highly virulent virus strain. Of the thirty-three animal species that can transmit foot-and mouth disease, pigs are the worst offenders, spewing virus everywhere in their vicinity. On the tenth day of exposure, the scientists walked into the animal rooms and cheered—not one of the vaccinated animals had caught the disease. Bachrach and his team were thrilled with the results of the experiment. They created the first genetically engineered vaccine in history. And they did it on Plum Island in 1981.
“We believe this to be the first production through gene splicing of an effective vaccine against any disease in animals or humans,” Secretary of Agriculture John R. Block proudly announced. With Bachrach’s ingenious recombinant DNA vaccine, disease control would be safer and far less expensive. Genetically engineered vaccines for this and other viruses could be produced anywhere in complete safety, because modified E. coli with VP3, and not the offending virus itself, would be produced. There was zero chance of VP3 becoming virulent on its own. And unlike traditional vaccines, genetically engineered vaccines didn’t require refrigeration, no small benefit given the prevalence of disease in the developing world.
True to character, for all the newswire stories and national press attention the revolutionary achievement received (including front-page billing in , the timid Bachrach gave but a single quote, letting Dr. Callis handle the publicity. Eliminating the threat of virus “is our goal and is what we expect to do,” the diffident biochemist told the Washington Post. That was the extent of his public comment.
At a February 1985 ceremony at the White House, President Ronald W. Reagan presented Bachrach with the National Medal of Science, the United States’ highest honor for scientific achievement. Welcoming him into the elite order, President Reagan spoke of his “pioneering research in molecular virology” and his “role in using gene splicing to produce the first effective protein vaccine.” Equally impressive was his induction into the National Academy of Sciences, a select fraternity of the nation’s brightest scientific minds. Dr. Fred Brown, a current Plum Island scientist and the world’s foremost authority on foot-and-mouth disease virus, calls Bachrach “one of the foundation stones of Plum Island.” Dr. Howard Bachrach had come a long way from Faribault, Minnesota. He had become a scientific legend.
Obtaining the achievement of a lifetime at age sixty-one, Dr. Bachrach decided to retire in 1983, after placing the capstone on a thirty-year Plum Island career. Employees gaze upon the reticent scientist—who returns on the ferry now and then to tinker with viruses—with measures of admiration and awe. “He is kind of an icon,” says a former administrator. After retiring, he turned to his three other passions: golfing in Florida, gardening in the backyard of his Southold home, and playing shutterbug, just like the old days in the 1950s when he snapped the first-ever glimpses of strange viruses.
The breakthrough did not merely revolutionize the future of an animal disease, it sounded the starting gun of the biotechnology race. Before long, genetically engineered hepatitis B and rabies vaccines were developed. The innovative work on Plum Island changed the face of biological science forever. It promised to resuscitate Plum Island’s reputation. But with Bachrach’s departure, one of Plum Island’s two “foundation stones” was cast into the water. The absence was deeply felt. Without the anchor of the no-nonsense, determined chief scientist, the place shifted further downward.
HAZARDS
While officials on Plum Island thought the virus outbreak was a trifling event the public ought to forget and move on, Washington took the blunder far more seriously. A safety review board was appointed, made up of biological safety officials from USDA headquarters, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and Fort Detrick. These men were the top germ safety experts in the nation, and what they had to say in their fourth annual review of Plum Island since the outbreak speaks volumes.
“We believe there is a potentially dangerous situation and that without an immediate massive effort to correct deficiencies, a severe accident could result.... Lack of preventative maintenance, and pressures by management to expedite programs have resulted in compromising safety.” After they described the failure—the “breaks”—of three of the four degrees of containment during the virus outbreak (the fourth degree was the island itself), they noted two more incidents of this nature. “In August 1980, a break was due to the use of facilities for purposes for which they were not designed, and in January 1981, a break was due to the absence of first degree containment and lack of maintenance of second-degree containment. We find both unacceptable.” In the first incident, Plum Island experimented with animals, not in the specially filtered and drained animal isolation rooms, but in corridor hallways never designed to hold infected animals. The second infraction showed smoke tests revealing gaping holes in the animal test rooms. “These are signs of unsafe facilities,” the safety review board said. “Breaches from known deficiencies are never acceptable.”
One passage written by the experts shows just how dangerous Plum Island was at the same time it mass-produced deadly Rift Valley fever viruses:
It is distressing to the experts to find... massive leaks . . . (a) around the metal frame of a door supporting a gasket (caused either by door buckle and weld separation and/or rust-induced deterioration), (b) around hinges and handles, (c) through an unplugged hole (former pipe hole?) and/or around an existing pipe penetration, (d) around adjacent spots behind a “dust deflector” on top of a wall mounted cabinet, (e) through cracks in the wall plaster, (f) through an electrical outlet. . . .
Major problems in the air movement in the four rooms examined . . . suggest that few rooms at Plum Island provide satisfactory containment.
Was this known to Dr. Callis, Plum Island’s director? Given his earlier sense of care and dedication, had Dr. Callis lost his grip, his handle on the situation? It seemed illogical that the esteemed veterinarian would stand by and let his island crumble beneath him. He seemed preoccupied often with seminars and conferences around the world, neglecting the management of Plum Island. By then, “Jerry Callis had his own agenda,” says a source. “As long as he could take off to Portugal, Thailand, Caracas, or somewhere deep in Africa or South America—these were some of his favorite places— he was happy.” The safety panel found widespread belief among employees that management was lacking, communications had deteriorated, and there was a “dictatorial” atmosphere. Employees expressed fear of reprisal if things were brought to the attention of management. The findings of the safety review board were only the latest in the unbroken string of ill-fated events over recent years taking their toll on Plum Island.
AIDS AND AFRICAN SWINE FEVER
Before human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was discovered in 1986, the cause for the emerging disease dubbed acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was unknown. Dr. Jane Teas, a pathobiologist at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, compared the symptoms of AIDS with those of known animal diseases, and hit upon a striking similarity between AIDS and the African swine fever virus in 1983.
Amid the hype over Teas’s proposed link between AIDS and African swine fever, forty-seven Plum Island employees were secretly tested for the presence of the African swine fever virus, normally not infectious in humans. Six tested positive. When asked about the findings, Dr. Callis said they were “nonspecific,” or unreliable test results. Though they didn’t contract the disease, six people had accidentally been exposed to the virus in Plum Island laboratories. They were virus carriers—capable of spreading it to other animals through tick and insect bites—and reservoirs of natural virus mutation, possibly into a strain that could affect people, like swine flu had decades ago. With no cure, the six Plum Island workers would have to live, symbiotically, with the virus. And without ever knowing they had it.
The subjects were tested without their knowledge or consent, since the samples were taken as part of routine physical examinations. Dr. Callis said he couldn’t recall whether those that tested positive for virus were notified. To this day, no Plum Island worker interviewed remembers being told they were carriers of African swine fever virus. Management apparently deemed it unimportant.
Finally, after being stalled for months by the USDA to study the AIDS connection, Teas’s colleague Dr. John Beldekas got a call from a secretary at Plum Island, telling him a shipment of African swine fever virus materials was being sent to him overnight via Federal Express. The next day, Beldekas waited in his laboratory all day for the package to arrive. It never came. Checking his answering machine at home in the late afternoon, there was a message from a neighbor saying a package had been left with her, and there was very little dry ice that accompanied the delivered parcel. It was from the USDA. He had no idea how they had his home address. Beldekas asked his neighbor to open the package and put the vials inside her kitchen freezer while he raced home. “So instead of delivering it to my laboratory where I had the proper freezer, it was left on my doorstep.... Then, when I called Plum Island back to tell them I received it, and everything was fine, they were like ‘Oh. Okay.’ They did everything they were supposed to do, but they also did everything in their power to screw us up.”
The joint discovery of Dr. Robert Gallo and French researchers of a new retrovirus called HIV settled the debate over AIDS and African swine fever. Today, HIV is widely regarded to have been an African monkey virus that jumped from chimpanzees to humans at some point between 1926 and 1946 (by virtue of humans eating raw, virus-infected chimp meat) and fully established itself in epidemic proportions by 1981.
Of the work, Dr. Teas later said, “It was viewed not as an interesting question but as a stupid thing I shouldn’t be doing. . . . You would think the world could use a few ideas, especially with a problem like AIDS.” The limited research aimed at finding a link between African swine fever and HIV ended.
CATS
Plum Island Lighthouse keepers always kept a few cats around for company, fenced inside the lighthouse reservation, and the cats greeted the USDA when they first arrived in 1952.1 When the Coast Guard automated the light and vacated the lighthouse in 1978, the abandoned cats broke through the old fence and foraged the island for food. Slowly but surely, the wild cats bred and bred, until there were a “zillion cats,” as one observer recalls. “Everywhere you looked, there were cats.” For decades, the feline and human populations coexisted; most of the cats had become feral and kept the rodent population in check. Occasionally a cat would sneak into one of the outdoor cattle pens and eat from the feed trough. But when the island’s cat lovers fed the felines, many became tame. A guard fed a gang of cats with food he brought over on the ferry periodically. “This group hung around the dock guardhouse,” recalls another. “Consequently, there were dozens of cats hanging around where visitors entered Plum Island.”
1 Soon scientists were experimenting on “imported” cats (domestics from southwestern Missouri) while researching a new cat disease called feline cytauxzoonosis, and its possible link to African East Coast cattle fever.
Management decided the island’s large cat population created a negative image when outside scientists visited. Instead of discouraging feedings near the guardhouse, a memorandum came out in 1981 that said, according to one employee, “We aren’t worried about the cats swimming to the mainland—we just can’t allow them to be here and we’re going to poison them.” Scientific and support staff alike vehemently protested. “You will not kill our cats! This is an agricultural facility, made up of veterinarians, for heaven’s sake—we will do the next best thing. We’ll neuter them!”
Workers laid out scores of Have-A-Heart traps near the guardhouse, on paths and in the meadows. As the cats were collected, the vets took pause from their scientific research to neuter them, shaving their rears just forward of the legs to identify which ones were fixed. “For weeks, it was just the strangest thing, to see these cats darting around the island with nude bottoms,” remembers the worker. But the neutering didn’t work— many of the cats were too smart to be lured into the traps.
So they were poisoned instead. The “Animal Welfare Committee” ordered a technician to mix sodium fluoroacetate—one of the deadliest poisons known to animal or man—in rusty tin cans with hamburger meat and set them out for the cats. One of the cats, the harbor mascot Harry—named after dock guard Harry Sinuda—was spared execution. Just before Dr. Walker laid out the poisonous food traps, Harry the Cat was secreted inside the emergency power plant, where he escaped a gruesome fate. The others wouldn’t be so lucky. “Ahh—the way they did it,” says a former worker, slowly shaking his head. “Maybe they thought it would put them to sleep. Instead, the wicked dose of poison fed these cats—well they were walking around the island, choking and making terrible cough like sounds.” A day later, six cats were found dead. Before long, dozens of felines were being pitched into the incinerator.
