Nuclear Pox
SEPTEMBER 2–3, 2000
A FEW MONTHS
after the failure of his monkey-model experiment, on a hot Saturday in early September 2000, Peter Jahrling flew to Montpellier, France, for the thirteenth International Poxvirus Symposium. It was held at Le Corum, a modern conference center in the middle of town. The place was jammed with more than six hundred poxvirus experts from around the world, many of them milling in the lobbies and chain-smoking cigarettes. On Sunday afternoon, Jahrling wandered around a lobby where scientists were showing poster papers.
A poster paper is much like the reports that children give in school. It’s usually about an experiment that doesn’t warrant a full presentation. A scientist makes up a poster that summarizes the experiment, hangs it up and stands next to it, and answers questions.
There were fifty or sixty poster papers hanging on bulletin boards. Jahrling bumped into Richard Moyer, an American poxvirus expert who is the chairman of the Department of Molecular Genetics at the University of Florida in Gainesville. There was a lot of noise and cigarette smoke, and they wanted to talk, so they found a poster that nobody was looking at. Jahrling and Moyer placed themselves to one side, so they wouldn’t disturb the scientist standing next to the poster, and they chatted about some of the things they’d been learning. Moyer glanced over at the poster. He stopped talking.
The experiment described on the poster had been carried out by a group of Australian government researchers from the Co-operative Research Centre for the Biological Control of Pest Animals, in Canberra. They were using viruses to try to cut down populations of mice. The scientist who led the work, Ronald J. Jackson, was the man standing beside the poster. Jackson is tall, with a roundish face, dark, short hair, and a nut-brown tan. He was a pleasant-looking man, wearing a yellow short-sleeved shirt and brown pants.
The Australian group had been working with the mousepox virus, which is closely related to smallpox. Mousepox, which is also called ectromelia, cannot infect humans and doesn’t make them sick, but it is lethal in some types of mice. The Australian group had been infecting mice with an engineered mousepox virus that was supposed to make the mice sterile. But the engineered mousepox had wiped out the mice.
The mice were naturally resistant to mousepox, and some of them had also been vaccinated. Even so, the engineered virus had sacked them. It had wiped out a hundred percent of the naturally resistant mice and sixty percent of the immunized mice.
The Australian scientists had added a single foreign gene, the mouse IL-4 gene, to natural mousepox virus. The mouse IL-4 gene produces a protein called interleukin-4, a cytokine that acts as a signal in the immune system. By putting a mouse gene into natural mousepox, the researchers had created a superlethal, vaccine-resistant pox of mice.
If a pox that crashes through a vaccine could be made for mice, then one could probably be made for men.
“My God, Peter, can you believe what these jackasses have done?” Moyer blurted.
Jahrling stared at the poster. He got the point of it right away: the Australians had engineered a poxvirus that could overwhelm the vaccine, and they’d done it by putting a single gene from the mouse into the virus. One mouse gene into the pox. Child’s play. “Holy shit,” he said.
“This virus just mowed down these immunized animals,” Moyer whispered in a low voice to Jahrling, staring at the mouse man from Australia, who was looking rather hopefully at them, like a salesman without any customers. But the two Americans drifted away. “If I were a bioterrorist, Peter, I would rip that paper down and take it home with me.” Moyer glanced back at the Australian. “Maybe that paper should come down right now. It makes me wonder if the vaccination strategy for smallpox would work,” Moyer said.
JAHRLING WENT BACK
to his hotel room and mentally kicked trash cans around. The poster looked to him like a blueprint for the biological equivalent of a nuclear bomb. People were attending the conference from countries that were suspected of secretly developing smallpox as a weapon, and there was no doubt that genetic engineering was something they were perfectly capable of doing. This poster might give them ideas for how to make a smallpox that could be vaccine-proof. He was especially worried about the Vector scientists. Lev Sandakhchiev was walking around, adding his blue Russian cigarette smoke to the haze in the conference center.
It was late in the afternoon, and there was a bus trip planned to the Pont du Gard, a Roman aqueduct that spans a gorge near Nîmes. Jahrling went downstairs and found Dick Moyer. They got on the bus together and sat down. Then Moyer spotted Ron Jackson sitting by himself near the back of the bus. “See you later,” Moyer said, and he hurried down the aisle and claimed the seat next to Jackson.
“That paper of yours is one of the best papers at the meeting,” he said, trying to break the ice.
The bus wound through the beautiful terrain of Languedoc, through olive groves and past limestone cliffs. Moyer found Jackson to be a “nice guy, kind of a shy guy, and a good scientist.” They had a talk about how, exactly, the engineered pox had wiped out the immune mice. Moyer was very interested in the exact way in which a poxvirus could trigger a storm in the immune system and overwhelm the vaccine. “Ron Jackson and his group knew what they had done,” he said later. “Anybody working in this field would have to be absolutely retarded not to see the implications of it with the vaccine for smallpox. They’re professionals, and they saw it. They agonized over publishing their experiment. But I still can’t believe they published it.” A vaccine-resistant smallpox would be everyone’s worst nightmare come true. We could be left trying to fight a genetically engineered virus with a vaccine that had been invented in 1796.