Someone got mad enough to blow the whistle on this inhumane act. The USDA was snagged, it turned out, on a technicality: the use of sodium fluoroacetate was prohibited by both state and federal law, and Plum Island hadn’t obtained the special permission required for its use. Asked about a “cat overkill” by a reporter, Dr. Callis said: “I’m embarrassed.” It wouldn’t be long before he embarrassed himself again.
END OF AN ERA
What happens when he who makes the rules breaks the rules? Over one hundred microbiological safety rules were in place on Plum Island. At times they were painstakingly tedious. Cutting corners here or there may not seem so bad to the casual observer. But that one missed shower, an improperly installed air unit, or a forgotten air-lock door—each inched toward disaster. At the beginning, Dr. Callis wrote in the three-inch-thick safety manual distributed to all employees that the safety program “should be backed up with provisions for enforcement and penalties for willful violations of the regulations and instructions.” And furthermore, “Personnel shall report promptly to the director, through the safety officer, any safety violation that occurs or that is observed in the acts of others.”
The federal law allowed foot-and-mouth disease virus to be shipped over the mainland to Plum Island, but not kept on the mainland. During a summer’s day in 1982, Director Jerry Callis left a container of glass ampoules filled with a highly contagious Brazilian virus strain and related antiserum in the refrigerator at Orient Point for three days, before finally bringing it to Plum Island. An employee reported the infraction. Callis admitted guilt, and the Washington USDA office suspended him for two weeks without pay. “I unthinkingly left the container on the mainland,” he later said. “I made a mistake. I’m not proud of it.”
The director believed his suspension was far more severe than the violation warranted. After all, the viruses were wrapped in a self-destructing mechanism; that is, if the glass vials somehow broke, acid surrounding the container would rush in and annihilate the virus. At least that was the way it was designed to work. “There was some kind of fiasco,” recalls Dr. Jim House, a recently retired Plum Island scientist. “And I don’t think we’ll ever know the details—it was unfortunate, really unfortunate.”
A former veteran employee remembers Callis coming back from Brazil with more than cans full of viruses, and doing more than salting the germs away in the warehouse fridge. “The safety officer at the time was Jonathan Richmond. He was at Orient Point when Callis came back with the cans . . . and Callis opened them. Absolute safety violation. But before he opened them, Jonathan reminded him of the safety rules and regulations, and not to open them—that it must not be opened. Jonathan reported it to Washington to protect himself.”
“I think Callis was getting a lot of flak at that time from the Washington area,” says another former employee. “I recognized his voice when he called in during the suspension, and he was calling from his home. It was very sad, because it hurt his reputation on the island and in the community. And guess where Jonathan Richmond is today? He’s one of the heads of the CDC!”2
2 One of the more prestigious Plum Island alums, Dr. Jonathan Richmond was until recently the director of health and safety for the Centers for Disease Control and the CDC’s national “hot zone” expert, responsible for writing the rules for biosafety levels one through four.
The following July, more virus safety rules were broken. Two Plum Island employees with a container of viruses scheduled for gamma irradiation, ostensibly en route to Radiation Technology Inc. in Rockaway, New Jersey, decided to make a two-day detour out of a three-hour drive, and stowed the biologicals in one of their garages at home overnight.
In 1983, the National Academy of Sciences weighed in. Their two hundred-page in-depth report repeated what lay people had been suspecting for years—Plum Island had run its course. “It is time to reconsider PIADC’s [Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s] future,” it began. Though they commended Dr. Bachrach’s pioneering work in genetic engineering, in the eyes of the nation’s top scientists, Plum Island was through. “Its isolation and high costs of operation, construction, and maintenance make it unsustainable in the long term. As soon as possible, USDA should proceed with construction of a new, highly secure, mainland laboratory to succeed PIADC as UDSA’s principal center for research. . . .” [ah Jesus, these people are insane, in tornado alley of all places and are we talking about Level 3 or 4,they seem to be making new rules as they go,take a look at these links I found after just a quick search DC]
http://outbreaknewstoday.com/plum-islands-move-to-kansas-this-research-facility-is-an-accident-waiting-to-happen-55361/
https://www.k-state.edu/nbaf/
While mainland research cost $175,000 on a per-scientist basis, comparable research on Plum Island cost $328,000. Of the island’s total annual budget of $11.7 million, $7.6 million was invested in salary and personnel benefits, and only $16,000 was earmarked for new equipment—hardly enough for an electron microscope. In a dig at the locals, the academy found “the education level of technical personnel seems to be lower than what might be available near larger urban centers with university communities.” Other than Dr. Bachrach’s revolutionary work, Plum Island’s virology program was “at least twenty years out of date.” The experts also detected “a sense of isolation between different workers within the facility as well as between PIADC scientists and the larger scientific community. . . . [Plum Island] suffers from a paucity of mid-career, established investigators.” Put another way, the place was languishing without direction by disinterested nearing retirement. And its ability to handle an exotic animal disease outbreak in the United States: “precarious at best,” said the experts.
Jack R. Dahl, a hearty, mild-mannered North Dakota rancher and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, helped write the report. “We identified a lot of problems that existed on Plum. We knew what the problems were—and we knew of the research work and the accomplishments. The problems outweighed the accomplishments.”
The academy scoffed at the importance of its island location, in light of its populous surroundings and available modern technology. “Better biosafety containment is possible. An island location is not a guarantee of safety. . . .” Twenty-five years ago, Labs 101 and 257 were state-of-the-art; now they were archaic. A full five years had passed since the virus outbreak, yet they wrote that “a potential for agent escape is still present.” Walls weren’t sealed, air-lock doors weren’t properly gasketed, and exhaust air filters weren’t installed. Personnel were allowed to move between support areas, laboratories, and animal rooms, despite the facility’s own requirements. Though most labs prohibited eating, drinking, and smoking within containment, “surprisingly, the new renovation [at Plum Island] includes a lunch facility within the barrier zone.”
A self-described “independent rancher” (the twenty-first-century euphemism for the near-extinct cowboy) who today runs a ten-thousand acre ranch, Dahl recalls that closing Plum Island and moving operations onto the mainland was the “crux” of the study. The report urged the facility be torn down and closed.
All the negative press, the PR missteps, the biological bungling, and the outright mismanagement had impacted Dr. Callis’s reign as Lord of the Manor. No longer was he the twenty-seven-year-old kid scientist who, at Doc Shahan’s side, helped build the “World’s Safest Lab.”
One source described the situation on the island at the time as “stagnation.” Another, “benign neglect.” “Jerry had a helluva vision about Plum Island,” says his successor, Dr. Roger G. Breeze. “But that vision sort of ran its arc. And I’m not trying to be critical about where that arc comes to rest.” But rest it did.
A former official cites the director’s penchant for travel as a contributing factor. “I’d say he was one for the ages, one of the few scientists who was a good leader and a good scientist. But by then his mission wasn’t running Plum Island—it was running around the world, visiting other countries doing disease work, addressing meetings, and attending seminars—that was his agenda. And that’s one of the reasons why Plum Island went to hell.”
All the negative newspaper stories, egged on by Karl Grossman, Newsday, and others—much of it warranted, but not all of it—weathered the old veterinarian beyond repair. “There’s one thing I think Jerry failed at,” says Dr. Jim House, “and every director after him has also failed at—public relations. There was and is no program to explain the benefits of the place, the fact that it is a national treasure, that it is needed. Nobody does that—nobody goes out and gets the community involved and lets them understand it.”
Much of that failure was an extreme desire for secrecy. “I think Jerry had this old-school cold war mentality,” House contemplates. “You must remember, the Russians thought Plum Island was a really wild site out there. They knew it existed, and they played this game, they built it up in areas, saying it was a biological warfare site, or at least something of cold war value. And this just carried on.” Dr. Carol House, also a retired Plum Island scientist (and Jim’s wife), adds, “I think Jerry liked that.” Though the outside advisory committee—now headed by Dr. Robert Shope—urged Plum Island to hold frequent press events, the hurtful, enduring sting caused by Grossman’s 1971 AP germ warfare story caused Callis to lock up the gates tighter. Problems and difficulties on Plum Island were met not with candor and public recognition, but with suppression. Ironically, the lack of sunlight on Plum Island’s activities over the years would lead the public—and rebuffed curious news reporters—to always assume the worst, fanning the flames of mystery, intrigue, and rampant speculation.
In one of his final communications, an uncharacteristically dry memo lacking the usual pleasantries, Dr. Callis told Plum Island employees that federal budget reduction legislation called for 5 percent cuts across the board, further depleting Plum Island’s shoestring budget. To fight skyrocketing costs, he was considering a proposal to consolidate the two laboratory buildings into one, close the old Army-vintage administration buildings, and make Laboratory 101 a self-contained operation. This might—might— require cuts in staff, he said, but lest anyone worry, he would reduce positions through natural attrition, not through layoffs. By this time, Callis twice had stopped a move to privitize the federal workforce and reduce salaries, benefits, and the total number of staff positions. Callis may have faulted in many areas, but he remained doggedly loyal to his people, and to the promises he had made to them a quarter century ago: “respect personal dignity... recognize work achievement . . . provide work security.... Believe in the Golden Rule and always practice it.”
Just days after his memo, the USDA hammer came down heavily. Regime change came quickly on Plum Island—Washington called up Jerry Jackson Callis, and told him his time was up.
“Let’s just say retirement was not his own idea,” says a source. “It happened abruptly—there were a lot of people and politics involved. He had really been there too long. We needed much better progression. We didn’t need one person in one place—no matter how good he was.” While Dr. Robert Shope maintains Callis’s retirement was his own decision, other sources confirm he was “pushed out.”
The USDA “elevated” him to the post of senior research adviser. This allowed him to maintain regular contact with his beloved island and offered another perk. Says one administrator familiar with the offer, “They said to him, ‘We’ll give you an office on the island, and carte blanche for several years on travel.’ And Washington did that by dragging in money from other agencies and hidden places. They took real good care of him. It was a payoff, a golden parachute, if you will—they had to give it to him.”
Dr. Roger Breeze, his successor, elaborated. “Jerry Callis is a very exceptional person. The United States never had a facility like Plum Island, until the debacle in Mexico hit between 1946 and 1952. People had to go out there, find it, and build it. Meanwhile, Jerry went over to Holland to learn about viruses from the Dutch. Now if you said to someone today, ‘Hey this is the federal government and we want you to go to a foreign country to learn this whole new thing, and when you come back, we’re going to build a laboratory for you,’ people would laugh in your face. ‘Yeah—sure—bullshit—can I get that in writing?’ But Callis did it.”
Lucrative offers from private laboratories had come his way for years, and he turned them all down. Plum Island was his life, and the island’s life was in many ways his—it was his first job out of school, the only job he’d ever worked. Like a parent to his child, he could never see fit to abandon it. And there he remained for four decades.
Most of those interviewed for this book have the highest respect for Jerry Callis. “Jerry built Plum Island into a very prestigious place,” says Carol House. “I think [his successors] had a hard time following in his shoes—anyone would, because of his memory and his depth of knowledge on everything that was Plum Island. A good—no, a very good manager.” Dr. Shope acknowledges that “every leader has some disgruntled employees,” but he found Dr. Callis nothing but “a real straight arrow.” John Boyle, a former budget director at Plum Island, called him “a brilliant man, at one time a great scientist, and probably still that way today.” Over time, a fondness and respect bonded the staff to their beloved director. “It wasn’t always perfect,” says building engineer Stanley Mickaliger. “There were discrepancies, and sure there were gripes—which were all normal. But we all understood something very important—Jerry Callis took care of us.”
When asked about his retirement, Callis says simply and humbly, “I’ve enjoyed my career tremendously.”
Plum Island librarian Frances Demorest—second in seniority to the now retiring director—saluted her director:
Dear Doctor Callis:
Our thoughts return to 1953 and the local turmoil over the decision to locate the Laboratory at Plum Island off Orient Point. The representatives from USDA were not received warmly but, as time went on, the turmoil and anger subsided. It has been a long time and we have crossed a lot of water together!
Through the efforts of two fine Directors, Dr. Shahan and yourself... the Center was recognized both nationally and internationally. Also, the Center made a tremendous economic impact on this end of Long Island.
Harrison and I trust you will experience a busy, fruitful, productive retirement, and enjoy GOOD HEALTH and fond MEMORIES for a “JOB WELL DONE.”
Not everyone lamented his retirement. Some expressed glee over the change in the guard and looked forward to replacing the dusty old adminis- 150 Michael Christopher Carroll tration with fresh new leadership. “A lot of people thought of him as an emperor who treated Plum Island as his personal fiefdom,” one former scientist says, “and to a degree, I believed he did. Whether your [research] program was funded depended on whether he liked you or not.” But those who cheered Callis’s departure didn’t realize how good they had had it. “I tell you what,” says one of them. “Six months later we were making novenas to Saint Anthony that he’d come back.”
Because what came next would be far worse.
“You know, there’s this old saying on Plum Island,” says one worker. “ ‘When Dr. Callis went, the island went with him.’ Once they moved him out, everything went downhill.
“In my humble opinion, this is when the whole island started to fall apart.”
Next
Part 3 The Decline
The Kingdom and the Glory
“Jerry,” Dr. Bill Scherer began, brows furrowed. “You know there are some important things to consider with Rift Valley. Look at this place,” he said, extending his arm in a wide gesture. “You have swarms of insects flying around on this island. There’s a lot of water and marshy land here.” Scherer pointed out it would be much safer to wait until after mosquito season, and study the virus in the dead of winter. He offered to send entomologists, insect experts, to catalogue Plum Island’s pest population and determine the precise level of protection required.
Callis listened quietly and politely nodded. The research was scheduled to start in early October, past the normal insect season, but hardly in the middle of winter. As for the insect study, there just wasn’t enough time this year—they were too busy readying the virus experiments. Maybe next year. The consultants’ prescient advice unfortunately was just that: advice. It wasn’t binding. While the advisory group was “always concerned something would get loose from the laboratory,” recalls member Dr. Robert Shope, its counsel remained “mostly reactive.”
Soon thereafter, the Suffolk County Department of Health got a call from an anonymous Plum Island employee, Newsday got a hot tip from an anonymous source in the Department of Health, and a story ran on September 9, 1978. “You can’t keep anything secret today,” Dr. Callis complained grudgingly. After receiving word, Suffolk County’s health commissioner, Dr. David Harris, placed a concerned phone call to Plum Island. Harris wanted to know what the Rift Valley fever was and how it related to some illness going on in Egypt. Dr. Walker assured Harris that the disease caused only mild flu symptoms in people, and in Egypt some “complications” had resulted in a few deaths. Mosquitoes apparently had something to do with the disease. Walker said the virus study would begin the following month and wrap up by the end of March, well before the 1979 mosquito season. No mention was made of other insects known to transmit Rift Valley fever, such as flies and ticks.
As for the workers, Walker assured, everyone on Plum Island would be vaccinated, the virus be kept in the high-containment lab, and employees wear face respirators. If by some remote chance anyone should become infected, they will be airlifted by military plane to “The Slammer,” Fort Detrick’s human isolation ward. Employees suspected of infection would be locked down in an insect-proof building on Plum Island until a firm diagnosis. There was, of course, the possibility the work may go over schedule, Walker said. Harris graciously agreed to “institute extensive mosquito control measures” by spraying chemicals with crop-dusting airplanes should the research continue past the first of May.
Plum Island refused to acknowledge they had been given up by frightened employees. “As a professional courtesy,” Walker said, “if some new disease comes on [Plum Island] that is infectious to both animals and man, of course we would notify the health department.” But contacting local officials was far from standard policy for the federal enclave. In fact, Plum Island officials never before informed the county about its zoonotic disease research—on multiple strains of at least five different germs—or about what germs were stored in its cavernous freezers.
In a feature editorial on September 11, 1978, four days before the Plum Island virus outbreak, Newsday declared, “We consider the new openness a welcome innovation,” but “under no conditions do we think the lab should continue its Rift Valley fever research into a Long Island mosquito season.” Falsely soothing the public, Newsday told its readers “ The disease itself is not fatal, but it’s often accompanied by complications. . . .” In fact, the seven hundred people who died in Egypt didn’t fall prey to complications. In each case, it was the Rift Valley fever virus disease that either putrefied the victims’ organs or swelled their brains into lethal shock. Worse, reporting only fifty deaths in Egypt caused by the virus, the New York Times was off by a factor of fourteen.
Then the Plum Island virus outbreak occurred. Callis and Walker realized there was no way they could clean up the island in two weeks’ time, vaccinate one hundred employees, and begin the Rift Valley fever project with Fort Detrick. “We really can’t think about it until we get the island back together,” said Walker. But, he added, “We intend to go on with the project” as soon as test animals arrived. Apparently, many of those animals were already there.
One man who refused to be played by Plum Island or misled by media reports was Suffolk county executive John V. N. Klein. Hailed as an “honest country gentlemen,” the young public servant had a promising political future, and the charge of a county of over 1.3 million people. A week after the outbreak, Klein resolved to take matters into his own hands. Going over Callis’s head with a two-page appeal to Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, he spoke of a “grave concern” and “apprehension” over “the potential spread of disease once exposure has taken place.” Exercising strict protocol, Secretary Bergland didn’t respond to the county executive’s dispatch, but instead referred it to a USDA research office underling. The acting associate deputy director of the Federal Research, Science, and Education Administration, United States Department of Agriculture, T. B. Kinney, a name of unknown gender, wrote a three-page letter accompanied by glossy Plum Island brochures, all extolling the virtues of animal research, while addressing none of Klein’s worries. His letter made no mention of Fort Detrick’s, Colonel Eddy’s, or Major Peters’s involvement, or that the study was in reality Army biological warfare research.
John Klein nearly hit the roof as he read Kinney’s letter. The feds were stonewalling him. Plum Island and the USDA had no regard for state or local government, or for the public. The facts were almost too fantastic to be true: a biological research laboratory flatly pronounced it was going to fiddle with a deadly virus on a ranch full of animals, days after germs were proven and acknowledged to have escaped their lab! This time, Klein would not mince words. The experiments raised “a basic and profound issue with respect to the relationship between the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the people of Suffolk County,” he wrote Secretary Bergland. “I cannot any longer permit this administration of county government and the people it represents to remain unaware of the total spectrum of activities carried on on Plum Island. . . .” Klein requested a personal meeting with Bergland.
“The People,” Klein exclaimed, “can no longer exist ‘in the dark’ on this issue and must have the right of being fully informed with the opportunity to object . . . to any activity deemed inconsistent with the interests of the people of Suffolk. . . .” Without an opportunity to be heard, to be recognized, to be adequately represented with such base interests at stake, Klein all but promised that a Boston Tea Party would ensue in the local waters off Plum Island. Indeed, the public began to foment, pelting Plum Island with scores of phone calls and letters objecting to the precarious research; and the editorial boards of newspapers weighed in as well. Local groups organized town meetings, hailed Klein’s decisive actions, and blasted the feds’ proposed research. “How tragic would be the irony,” proclaimed one resident, “if an agency established to control and find cures for diseases caused instead their proliferation?”
There was no reply from Secretary Bergland. Incensed, Klein felt that come hell or high water, Plum Island would not start this project without his direct input, whether it meant a federal lawsuit or a local picket demonstration. He fired a final warning shot by way of telegram:
TELEX CABLE
U.S SECRETARY OF AGRICULTURE BERGLAND
REPEAT REQUEST OF MY LETTER OCTOBER 26 FOR PROMPT MEETING WITH YOU RELATIVE TO PLUM ISLAND LAB EXPERIMENTATION STOP IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT DIRECT AND PERMANENT MECHANISM OF COMMUNICATION BETWEEN USDA AND SUFFOLK COUNTY RESPECTING PLUM ISLAND BE ESTABLISHED IMMEDIATELY STOP THE PEOPLE OF SUFFOLK ARE ENTITLED TO NO LESS THAN FULL KNOWLEDGE OF THE NATURE AND SCOPE OF EXPERIMENTATION WITHIN SUFFOLK COUNTY AND WITHIN ONE AND ONE QUARTER MILES OF INTERSTATE FERRY TO CONNECTICUT STOP PLEASE RESPOND PROMPTLY WITH DATE FOR MEETING WITH YOU STOP
JOHN V N KLEIN
Days after the telegram, Klein received a Washington-ordered phone call from Dr. Jerry J. Callis, director of the Plum Island Animal Disease Center.
“Come on over,” said Dr. Callis in a low Georgia drawl. “Come see how safe we are over here.”
BEYOND THE GATES
Minutes before 7:00 a.m., Klein’s entourage drove through the barbed-wire checkpoint at the Orient Point lot to board the ferry. It was the dreariest of Mondays—gray skies, rainy, and bone-chilling cold. Klein’s group included township supervisors, the county health commissioner, the county attorney, and ten reporters, including newsmen from the New York Times and Newsday. In the guard building, they took turns reading and signing the visitor affidavit required to board the boat. With their signatures, each acknowledged they might be detained in the event of emergency, and promised to obey the safety officer and not come into contact with animals after leaving Plum Island. Two burly, gray-haired security officers called the group to attention. “There are no cameras, no tape recorders taken to the island,” warned the older of the two. “I know you can have these little things in your pocket... we’ll make sure on the boat you won’t have one on you.”