THE AUSTRALIAN RESEARCHERS
were working for the government, and they had asked officials what they should do. Information travels fast via the Internet. Word could leak out about their experiment, even if they didn’t publish it. Putting the IL-4 gene into a poxvirus was such simple work that a grad student or summer intern could probably do it. Virus engineering had become standardized, and there were kits you could order in the mail for doing it. It was getting easier to alter the genes of a virus all the time, and poxviruses were just about the easiest viruses to engineer in the laboratory.
Ron Jackson and his colleagues—principally, a molecular biologist named Ian Ramshaw, who had done the technical work of constructing the virus—talked it over with one of the leading eradicators of smallpox, the Australian pox virologist Frank Fenner. Fenner had done some of the early and important research on mousepox virus, and he is the principal author of the Big Red Book
—Smallpox and Its Eradication.
He advised them to publish. He felt that there were reasons to think that IL-4 smallpox—smallpox with the human IL-4 gene spliced into it—might not work the same way as IL-4 mousepox did in mice. Furthermore, he felt that an engineered smallpox that did spread through vaccinated humans would not be useful as a biological weapon because it would kill too many people too fast, and so would not spread well, in his opinion, and it might kill the people who made it. Fenner also believed that a terror group or a nation would need to test the engineered smallpox on human subjects in order to be sure it worked. That was a difficult hurdle, he reasoned.
As for Jackson and Ramshaw, one impulse for publishing their work seems to have been simply to remind the world that the genetic engineering of virus weapons was something quite possible. They wanted to warn the community of biologists to stop pretending the problem didn’t exist, and to start discussing it and dealing with it.
The Jackson-Ramshaw paper was published, with a small burst of publicity and media attention, in the
Journal of Virology
in February 2001. At that point, the technique for engineering a presumably vaccine-resistant super mousepox became available worldwide on the Internet.
The Jackson-Ramshaw experiment provoked an uneasy reaction in the American intelligence community. CIA biologists were apparently aware of the paper, since it pointed to a vulnerability in the government’s plans to assemble a stockpile of vaccine. The paper was discussed at the National Security Council. One member of the NSC believed that the Australian scientists had intentionally published their experiment out of scientific pride. This was an unreasonably cynical view of Australian scientists, but it reflected the unease with which the intelligence community viewed the possibilities for genetic engineering of virus weapons.
After giving a couple of interviews with journalists, Jackson and his group decided to let others do the talking for them. Dr. Annabelle Duncan, an Australian government scientist, argued that the researchers had done nothing wrong and that unexpected findings are a normal part of science. “I got especially rabid e-mail from people in the United States,” she said. “But it would have been silly and dangerous not to publish the paper, because there would have been an implication that we were doing something harmful.” She maintained that the group had been surprised by the result and had never thought the immunized mice would die, and this seems true. In essence, the Jackson-Ramshaw team had had a laboratory accident with an engineered virus and had chosen to tell the world what had happened.
A MONTH LATER,
officials at the CDC gave the U.S. Army permission to try a second experiment to see if, somehow, they could create a monkey model of smallpox. Peter Jahrling put Lisa Hensley in charge of the experiment.
A Slight Argument
MAY 29, 2001
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK
in the evening, Peter Jahrling was in his living room, packing a battered suitcase. The sun had set, but the birds were still singing, and the sky glowed with spring. Jahrling had to catch a flight to Atlanta. The Jahrlings’ master bedroom is small, and his wife, Daria, had told her husband that she did not want him packing there. “That suitcase of yours has been God knows where, like Siberia. You drag it down streets where dogs walk,” she said. “I don’t want that thing on our bed.”
So he was packing the suitcase on the rug in front of the television set, which was on, although nobody was watching it. Daria was gathering the children’s laundry from their rooms, walking briskly around the house with a plastic laundry basket. Their five-year-old daughter, Kira, was rolling on the couch in a bunny suit, drawing on a piece of paper with a crayon.
Daria paused briefly, holding the laundry basket. “Peter, how long are you going to be gone this time?” She is a casual person with an honest way about her. She teaches English at a local high school: Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot and the Imagist poets.
“It depends on how it goes,” he answered. He added a T-shirt and shorts.
“I thought you didn’t go into the space-suit lab anymore. Don’t you have people who can do the work for you?”
He added a light blue polyester sport coat to the suitcase. “Frankly, I’m the only one who has the passion to make it all come together right.”