The journey took about thirty minutes through the bumpy chop of Plum Gut. Awaiting them at the harbor guardhouse was the mutton chop side burned Callis, in a dapper checked suit and dark tie punctuated with shimmering lodestars. He greeted the landing party warmly, then shepherded them onto the bus, which roared away toward the old Army parade ground. On the way through the woods, past the marshy wetlands, Callis lectured the group on the island’s three-hundred-year history. With impeccable timing, he brought his story to a close as the bus pulled alongside the double doors of the old white Army chapel. The heavenly spire and the pews and crucifix had been removed long ago; the smell of frankincense and myrrh had given way to a deep musty odor. Inside the brown-paneled chapel were the laboratory chiefs, assistant director Graves and safety officer Walker. Shades were pulled down over the long rectangular windows, and a staffer dimmed the lights and turned on the projector so Callis could begin the presentation.
Klein and his team shifted uncomfortably in their folding chairs in the dark as Callis narrated a colorful slide show. As Callis clicked away, he informed the group about the current breadth of America’s livestock (“136 million cattle, 25 million swine, 25 million sheep, 25 million goats, 8 million horses”); the history of foot-and-mouth virus outbreaks in North America—two-thirds of it anyway (“Mexico outbreak 1948, Canada 1952”); the USDA’s careful, thoughtful selection of Plum Island in 1952 (“a coastal island separated by deep navigable waters”); and so on.
“I want to talk about biological warfare,” said Callis. Everyone perked up. A dozing reporter in the back row stirred. “We don’t do any of it on Plum Island.” He clicked the slide button again, and large black-and-white headlines emblazoned across the chapel walls:
u.s. tests germ warfare off l.i. the virus hunters of forbidden island animal disease detectives work on island of no return plum island for mankind, or against it?
“I solicit your assistance in dispelling these very unfortunate errors,” appealed an unhappy Callis. “It’s not good for the United States to have these perpetuated.” Finally, facing the spin control head-on, the dam broke. A reporter asked about Karl Grossman’s AP wire story seven years before in which Plum Island admitted a hand in biological warfare.
“I’m not knowledgeable about defense,” said Callis, mindful that the Rift Valley fever project—the reason for his slide show—was a joint affair with the Army’s Fort Detrick biological warfare facility, a fact unknown to his audience. Klein stood up. He’d had enough.
“Dr. Callis, please explain this Rift Valley fever program to us. Can we put into place a program to know what you are working with that poses a risk to humans and discuss your safety measures? We cannot continue to learn of your work by accident,” Klein scolded.
Rift Valley fever was spreading through Africa into the Sinai Peninsula, Callis replied, focusing his answer not on safety, but on an urgent need for research. “Last week we heard it was in Nigeria.” One look at the expressions on the local officials’ faces told their response.
Nigeria? Who cares? they thought. Nigeria is the other side of the world! In Africa! What about our people—the people RIGHT HERE? Not acknowledging the nonverbal clues, Callis continued on, noting that Plum Island had a distinguished advisory board. He even extended an olive branch: one county health official would be permitted to attend their annual meeting on Plum Island. This, thought Callis, was a generous offer from an island unaccustomed to sharing its activities with anyone. He clicked quickly through several more slides until he reached one of selected zoonotic diseases. Some of these, he casually mentioned, had been investigated on Plum Island in the past. Though Callis attempted to gloss over this, Klein and the reporters sharply interrupted.
“Which germs did you work on? Which ones affect humans? What types of illnesses? Are any of them fatal?” Five of the diseases—virulent influenza, Coxsackie B-5 virus, louping ill, Venezuelan equine encephalitis, and Rift Valley fever—were lethal to humans. Five more—Newcastle disease, vesicular stomatitis virus, contagious ecthyma, foot-and-mouth disease, and Nairobi sheep disease—caused human illnesses. No mention was made of the other viruses and bacteria studied or the scope of the vast Plum Island germ library.
“Has anyone been infected in the lab?” Six had taken ill from accidental exposures, Callis said. Three people had contracted Newcastle disease, two caught vesicular stomatitis, and one caught foot-and-mouth disease. There were no fatalities to date.
Discussion turned to the outbreak. Sounding all too rehearsed, Plum Island officials assured the group that every effort was being made to test systems and ensure virus agent containment.
“We’ve had twenty-four years of safe work,” Callis said to his tormentors. “Let’s not get it out of proportion now.”
After the slide show, the scientists led the tour to the ominous-looking Lab 257, before directing them into the perimeter guardhouse. Each guest forked over his personal items—watches, wallets, wedding rings, coins, paper notes, pencils—which were placed in small gray envelopes personalized with their initials.
“You have to go into the lab like Mother Nature brought you into this world,” Callis drily quipped to his tour group. Everyone was ordered to strip in the change room and don white coveralls, white socks, and white sneakers. Then, with the door behind them closed and air-sealed, the door at the opposite side of the room was depressurized. It hissed loudly, then opened into a maze of hallways, dimly illuminated with fluorescent light. After observing farm animals in various stages of different infections, the group stripped naked and waited single file to take decontamination showers before leaving the lab, following the same strict procedures required of workers in the early days. As they changed back into their street clothes, Walker peeled two Band-Aids off a reporter’s fingers, informing him that the crevices harbored viruses.
Dr. Callis saw the group of fifteen men to the harbor and graciously thanked them for their interest. Did the press learn anything new in this, the second glimpse of Plum Island? “The whole thing was pretty redundant,” says one attendee, comparing the tour with the earlier 1971 press junket. Another observed “a serious lack of mission at the island. . . . One would expect to find a sense of pride and accomplishment among the workers there. Based on our conversations, such is not the case.”
After the grand tour, Klein reflected on the experience. “Now it turns out, there’s a whole laundry list of such diseases they’ve been researching.” Had Klein known the true condition of the facilities Plum Island was concealing; or that the insect study recommended by the advisory board was snubbed; or that the study was a joint affair with the Army; or the deadly effects of human exposure to the Rift Valley fever virus; or the true number of casualties that the new Zagazig 501 strain wrought upon Egypt—things might have been different. Instead, without precaution the work went full steam ahead. Of Klein and his visit, Dr. Callis says twenty years later, “I didn’t give a damn.” The federal government wasn’t going to be told what it could and could not do by some local politicians.
Try as he might, county executive John V. N. Klein didn’t slice through the veil of secrecy over Plum Island. A noble failure, it had little if any impact on the island’s activities. After the 1978 virus outbreak and the flap over Rift Valley fever virus, the island dropped the “World’s Safest Lab” moniker. In fact, it dropped public contact altogether. The gates would not reopen until another Plum Island biological debacle fifteen years later.
THE RIFT VALLEY FEVER EXPERIMENT
Unlike bacteria, which can be seen easily under a traditional microscope, viruses are too small to be detected. To measure the concentration of viruses, scientists use the plaque-reduction method, whereby a visibly clear area in a culture dish, called a plaque, is left behind after the virus destroys the healthy culture cells. By measuring the plaque—essentially the damage the invisible viruses have done—you can get an idea of the titer, or how virulent and concentrated the virus is. Viruses are measured in plaque-forming units, or PFUs. In the Plum Island study of the deadly strain of the Rift Valley fever virus, the lab techs took a starter culture of African green monkey kidney cells out of the freezer and propagated them in culture plates using a growth medium of amino acids and heated calf fetus serum. To brew large quantities of virus, they fed Zagazig 501-plus on the monkey cells they cultured inside sterilized fermenters, not unlike the ones seen at a microbrew pub. Zagazig 501 was the Rift Valley fever strain pulled from a fatal hemorrhagic human case during the Egyptian outbreak. Peters added some kick at Fort Detrick—the plus—when he passed the virus through two sets of lung cell cultures taken from rhesus monkey fetuses. It was potent as hell. From the fermenter, they decanted the slurry into hundreds of 1-milliliter ampoules and stored them in nitrogen-cooled freezers at minus 70 degrees Celsius. They thawed each ampoule immediately before pacing briskly through the “hot corridor” to the animal room to inject a test animal.
Rift Valley fever virus affects its victim much like the well-known Ebola virus. Ten of the sixty sheep were used as controls, meaning they were not afforded the luxury of a vaccine. Twelve hours after the unlucky ones are exposed to the virus, viremia—the onslaught of a virus infection within the body—begins. Their temperatures rise sharply and their hearts beat rapidly in an attempt to circulate an immune response to parts of the body suffering from localized attack. But their immune systems cannot counter the multiplying germ. The blood circulates viruses to all quarters of the body, where they attach to the surface of organ and membrane cells, then infiltrate those cells. Within the cytoplasm, the virus hijacks the cell’s machinery and replicates itself exponentially. Inside of one hour the cells lyse, or burst, unleashing thousands of new baby viruses upon neighboring healthy cells, where they attach and repeat the vicious cycle ad infinitum. The exploded cells cause edema, or large buildups of fluid in the connective tissues throughout the body. The sheep spasm and lose their gait, leaning up against the cell-block wall of the windowless room to stay upright. A pregnant ewe spontaneously aborts her young onto the floor in a grotesque scene. The sheep vomit blood and discharge red-tinged mucus from their noses. The dizziness in their heads makes them slide, one by one, down the wall and onto the concrete floor. [talk about inhumane geez DC]
Within forty-eight hours, eight will be dead. Samples of each animal’s blood-riddled excreta are taken to see if the virus passed through. The two that make it to recovery are then killed, along with the fifty sheep in the test flock. Each is lifted onto a cart by an animal handler and wheeled into the necropsy room. On kill day, veterinarians necropsy (animal autopsy) each of the animals under bright examination lights, snap photos of the diseased internal organs for later analysis, clip tissue samples from here and there, and send the carcasses down the chute to the incinerator charging room.
The initial experiment was a success. The human vaccine produced immunity in all of the vaccinated sheep and warded off the virus.
With the April 1 safety deadline met, the Plum Island scientists decided to push their luck. They revaccinated employees and continued the groundbreaking research, extending the study through the end of April and into the start of the mosquito season. Supplanting the ubiquitous foot-and mouth disease virus work, Rift Valley fever fast became the island’s germ of choice. Eight Shetland ponies injected with Rift Valley fever were observed daily and their rectal temperatures recorded for forty days to see if they were susceptible hosts or carriers. Necropsied on day forty-one, the ponies showed no internal signs of disease or clinical signs. However, the vets found that the Arabian horses maintained low levels of viremia, and, as such, were potential reservoirs to infect biting mosquitoes.
Next, they brought in another sixty-three sheep for a third Rift Valley fever project. This study revealed that infected sheep could pass USDA food inspections for human consumption. Drs. Dardiri and Walker observed the virus lingering in spleen tissues, but reasoned that “the spleen is not normally eaten.” The scientists also announced in a press release that they produced “antigens and reagents” for future use. Put more plainly, they were brewing Zagazig 501 virus in gross quantities on Plum Island.