Daria carried the laundry downstairs and started the washing machine. Peter was immune to everything—he had been vaccinated for anthrax and smallpox—but she and the kids weren’t. She had told her sister that she wished they all had some of Peter’s blood in them. She went back upstairs.
Kira hopped off the couch and ran over to her father, holding her paper. “Daddy, I need a clipboard.”
He went into his office and got a clipboard. She hung a picture on it and showed it to him.
“Hey, that’s nice, Kira.”
“Go brush your teeth, baby,” Daria said to Kira. Kira buzzed off to the bathroom.
“I’m going to miss her.”
“You never see her. You usually don’t get back from work until she’s in bed.”
“All I can say is, there are reasons for coming up with countermeasures to smallpox. We all know that crazies exist.”
A lot of their communication was nonverbal. She gave him a smile that was a mixture of impatience, annoyance, and wry amusement, a look they knew meant, You live in Peter’s world.
He tucked Kira in bed and read her a story and arrived in Atlanta at midnight.
Chaos in Level 4
MAY 30, 2001 (DAY MINUS-ONE)
THE MONKEY-MODEL
team stayed at a hotel in the suburbs, not far from the CDC. At sunrise they were drinking coffee and eating bagels, scrambled eggs, and fruit in the hotel’s café. The monkey-model team consisted of Peter Jahrling, John Huggins, Lisa Hensley, and an Army veterinary pathologist, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Martinez. There was also an animal caretaker named James Stockman and two veterinary technicians, Joshua Shamblin and Sergeant Rafael Herrera. A separate science team, headed by a biologist named Louise Pitt, ran the Monkey Cabinet. This was big biology—expensive and complex. Everyone in the room was keyed up.
Lisa Hensley wasn’t a morning person and never ate breakfast. She bought a Diet Coke and drove with Sergeant Herrera to the CDC in a rented car. It was a cool, pleasant morning, and the sun was flashing through chinkapin trees and loblolly pines, and the air held scents of Georgia summer. They drove down a hollow and up a hill, turned in to the CDC campus, and showed their identification badges to a security guard. The badges were marked “Guest Researcher.”
They walked through a security door and crossed an open area, went through another security checkpoint, and arrived inside the Maximum Containment Lab. The MCL is a six-story building but does not seem large; it is embedded in the side of a hill, and three of its stories are partly belowground. It is attached to a larger structure known as Building 15. The MCL has a line of purplish smoked-glass windows that make the building look like an aquarium. There were television cameras and armed guards around. The variola freezer had been removed from its normal hiding place or places, and the security people had a live camera watching the freezer inside the hot zone.
CDC officials had decided that the Army people could work in a corridor of the sub-subbasement. The Army people felt they were getting a bit of a hazing, for it was clear that not everyone at the CDC was happy to have them there, working with smallpox. As an institution, the CDC was proud of the leading role it had played in the Eradication, and there were undercurrents of feeling around the CDC that it was just not right to be warming up variola and doing experiments with it.
The Army’s work area consisted of three small desks lined up in the corridor, illuminated by basement windows that looked out on the wheels of parked cars. Hensley sat down at a desk, pulled the Diet Coke from her bag, popped it open, and sipped it.
The others arrived, but there weren’t enough desks, so they stood, drinking coffee from foam cups. The animal caretakers were going to go in first, to feed the monkeys. Hensley waited for a while and then went up three flights of stairs and through another security point to an entry door that led inward to the smallpox. The MCL was divided into two separate hot zones, east and west. She pushed through a small door into MCL West and into a small locker room, where she undressed.
There was a circular scar on her upper left arm—the site of a fresh smallpox immunization. She pulled a green cotton surgical jumpsuit from a shelf and buttoned up the front. The fabric was faded and tore easily: it had been sterilized in an autoclave many times. Another shelf held athletic socks that had been sterilized and were crispy and brownish. She rummaged around for a pair that seemed less crispy. Barefoot and holding the socks, she walked through a wet shower stall and opened a door. It led to a supply closet. She walked through the closet, pushed open a door, and entered the space-suit room.
It was a Level 3 room, close to the hot side, jammed with blue space suits hanging on hooks. Each suit was marked with the name of its owner. Most of the suits belonged to CDC scientists. They had seen hard use—the seats of some of them were patched with black tape. (They tend to develop holes in the buttock area when you sit down.)
Her space suit was brand-new. She really liked that new-space-suit smell. She snapped on surgical gloves, taped the wrists to the sleeves of her scrubs, and carried her suit back into the supply closet, where she sat on a box and put her legs into the suit. She stood up, pulled the faceplate down over her head, and closed the front seal, which snapped shut automatically. She selected an air regulator—a steel canister with a shoulder strap. She slung it over her shoulder and plugged the regulator into her suit.