As the studies progressed, tensions eased between the Plum Island and Suffolk County officials. Together they drew up emergency plans for hurricanes, civil disobedience (like violent animal rights demonstrations), fires, sabotage, radiological incidents, and unauthorized removal of an exotic pathogen. But the détente was short-lived.
Dr. Martin Mayer, the county’s disease control chief, got a call from an investigative reporter over the weekend of April 29. Did he know Plum Island extended research until May 8, eight days into the mosquito season and six weeks after they promised to conclude? “No, I’m completely unaware,” Mayer said. He called the island first thing Monday morning, and Walker promised him they would be finished—honestly, this time—by week’s end. “A couple of extra days aren’t going to hurt,” conceded Mayer, calling it a “minor” deviation. Yet mosquitoes in the region were hatching and beginning to fly, according to the county’s mosquito control chief, who told Newsday the pests would not be swarming for another week or two over “dry areas” like Plum Island. This “dry area” boasted three freshwater swamp beds covering 120 acres of an 843-acre island, and over twenty different species of mosquitoes called Plum Island home. Dr. Callis said the project ran late because researchers were in the middle of their studies.
While Plum Island faced three ongoing investigations—one for a virus outbreak, one for a construction fiasco, and one for criminal fraud—scientists uncorked vials of deadly Zagazig 501 (and its progeny) and infected cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and even seals. Few of the air filter, incinerator, and negative airflow repairs were complete.
The labs were vulnerable, and the USDA was compounding the risk.
A TROUBLING SCENARIO
Discussing Rift Valley fever—over a decade before the West Nile virus became part of the American lexicon—Dr. C. J. Peters and Plum Island director Dr. Roger G. Breeze wrote, “The most probable routes of introduction of Rift Valley fever into the United States are via a viremic person who will be bitten by a mosquito or an infected mosquito aboard a plane. The infected mosquito will then infect a susceptible animal in which the virus will be amplified for the infection of more mosquitoes.”
But what if the virus performed an end run, not from the nation’s international airports, but from within, set free from a poorly run top-secret facility where it was kept in large quantities? What might have happened? And how?
It’s a Thursday in early May, just a few days before the Rift Valley fever virus experiments concluded:
As Long Islanders open windows, inviting the crisp spring air to fill their homes, and venture outdoors to garden, mosquito larvae begin to stir, hatching from their eggs. Soon the winged creatures take flight and begin to feed. On Plum Island, scientists there are wrapping up a large-scale study of Rift Valley fever. Seven young Plum Island Culex pipiens, Aedes vexans, and Aedes atropalpus mosquitoes fly into Lab 101 through a three-quarter-inch gap between an old air filter and the roof. Two of them buzz their way into an animal experimentation room. Two more find the “hot zone” corridor. One flies into the clean corridor. The remaining two meet their demise in an exhaust fan.
The first two head straight for two test sheep dying of Rift Valley fever virus (the Zagazig 501 strain), and take a blood meal. Viruses disseminate into the insects’ midgut and move to their tiny salivary glands. Two days later, an animal handler, Jeff, opens the air-lock door to check on the sheep. As he opens the door, the two mosquitoes in the corridor rush into the animal room. While he draws blood from one of the ailing sheep, one stings him on the arm while the other bites the sheep. Busy holding the frightened animal steady, he doesn’t feel the pinprick. The mosquito takes an ample blood feast, leaving behind virus in the unknowing man. As Jeff opens the door to leave, the mosquitoes rush out. In the “hot corridor,” one of the scientists on her way out of containment brushes by the animal handler. “Have a good night, Jeff,” she says to him. “You too, Jane.” One mosquito targets her and bites her on the neck. She brushes her collar, thinking the irritation is from the lab-coat tag rubbing against her skin.
That evening, Jane meets her family at Claudio’s in Greenport, their favorite seafood restaurant. It’s balmy outside, and the wait is long but worth the wait. While the couple chit-chat outside and ask the kids about school, a few mosquitoes zone in on them. “Damn gnats,” Jane’s husband complains, swatting away a small swarm. “We’re getting eaten alive by bugs! Guess summer’s officially here, huh?”
Back in the lab, the four mosquitoes buzzing around in Lab 101 die. A sole survivor makes its way outside through a hole in a rubber gasket attached to the room’s air filter. It flies with purpose to the outside animal pen for a new meal of sheep blood.
Separately, one of the doses of experimental vaccine used to vaccinate the sheep outdoors is contaminated with live virus. The dose was injected into a ewe the day before. The ewes aren’t scheduled for laboratory testing until after the weekend.
Two fuses are lit.
Earlier that afternoon, Jeff finishes tending to the ill animals in the test rooms. He spends a few extra moments comforting them with pats and coos. Then he showers out of containment and takes the ferry home to Long Island. The next morning, he wakes up and shakes off a little nausea. “Maybe there was something wrong with that fish Bobby caught and cooked up for dinner,” he thinks. Convinced the feeling will pass soon enough, he readies for work and drives to the Orient Point ferry dock. While waiting to board the boat, a mosquito flies over and bites him on the leg. Preoccupied with his queasiness, he doesn’t notice and climbs aboard the Plum Island ferry. Jeff shakes off his sluggishness, finishes work, and heads home for the weekend. He figures he must have mild food poisoning, and he’ll beat it by Monday for sure.
Over the weekend, virus replication rages inside the two sheep—the one bitten by the mosquito and the other with the contaminated vaccine. They’re both viral amplifiers, virus-manufacturing facilities literally spewing infectious particles. Swarms of mosquitoes from the marshes and landfills are in the animal pens now, biting the two sheep and the other animals.
A feeding frenzy begins.
Hovering near the island’s harbor, a swarm takes a ride to Orient Point on the afternoon ferry and continues the journey on Long Island. Some catch the cross-sound ferry to New London, Connecticut. Others bite Canadian geese and gulls flying south to perch on Hamptons beaches. As the birds head toward Connecticut, they are bitten again by more hungry mosquitoes. People are migrating, too. America’s well-to-do are traveling to Long Island’s East End to spend their weekend in share-houses, bungalows, and waterfront country estates. Locals are hiking, cycling, swimming, and fishing in the environs.
The insects spread far and wide and bite more “amplifiers”—pets, livestock, and people. The mosquito that bit Jeff at the Orient Point dock splatters on the windshield of a car. But the one that nabbed Jane outside of Claudio’s bites another patron the same night, and then a golden retriever.
The cycle continues.
On Friday afternoon, the Rift Valley fever virus travels to Jeff’s lymph nodes, which engorge with virus. Through the lymph and the bloodstream, the virus surges through his body all day Saturday as he pops open a Bud and watches the NBA playoffs. He’s sluggish all day. The day lulls slowly into night. On Sunday morning, instead of feeling better, things take a turn for the worse. Jeff’s temperature spikes to 105 degrees. The nausea, chills, headache, and achy-weak feeling intensify. He becomes dizzy in the afternoon, doubles over in the kitchen, and vomits. This is where the flu like symptoms end and Rift Valley fever begins. Jeff, who’s never been afraid of heights, has vertigo just standing up. His eyes are suddenly sensitive to light, so he draws shut the blinds. His stomach feels strangely full, though he hasn’t been able to hold anything down since breakfast Friday. The fullness turns to pain, and his eyes hurt more and more. He realizes this is far more serious than mild food poisoning or some twenty-four-hour bug. He hates doctors, but now he relents. Summoning the strength to drive to the hospital in Greenport, Jeff checks into the emergency room.
Unlike other hemorrhagic fevers like the Ebola virus, Rift Valley fever has a special affinity for the liver, where it concentrates necrosis, the destruction of cells. Each virus is 100 nanometers long (500,000 could fit on the head of a sewing pin) and has an envelope that binds to the wall of a liver cell and enters it. Inside Jeff’s liver cell, the envelope opens and releases a second shell, which in turn releases three strands of nucleic acid that unfurl and replicate inside the cell, until the pressure of the baby viruses against the cell wall forces it to burst. Dead tissue is mottled with yellow blotches and blood. His lungs and spleen are attacked, too. The gallbladder swells to four times its usual size, congested with fluid and blood.
Jeff staggers dizzily into the emergency ward and he’s admitted immediately. The doctor on duty pulls the curtain closed and helps his patient sit up. Contact with the virus is easy enough—through the skin via the mouth and nose, inhaled directly into lungs, or by the bite of a mosquito. Weak and semi delirious, Jeff coughs without covering his mouth and sends virus particles through the air. The doctor’s next breath draws them into his own lungs.
The virus breaks down the integrity of Jeff’s smaller blood vessels, and when they give way there is noticeable bleeding. Jeff has his first bloody nose, which lasts for an hour even though the nurse applies pressure and tilts his head. While the nurse controls the nosebleed, her skin comes into contact with his blood. Vessels in his small and large intestines begin to collapse. That evening, he defecates diarrhea and dark blood. Blood shows up in his urine. Hemorrhaging in his eye covers parts of the retina and the optical nerve so that Jeff goes blind in his right eye and can see only shadows through his left. Hematomas appear on his torso, broken blood vessels near the skin. Capillaries near the skin collapse and cause red dots on his arms and legs.
The medical staff is perplexed. The ER doctor calls in the head of infectious disease to have a look. Their patient is slipping out of consciousness; he can no longer speak. Before they can do anything meaningful, they need to know what they’re dealing with. Jeff’s blood test results are in, and alarmingly, the results indicate nothing—or nothing that the hospital has the capability to test for. The two MDs argue about the situation as they frantically flip through their Merck Manuals. Could this be a viral hemorrhagic fever? Could it be Ebola virus? With no established course of treatment, there’s little the doctors can do. They place an emergency call to the county health department and warn them of their preliminary diagnosis. Despite futile efforts, within twelve hours Jeff suffers near total vascular collapse. He goes into a state of shock and loses pulse. The medical team rushes to his side and tries desperately to revive him.
It’s too late. Jeff’s gone.
Next morning, the doctors and nurse contract flu like symptoms themselves. If they are bitten by an insect out in the parking lot or in their backyard, or if they breathe on another family member or use the telephone, the virus will gain more momentum.
As Jeff lay on his deathbed, Jane began to suffer a severe headache. A migraine, she figures. But on Sunday night, she suffers a seizure. Panicstricken, her husband rushes her to the hospital, the same one Jeff went to. In her case, the Rift Valley fever virus chooses to cross the blood barrier and enter neurons, and it attacks her brain. Edema, cell fluid from the broken-up neurons, swells and inflames her healthy brain tissues. Hemorrhages occur. The emergency room doctor on the second shift doesn’t connect Jane’s symptoms with the patient who died earlier. That was an isolated case with no confirmed diagnosis. Instead, this doctor guesses Jane’s ailment is a case of encephalitis—like West Nile virus—and administers Acyclovir intravenously (as prescribed in her Merck Manual) to help ease the brain inflammation. It works, but moments later she lapses into a life-threatening coma. Jane manages to pull through, “lucky” to have contracted the encephalitis brand of Rift Valley infection, instead of the hemorrhagic fever that stole Jeff’s last breath hours before.
Meantime, Laura, the other patron at Claudio’s bitten while in line, feels nausea as she readies to leave her summer cottage—where she’s been tilling the garden and picking out new kitchen cabinets—for work Monday morning. “Maybe I’m pregnant,” Laura hopes to herself. They’ve been trying for a baby for months now. With an extra spring in her step, she walks to the train station to catch the train to Manhattan. “I’ll be fine,” she thinks, smiling. “If it’s what I think it is, a little morning queasiness is nothing.” At work that day, she slices her finger on the paper cutter; a co-worker rushes to her aid. Now he has come in contact with the virus running through Laura’s veins. He lives across the Hudson River, in Metuchen, New Jersey.
That same morning, Sunny, the golden retriever nabbed by the same mosquito as Laura, collapses on the living room floor. The owner of the spry three-year-old knows immediately that something is wrong. He carries Sunny outside, lays her gently on the bed of his Jeep, and rushes her to the vet. The vet takes a look at her and shakes his head in doubt. He instructs the lab tech to draw a blood sample. “The test should tell us something,” he says in a comforting voice. But by the next day, Sunny succumbs to an unknown. The lab tech develops a bad cough and has sharp pains in her stomach that evening. She calls in sick the next day. She is one of hundreds already in direct contact with an infected friend, relative, or co-worker.
And this is just the beginning.
AFTERTHOUGHTS
Plum Island scientists voice their own fears, in a piece submitted to the New York Academy of Sciences, only a few years after their experiments:
Introduction of Rift Valley fever virus into northern North America in the spring, when mosquito activity is on the rise, would pose a greater threat than an introduction in the late fall, when a frost would kill the mosquito population and potentially end the outbreak. Numerous North American mosquito species are competent laboratory vectors of Rift Valley fever virus. The development of an epizootic [disease in large numbers of animals] / epidemic also requires the prevalence of amplifying hosts, such as cattle, sheep, and goats [and people], with levels of viremia high enough to infect vectors.
A self-indictment. The record shows Plum Island was well aware of the dangers posed by its research in a dilapidated laboratory facility.
The virus outbreak forced Plum Island to renew its commitment to biological safety—but this transformation took years to effect. Brushing off a reporter’s question about the virus outbreak that truly occurred and the decision to continue research, one of the lab chiefs replied matter-of-factly, “Rift Valley fever is transmitted only by mosquito. For our security to break down, a mosquito would have to get into the lab, bite an infected animal, get out through our intricate security system, and bite a susceptible man or animal. We think that possibility is extremely unlikely.”
The documented holes in the roof of the “intricate security system” of the USDA-described “World’s Safest Lab” shifts this glib assessment from “extremely unlikely” to frighteningly possible. It is easy to see how a second outbreak could have occurred on Plum Island, one of unimaginable ramifications.
In the meantime, the deadly Rift Valley fever virus research charged ahead.
Fortunately, they got away with it.
9
Crossing the Rubicon
A potential for agent escape is still present. . . . It is time to
reconsider Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s future.
—NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (1983)
To Dr. Jerry Callis’s disappointment, the virus outbreak and the Rift
Valley fever debacle overshadowed Plum Island’s positive contributions, including an achievement that would change the future of science. While attention focused elsewhere, Callis’s chief scientist, the
unassuming Dr. Howard Bachrach, was quietly achieving scientific
miracles deep inside Laboratory 101. Working for Nobel laureate Wendell Meredith Stanley after the war, Dr. Bachrach was the first to isolate the polio virus. He was also the first to photograph polio with the lab’s primitive electron microscope—though Stanley, according to scientific traditions, received credit for both as lead researcher. These accomplishments led to the development of Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine and the end of the virus as a menace. Soon after, the promising young biochemist accepted Doc Shahan’s generous offer to come to Plum Island. The parallel paths of Jerry Callis and Howard Bachrach represent two threads running through Plum Island’s history. Both Callis, the youngest of ten siblings on a rural Georgia farm, and Bachrach, whose father owned a boys’ haberdashery in Minnesota, were drafted by the USDA to learn handson science in Europe while America prepared to research exotic animal germs for the first time. While the outgoing Dr. Callis was a tall, officious administrator type, one who relished giving authoritative speeches about scientific research, the bespectacled Bachrach was a gnomesized scientist who preferred tinkering on the workbench in the windowless lab fortress. When Callis was elevated to director in the early 1960s, Bachrach was named chief scientist. “Callis was very supportive of Howard,” says Dr. Robert Shope.
Dr. Bachrach had been using chemicals in the mid-1970s to fractionate viruses, or break them up into component protein pieces. He theorized that one or more of a virus’s proteins might provide enough of a “signature” to fool an immune system into creating a response, triggering immune memory cells and thus providing protection from being subsequently infected by the real germ. Vaccines, traditionally killed or weakened viruses that provided immunity, always left open the danger of reverting to virulence and causing disease to the host. But if an inanimate viral subunit vaccine could be designed, not only would it never revert to a virulence, but it would eliminate vaccine contaminants that sometimes caused harmful side effects. He discovered that the foot-and-mouth disease virus’s capsid, or shell, was made up of four distinct proteins that latched on to healthy cells to infiltrate and infect them. After many years of trial and error, in 1975 Bachrach found his subunit protein: VP3. When he injected this third capsid protein into pigs, it protected them from a later challenge with the virus.
This was a bittersweet discovery, however, because extracting and producing VP3 in large quantities was too complicated to be practical.
That is, until genetic engineering came into the picture.
Scientists figured out how to manipulate DNA, molecule chains coded in specific patterns that instruct cells how to build proteins. By snipping portions of DNA that made insulin and splicing those portions into cells, they caused the cells to manufacture large amounts of synthetic insulin. Insulin, traditionally extracted from animals, was at last widely available to diabetics, helping them lead normal everyday lives. Scientists called the technique gene splicing or recombinant DNA, and it promised to advance microbiology to infinite heights. In the world of disease prevention it held even greater promise. This new technology, thought Bachrach, could produce VP3 en masse! Dr. Callis agreed with the chief scientist. He presented Bachrach’s proposed work to a special committee at the National Institutes of Health to obtain their approval. The NIH liked the idea of using an animal virus as opposed to a human virus—the stakes were lower, and there was less of a chance that an accident or an unexpected new resultant germ would attack human populations.
In 1981, aided by three assistants on loan from the brand-new San Francisco–based biotechnology company Genentech, Bachrach entered the air lock, donned his white lab coat, and went to work in Lab 101.1 The infective part of the foot-and-mouth disease virus (called the virion) consists of eight thousand nucleotide building blocks, housed inside the capsid. These blocks code the information for the virus’s proteins. Dr. Bachrach knew that VP3 was made up of protein numbers 8 through 211. Using special enzymes, he pasted the DNA building blocks that coded for the VP3 proteins into a plasmid. A plasmid is a small ring of DNA that acts as a transporter, or magic carpet. The plasmid was then spliced into an E. coli bacterium, a benign microbe found in the human digestive tract. Lodged inside the bacterium, the plasmid directed the E. coli to assemble VP3 protein molecules; it essentially taught a living germ how to cobble together a foreign protein. When the E. coli replicated, the DNA instructions to make VP3 also replicated with it. Bachrach grew the modified bacteria—now an entirely new life form—in large kettles, and the newfangled bacteria grew easily in unlimited amounts as unmodified E. coli normally would. Each new E. coli produced an astonishing two million VP3 proteins.
1 Genentech was founded by scientist Herbert Boyer, the co-inventor of recombinant DNA in 1973. The company spawned the biotech business, an industry valued at over $430 billion today.
Seven weeks into the project, they extracted the synthesized VP3 from the vats of slurry. Healthy cows and pigs were vaccinated with it, then held in animal rooms with disease-carrying swine infected with a highly virulent virus strain. Of the thirty-three animal species that can transmit foot-and mouth disease, pigs are the worst offenders, spewing virus everywhere in their vicinity. On the tenth day of exposure, the scientists walked into the animal rooms and cheered—not one of the vaccinated animals had caught the disease. Bachrach and his team were thrilled with the results of the experiment. They created the first genetically engineered vaccine in history. And they did it on Plum Island in 1981.
“We believe this to be the first production through gene splicing of an effective vaccine against any disease in animals or humans,” Secretary of Agriculture John R. Block proudly announced. With Bachrach’s ingenious recombinant DNA vaccine, disease control would be safer and far less expensive. Genetically engineered vaccines for this and other viruses could be produced anywhere in complete safety, because modified E. coli with VP3, and not the offending virus itself, would be produced. There was zero chance of VP3 becoming virulent on its own. And unlike traditional vaccines, genetically engineered vaccines didn’t require refrigeration, no small benefit given the prevalence of disease in the developing world.
True to character, for all the newswire stories and national press attention the revolutionary achievement received (including front-page billing in , the timid Bachrach gave but a single quote, letting Dr. Callis handle the publicity. Eliminating the threat of virus “is our goal and is what we expect to do,” the diffident biochemist told the Washington Post. That was the extent of his public comment.
At a February 1985 ceremony at the White House, President Ronald W. Reagan presented Bachrach with the National Medal of Science, the United States’ highest honor for scientific achievement. Welcoming him into the elite order, President Reagan spoke of his “pioneering research in molecular virology” and his “role in using gene splicing to produce the first effective protein vaccine.” Equally impressive was his induction into the National Academy of Sciences, a select fraternity of the nation’s brightest scientific minds. Dr. Fred Brown, a current Plum Island scientist and the world’s foremost authority on foot-and-mouth disease virus, calls Bachrach “one of the foundation stones of Plum Island.” Dr. Howard Bachrach had come a long way from Faribault, Minnesota. He had become a scientific legend.
Obtaining the achievement of a lifetime at age sixty-one, Dr. Bachrach decided to retire in 1983, after placing the capstone on a thirty-year Plum Island career. Employees gaze upon the reticent scientist—who returns on the ferry now and then to tinker with viruses—with measures of admiration and awe. “He is kind of an icon,” says a former administrator. After retiring, he turned to his three other passions: golfing in Florida, gardening in the backyard of his Southold home, and playing shutterbug, just like the old days in the 1950s when he snapped the first-ever glimpses of strange viruses.
The breakthrough did not merely revolutionize the future of an animal disease, it sounded the starting gun of the biotechnology race. Before long, genetically engineered hepatitis B and rabies vaccines were developed. The innovative work on Plum Island changed the face of biological science forever. It promised to resuscitate Plum Island’s reputation. But with Bachrach’s departure, one of Plum Island’s two “foundation stones” was cast into the water. The absence was deeply felt. Without the anchor of the no-nonsense, determined chief scientist, the place shifted further downward.