There was a stainless-steel door on the inward side of the room that had the red biohazard symbol on it. She shuffled into the air-lock decon shower, closed the outer door, opened the inner door, and stepped through to the hot side. She was in a small room where galoshes were sitting on the floor—the boot room. She stepped into a pair that looked about her size. The galoshes were to protect the feet of her suit from developing holes. Then she pushed through a swinging door into the main room of MCL West.
The main room was forty feet long, and it was in the shape of an L. The walls were covered with brilliant white tiles, and the light was bright. Red air hoses dangled in coils from the ceiling. An array of freezers stood along one wall, one of which was the smallpox freezer. Hensley started moving through the room. You didn’t exactly walk in Level 4, you shuffled. She pushed through a door into a lab room. This would be her workplace for the duration of the experiment. She stood up on tiptoes, pulled down an air hose, and plugged it into her regulator. There was a roar, her suit pressurized, and dry, cool air washed past her face. She spent the morning setting up test kits, getting ready for the awakening of variola.
On the far end of the main room there was a heavy steel door, and beyond it was the animal room, which was now crowded with people in space suits. The room contained four banks of monkey cages. The monkeys were calm, not vocalizing much, since they had been living in Level 4 for weeks, and they had grown used to being around humans wearing space suits. Each bank of cages had a plastic tent over it, to keep smallpox from spreading from one bank to another, in case any monkeys did develop smallpox. There were eight monkeys in the cages. The monkeys were crab-eating macaques from Southeast Asia. They had grayish-brown fur, pointed ears, and sharp, canine fangs. Jim Stockman, the animal caretaker, had fed them a breakfast of monkey biscuits. They had eaten some of their biscuits and had thrown others around the room. Stockman had cleaned up the mess. All the cages had brass padlocks on them—a crab-eating monkey can figure out any latch.
Mark Martinez, the veterinary pathologist, was in the monkey room, too, getting things set up. Martinez is a soft-spoken man in his forties, with brown eyes and wire-rimmed glasses. Some years earlier, he had attended Airborne school at Fort Benning, Georgia. One day, he had been walking around the base and had found a graveyard for dogs, overgrown with weeds. Among them were brass plates and slabs of stone. Each marker displayed the name of a dog, with its dates of birth and death. They had been killed in action during the Vietnam War, had been shipped home, buried, and forgotten. Martinez thought about how many of the dogs had died in combat, perhaps defending their human companions, and he had the graveyard mowed and tidied up, and he cleaned the grave markers. He felt that the dogs had died for their country.
LISA HENSLEY
was standing at a work counter, setting up her equipment. She was looking down at her hands, when she noticed that her right outer glove had developed a crack in the wrist. The glove was rotten.
She had no tolerance for bad gloves. Time to get out.
She picked up a bottle of Lysol, sprayed her glove, and headed for the exit. She took off her galoshes and stepped into the decon shower and pulled a handle to start the cycle.
A spray of water, then Lysol came down over her. After it ran for seven minutes, she turned a handle to shut it off. It wouldn’t turn off. It was jammed open, and the shower was still running with Lysol.
“Oh, crap,” she said. She returned to the hot side and tapped the vet tech, Josh Shamblin, on the shoulder and pointed to the air lock. “It’s running. It won’t stop.” She had to shout, since both of them were wearing earplugs inside noisy suits; it helped if you could read lips.
He said to her, “Get Jim.”
Jim Stockman had worked in MCL West before, and he knew how to fix the decon shower. He clambered into the air lock and started banging around in the spray, trying to fix the mechanism.
Peter Jahrling had arrived in the gray area with John Huggins, and they were peering at Stockman through a window in the air lock. “What the heck are you doing?” Jahrling mouthed.
“Fixing it.”
Suddenly, the floor drains in the main room began puking up nasty yellow foam. It was dirty Lysol, overflowing from the waste drains.
Rafael Herrera came running out of his workroom, lumbering in his suit, shouting, “We’ve got a flood in here!”
Hensley went over to the window of the shower and started pounding on the glass. “Jim! Jim! Look!” Mark Martinez and the others were now careening around the main room, their voices sounding dull and faint as they yelled at one another inside their suits. One of them picked up the receiver of a wall phone and called the CDC’s Level 4 janitorial services: “We’ve got a Lysol flood in here! The plumbing is backing up!”
The monkeys probably thought it was pretty exciting.
The shower stopped. Stockman opened the door of the air lock, and more Lysol poured into the room. They found a Sears shop vacuum and ran it around the hot zone to suck up the flood.
It had been a long day. The team drove back to the hotel, and most of them went straight to bed. Hensley stayed up long enough to phone Rob Tealle. She told him that everything was okay, except for a flood in the lab. He had been working on a project to build some houses. The project was winding down, and he was planning to direct his business toward furniture building. It was a brief conversation.