HAZARDS
While officials on Plum Island thought the virus outbreak was a trifling event the public ought to forget and move on, Washington took the blunder far more seriously. A safety review board was appointed, made up of biological safety officials from USDA headquarters, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, and Fort Detrick. These men were the top germ safety experts in the nation, and what they had to say in their fourth annual review of Plum Island since the outbreak speaks volumes.
“We believe there is a potentially dangerous situation and that without an immediate massive effort to correct deficiencies, a severe accident could result.... Lack of preventative maintenance, and pressures by management to expedite programs have resulted in compromising safety.” After they described the failure—the “breaks”—of three of the four degrees of containment during the virus outbreak (the fourth degree was the island itself), they noted two more incidents of this nature. “In August 1980, a break was due to the use of facilities for purposes for which they were not designed, and in January 1981, a break was due to the absence of first degree containment and lack of maintenance of second-degree containment. We find both unacceptable.” In the first incident, Plum Island experimented with animals, not in the specially filtered and drained animal isolation rooms, but in corridor hallways never designed to hold infected animals. The second infraction showed smoke tests revealing gaping holes in the animal test rooms. “These are signs of unsafe facilities,” the safety review board said. “Breaches from known deficiencies are never acceptable.”
One passage written by the experts shows just how dangerous Plum Island was at the same time it mass-produced deadly Rift Valley fever viruses:
It is distressing to the experts to find... massive leaks . . . (a) around the metal frame of a door supporting a gasket (caused either by door buckle and weld separation and/or rust-induced deterioration), (b) around hinges and handles, (c) through an unplugged hole (former pipe hole?) and/or around an existing pipe penetration, (d) around adjacent spots behind a “dust deflector” on top of a wall mounted cabinet, (e) through cracks in the wall plaster, (f) through an electrical outlet. . . .
Major problems in the air movement in the four rooms examined . . . suggest that few rooms at Plum Island provide satisfactory containment.
Was this known to Dr. Callis, Plum Island’s director? Given his earlier sense of care and dedication, had Dr. Callis lost his grip, his handle on the situation? It seemed illogical that the esteemed veterinarian would stand by and let his island crumble beneath him. He seemed preoccupied often with seminars and conferences around the world, neglecting the management of Plum Island. By then, “Jerry Callis had his own agenda,” says a source. “As long as he could take off to Portugal, Thailand, Caracas, or somewhere deep in Africa or South America—these were some of his favorite places— he was happy.” The safety panel found widespread belief among employees that management was lacking, communications had deteriorated, and there was a “dictatorial” atmosphere. Employees expressed fear of reprisal if things were brought to the attention of management. The findings of the safety review board were only the latest in the unbroken string of ill-fated events over recent years taking their toll on Plum Island.
AIDS AND AFRICAN SWINE FEVER
Before human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) was discovered in 1986, the cause for the emerging disease dubbed acquired immune deficiency syndrome, or AIDS, was unknown. Dr. Jane Teas, a pathobiologist at Harvard University’s School of Public Health, compared the symptoms of AIDS with those of known animal diseases, and hit upon a striking similarity between AIDS and the African swine fever virus in 1983.
Amid the hype over Teas’s proposed link between AIDS and African swine fever, forty-seven Plum Island employees were secretly tested for the presence of the African swine fever virus, normally not infectious in humans. Six tested positive. When asked about the findings, Dr. Callis said they were “nonspecific,” or unreliable test results. Though they didn’t contract the disease, six people had accidentally been exposed to the virus in Plum Island laboratories. They were virus carriers—capable of spreading it to other animals through tick and insect bites—and reservoirs of natural virus mutation, possibly into a strain that could affect people, like swine flu had decades ago. With no cure, the six Plum Island workers would have to live, symbiotically, with the virus. And without ever knowing they had it.
The subjects were tested without their knowledge or consent, since the samples were taken as part of routine physical examinations. Dr. Callis said he couldn’t recall whether those that tested positive for virus were notified. To this day, no Plum Island worker interviewed remembers being told they were carriers of African swine fever virus. Management apparently deemed it unimportant.
Finally, after being stalled for months by the USDA to study the AIDS connection, Teas’s colleague Dr. John Beldekas got a call from a secretary at Plum Island, telling him a shipment of African swine fever virus materials was being sent to him overnight via Federal Express. The next day, Beldekas waited in his laboratory all day for the package to arrive. It never came. Checking his answering machine at home in the late afternoon, there was a message from a neighbor saying a package had been left with her, and there was very little dry ice that accompanied the delivered parcel. It was from the USDA. He had no idea how they had his home address. Beldekas asked his neighbor to open the package and put the vials inside her kitchen freezer while he raced home. “So instead of delivering it to my laboratory where I had the proper freezer, it was left on my doorstep.... Then, when I called Plum Island back to tell them I received it, and everything was fine, they were like ‘Oh. Okay.’ They did everything they were supposed to do, but they also did everything in their power to screw us up.”
The joint discovery of Dr. Robert Gallo and French researchers of a new retrovirus called HIV settled the debate over AIDS and African swine fever. Today, HIV is widely regarded to have been an African monkey virus that jumped from chimpanzees to humans at some point between 1926 and 1946 (by virtue of humans eating raw, virus-infected chimp meat) and fully established itself in epidemic proportions by 1981.
Of the work, Dr. Teas later said, “It was viewed not as an interesting question but as a stupid thing I shouldn’t be doing. . . . You would think the world could use a few ideas, especially with a problem like AIDS.” The limited research aimed at finding a link between African swine fever and HIV ended.
CATS
Plum Island Lighthouse keepers always kept a few cats around for company, fenced inside the lighthouse reservation, and the cats greeted the USDA when they first arrived in 1952.1 When the Coast Guard automated the light and vacated the lighthouse in 1978, the abandoned cats broke through the old fence and foraged the island for food. Slowly but surely, the wild cats bred and bred, until there were a “zillion cats,” as one observer recalls. “Everywhere you looked, there were cats.” For decades, the feline and human populations coexisted; most of the cats had become feral and kept the rodent population in check. Occasionally a cat would sneak into one of the outdoor cattle pens and eat from the feed trough. But when the island’s cat lovers fed the felines, many became tame. A guard fed a gang of cats with food he brought over on the ferry periodically. “This group hung around the dock guardhouse,” recalls another. “Consequently, there were dozens of cats hanging around where visitors entered Plum Island.”
1 Soon scientists were experimenting on “imported” cats (domestics from southwestern Missouri) while researching a new cat disease called feline cytauxzoonosis, and its possible link to African East Coast cattle fever.
Management decided the island’s large cat population created a negative image when outside scientists visited. Instead of discouraging feedings near the guardhouse, a memorandum came out in 1981 that said, according to one employee, “We aren’t worried about the cats swimming to the mainland—we just can’t allow them to be here and we’re going to poison them.” Scientific and support staff alike vehemently protested. “You will not kill our cats! This is an agricultural facility, made up of veterinarians, for heaven’s sake—we will do the next best thing. We’ll neuter them!”
Workers laid out scores of Have-A-Heart traps near the guardhouse, on paths and in the meadows. As the cats were collected, the vets took pause from their scientific research to neuter them, shaving their rears just forward of the legs to identify which ones were fixed. “For weeks, it was just the strangest thing, to see these cats darting around the island with nude bottoms,” remembers the worker. But the neutering didn’t work— many of the cats were too smart to be lured into the traps.
So they were poisoned instead. The “Animal Welfare Committee” ordered a technician to mix sodium fluoroacetate—one of the deadliest poisons known to animal or man—in rusty tin cans with hamburger meat and set them out for the cats. One of the cats, the harbor mascot Harry—named after dock guard Harry Sinuda—was spared execution. Just before Dr. Walker laid out the poisonous food traps, Harry the Cat was secreted inside the emergency power plant, where he escaped a gruesome fate. The others wouldn’t be so lucky. “Ahh—the way they did it,” says a former worker, slowly shaking his head. “Maybe they thought it would put them to sleep. Instead, the wicked dose of poison fed these cats—well they were walking around the island, choking and making terrible cough like sounds.” A day later, six cats were found dead. Before long, dozens of felines were being pitched into the incinerator.
Someone got mad enough to blow the whistle on this inhumane act. The USDA was snagged, it turned out, on a technicality: the use of sodium fluoroacetate was prohibited by both state and federal law, and Plum Island hadn’t obtained the special permission required for its use. Asked about a “cat overkill” by a reporter, Dr. Callis said: “I’m embarrassed.” It wouldn’t be long before he embarrassed himself again.
END OF AN ERA
What happens when he who makes the rules breaks the rules? Over one hundred microbiological safety rules were in place on Plum Island. At times they were painstakingly tedious. Cutting corners here or there may not seem so bad to the casual observer. But that one missed shower, an improperly installed air unit, or a forgotten air-lock door—each inched toward disaster. At the beginning, Dr. Callis wrote in the three-inch-thick safety manual distributed to all employees that the safety program “should be backed up with provisions for enforcement and penalties for willful violations of the regulations and instructions.” And furthermore, “Personnel shall report promptly to the director, through the safety officer, any safety violation that occurs or that is observed in the acts of others.”
The federal law allowed foot-and-mouth disease virus to be shipped over the mainland to Plum Island, but not kept on the mainland. During a summer’s day in 1982, Director Jerry Callis left a container of glass ampoules filled with a highly contagious Brazilian virus strain and related antiserum in the refrigerator at Orient Point for three days, before finally bringing it to Plum Island. An employee reported the infraction. Callis admitted guilt, and the Washington USDA office suspended him for two weeks without pay. “I unthinkingly left the container on the mainland,” he later said. “I made a mistake. I’m not proud of it.”
The director believed his suspension was far more severe than the violation warranted. After all, the viruses were wrapped in a self-destructing mechanism; that is, if the glass vials somehow broke, acid surrounding the container would rush in and annihilate the virus. At least that was the way it was designed to work. “There was some kind of fiasco,” recalls Dr. Jim House, a recently retired Plum Island scientist. “And I don’t think we’ll ever know the details—it was unfortunate, really unfortunate.”
A former veteran employee remembers Callis coming back from Brazil with more than cans full of viruses, and doing more than salting the germs away in the warehouse fridge. “The safety officer at the time was Jonathan Richmond. He was at Orient Point when Callis came back with the cans . . . and Callis opened them. Absolute safety violation. But before he opened them, Jonathan reminded him of the safety rules and regulations, and not to open them—that it must not be opened. Jonathan reported it to Washington to protect himself.”
“I think Callis was getting a lot of flak at that time from the Washington area,” says another former employee. “I recognized his voice when he called in during the suspension, and he was calling from his home. It was very sad, because it hurt his reputation on the island and in the community. And guess where Jonathan Richmond is today? He’s one of the heads of the CDC!”2
2 One of the more prestigious Plum Island alums, Dr. Jonathan Richmond was until recently the director of health and safety for the Centers for Disease Control and the CDC’s national “hot zone” expert, responsible for writing the rules for biosafety levels one through four.
The following July, more virus safety rules were broken. Two Plum Island employees with a container of viruses scheduled for gamma irradiation, ostensibly en route to Radiation Technology Inc. in Rockaway, New Jersey, decided to make a two-day detour out of a three-hour drive, and stowed the biologicals in one of their garages at home overnight.
In 1983, the National Academy of Sciences weighed in. Their two hundred-page in-depth report repeated what lay people had been suspecting for years—Plum Island had run its course. “It is time to reconsider PIADC’s [Plum Island Animal Disease Center’s] future,” it began. Though they commended Dr. Bachrach’s pioneering work in genetic engineering, in the eyes of the nation’s top scientists, Plum Island was through. “Its isolation and high costs of operation, construction, and maintenance make it unsustainable in the long term. As soon as possible, USDA should proceed with construction of a new, highly secure, mainland laboratory to succeed PIADC as UDSA’s principal center for research. . . .” [ah Jesus, these people are insane, in tornado alley of all places and are we talking about Level 3 or 4,they seem to be making new rules as they go,take a look at these links I found after just a quick search DC]
http://outbreaknewstoday.com/plum-islands-move-to-kansas-this-research-facility-is-an-accident-waiting-to-happen-55361/
https://www.k-state.edu/nbaf/
While mainland research cost $175,000 on a per-scientist basis, comparable research on Plum Island cost $328,000. Of the island’s total annual budget of $11.7 million, $7.6 million was invested in salary and personnel benefits, and only $16,000 was earmarked for new equipment—hardly enough for an electron microscope. In a dig at the locals, the academy found “the education level of technical personnel seems to be lower than what might be available near larger urban centers with university communities.” Other than Dr. Bachrach’s revolutionary work, Plum Island’s virology program was “at least twenty years out of date.” The experts also detected “a sense of isolation between different workers within the facility as well as between PIADC scientists and the larger scientific community. . . . [Plum Island] suffers from a paucity of mid-career, established investigators.” Put another way, the place was languishing without direction by disinterested nearing retirement. And its ability to handle an exotic animal disease outbreak in the United States: “precarious at best,” said the experts.
Jack R. Dahl, a hearty, mild-mannered North Dakota rancher and former president of the National Cattlemen’s Association, helped write the report. “We identified a lot of problems that existed on Plum. We knew what the problems were—and we knew of the research work and the accomplishments. The problems outweighed the accomplishments.”
The academy scoffed at the importance of its island location, in light of its populous surroundings and available modern technology. “Better biosafety containment is possible. An island location is not a guarantee of safety. . . .” Twenty-five years ago, Labs 101 and 257 were state-of-the-art; now they were archaic. A full five years had passed since the virus outbreak, yet they wrote that “a potential for agent escape is still present.” Walls weren’t sealed, air-lock doors weren’t properly gasketed, and exhaust air filters weren’t installed. Personnel were allowed to move between support areas, laboratories, and animal rooms, despite the facility’s own requirements. Though most labs prohibited eating, drinking, and smoking within containment, “surprisingly, the new renovation [at Plum Island] includes a lunch facility within the barrier zone.”
A self-described “independent rancher” (the twenty-first-century euphemism for the near-extinct cowboy) who today runs a ten-thousand acre ranch, Dahl recalls that closing Plum Island and moving operations onto the mainland was the “crux” of the study. The report urged the facility be torn down and closed.
All the negative press, the PR missteps, the biological bungling, and the outright mismanagement had impacted Dr. Callis’s reign as Lord of the Manor. No longer was he the twenty-seven-year-old kid scientist who, at Doc Shahan’s side, helped build the “World’s Safest Lab.”
One source described the situation on the island at the time as “stagnation.” Another, “benign neglect.” “Jerry had a helluva vision about Plum Island,” says his successor, Dr. Roger G. Breeze. “But that vision sort of ran its arc. And I’m not trying to be critical about where that arc comes to rest.” But rest it did.
A former official cites the director’s penchant for travel as a contributing factor. “I’d say he was one for the ages, one of the few scientists who was a good leader and a good scientist. But by then his mission wasn’t running Plum Island—it was running around the world, visiting other countries doing disease work, addressing meetings, and attending seminars—that was his agenda. And that’s one of the reasons why Plum Island went to hell.”
All the negative newspaper stories, egged on by Karl Grossman, Newsday, and others—much of it warranted, but not all of it—weathered the old veterinarian beyond repair. “There’s one thing I think Jerry failed at,” says Dr. Jim House, “and every director after him has also failed at—public relations. There was and is no program to explain the benefits of the place, the fact that it is a national treasure, that it is needed. Nobody does that—nobody goes out and gets the community involved and lets them understand it.”
Much of that failure was an extreme desire for secrecy. “I think Jerry had this old-school cold war mentality,” House contemplates. “You must remember, the Russians thought Plum Island was a really wild site out there. They knew it existed, and they played this game, they built it up in areas, saying it was a biological warfare site, or at least something of cold war value. And this just carried on.” Dr. Carol House, also a retired Plum Island scientist (and Jim’s wife), adds, “I think Jerry liked that.” Though the outside advisory committee—now headed by Dr. Robert Shope—urged Plum Island to hold frequent press events, the hurtful, enduring sting caused by Grossman’s 1971 AP germ warfare story caused Callis to lock up the gates tighter. Problems and difficulties on Plum Island were met not with candor and public recognition, but with suppression. Ironically, the lack of sunlight on Plum Island’s activities over the years would lead the public—and rebuffed curious news reporters—to always assume the worst, fanning the flames of mystery, intrigue, and rampant speculation.
In one of his final communications, an uncharacteristically dry memo lacking the usual pleasantries, Dr. Callis told Plum Island employees that federal budget reduction legislation called for 5 percent cuts across the board, further depleting Plum Island’s shoestring budget. To fight skyrocketing costs, he was considering a proposal to consolidate the two laboratory buildings into one, close the old Army-vintage administration buildings, and make Laboratory 101 a self-contained operation. This might—might— require cuts in staff, he said, but lest anyone worry, he would reduce positions through natural attrition, not through layoffs. By this time, Callis twice had stopped a move to privitize the federal workforce and reduce salaries, benefits, and the total number of staff positions. Callis may have faulted in many areas, but he remained doggedly loyal to his people, and to the promises he had made to them a quarter century ago: “respect personal dignity... recognize work achievement . . . provide work security.... Believe in the Golden Rule and always practice it.”
Just days after his memo, the USDA hammer came down heavily. Regime change came quickly on Plum Island—Washington called up Jerry Jackson Callis, and told him his time was up.
“Let’s just say retirement was not his own idea,” says a source. “It happened abruptly—there were a lot of people and politics involved. He had really been there too long. We needed much better progression. We didn’t need one person in one place—no matter how good he was.” While Dr. Robert Shope maintains Callis’s retirement was his own decision, other sources confirm he was “pushed out.”
The USDA “elevated” him to the post of senior research adviser. This allowed him to maintain regular contact with his beloved island and offered another perk. Says one administrator familiar with the offer, “They said to him, ‘We’ll give you an office on the island, and carte blanche for several years on travel.’ And Washington did that by dragging in money from other agencies and hidden places. They took real good care of him. It was a payoff, a golden parachute, if you will—they had to give it to him.”
Dr. Roger Breeze, his successor, elaborated. “Jerry Callis is a very exceptional person. The United States never had a facility like Plum Island, until the debacle in Mexico hit between 1946 and 1952. People had to go out there, find it, and build it. Meanwhile, Jerry went over to Holland to learn about viruses from the Dutch. Now if you said to someone today, ‘Hey this is the federal government and we want you to go to a foreign country to learn this whole new thing, and when you come back, we’re going to build a laboratory for you,’ people would laugh in your face. ‘Yeah—sure—bullshit—can I get that in writing?’ But Callis did it.”
Lucrative offers from private laboratories had come his way for years, and he turned them all down. Plum Island was his life, and the island’s life was in many ways his—it was his first job out of school, the only job he’d ever worked. Like a parent to his child, he could never see fit to abandon it. And there he remained for four decades.
Most of those interviewed for this book have the highest respect for Jerry Callis. “Jerry built Plum Island into a very prestigious place,” says Carol House. “I think [his successors] had a hard time following in his shoes—anyone would, because of his memory and his depth of knowledge on everything that was Plum Island. A good—no, a very good manager.” Dr. Shope acknowledges that “every leader has some disgruntled employees,” but he found Dr. Callis nothing but “a real straight arrow.” John Boyle, a former budget director at Plum Island, called him “a brilliant man, at one time a great scientist, and probably still that way today.” Over time, a fondness and respect bonded the staff to their beloved director. “It wasn’t always perfect,” says building engineer Stanley Mickaliger. “There were discrepancies, and sure there were gripes—which were all normal. But we all understood something very important—Jerry Callis took care of us.”
When asked about his retirement, Callis says simply and humbly, “I’ve enjoyed my career tremendously.”
Plum Island librarian Frances Demorest—second in seniority to the now retiring director—saluted her director:
Dear Doctor Callis:
Our thoughts return to 1953 and the local turmoil over the decision to locate the Laboratory at Plum Island off Orient Point. The representatives from USDA were not received warmly but, as time went on, the turmoil and anger subsided. It has been a long time and we have crossed a lot of water together!
Through the efforts of two fine Directors, Dr. Shahan and yourself... the Center was recognized both nationally and internationally. Also, the Center made a tremendous economic impact on this end of Long Island.
Harrison and I trust you will experience a busy, fruitful, productive retirement, and enjoy GOOD HEALTH and fond MEMORIES for a “JOB WELL DONE.”
Not everyone lamented his retirement. Some expressed glee over the change in the guard and looked forward to replacing the dusty old adminis- 150 Michael Christopher Carroll tration with fresh new leadership. “A lot of people thought of him as an emperor who treated Plum Island as his personal fiefdom,” one former scientist says, “and to a degree, I believed he did. Whether your [research] program was funded depended on whether he liked you or not.” But those who cheered Callis’s departure didn’t realize how good they had had it. “I tell you what,” says one of them. “Six months later we were making novenas to Saint Anthony that he’d come back.”
Because what came next would be far worse.
“You know, there’s this old saying on Plum Island,” says one worker. “ ‘When Dr. Callis went, the island went with him.’ Once they moved him out, everything went downhill.
“In my humble opinion, this is when the whole island started to fall apart.”
Next
Part 3 The Decline
The Kingdom and the Glory
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