Citizen Scientists Attract Attention of Authorities
Larry Wayne Harris stands in his second bedroom holding a rack of test tubes.
“These are the active cultures that I use,” he says proudly, ticking off the contents of each glass vial. “Staphylococcus aureus, Enterococcus, E. coli, Bacillus cereus.
“Also, if I need it. . . . “ he adds, squeezing between the bed and a chest of drawers.
Harris pulls a vial out of a dormitory-size fridge and holds it between thumb and forefinger. He peers at it though his reading glasses, his Santa Claus beard spreading over his chest like a bib.
It is anthrax, albeit a harmless form used for inoculating livestock against the disease.
“It cannot make you sick, nor can it be made to make you sick,” Harris says reassuringly.
There is nothing about Harris’ small wood-frame house, neatly planted in a modest suburban neighborhood of minivans and chain-link fences, to suggest the presence of live anthrax bacteria inside. Even in his bedroom laboratory, there are just a few scientific accouterments, none very sophisticated. His lab bench is an old bedroom vanity. His supply closet is an armoire. The centrifuge on the dresser might look familiar to anybody who took high school biology in the 1950s.
This tiny home lab could never produce anything like the high-grade anthrax that started turning up at news organizations and in Capitol Hill mailboxes last fall.
Even so, federal agents investigating the mail attacks have taken a keen interest in Harris and anybody remotely like him. An FBI profile in November described a loner with “access to some laboratory equipment” who “has a scientific background, or at least a strong interest in science.”
That’s Harris. And to a greater or lesser extent, the FBI profile describes a surprisingly robust network of people like him.
These are citizen-scientists who conduct their experiments outside of the big institutions--universities, pharmaceutical companies and government laboratories--that control biological research today. They vary greatly in academic credentials and their access to sophisticated equipment.
Some don’t have college degrees; others have PhDs and experience directing university laboratories.
Some perform their experiments in basements, spare bedrooms and rented offices in suburban office parks. They use secondhand equipment, modified kitchenware, whatever they can scrounge up with their own money or donations.
A select few have their own research institutes, and in some cases they have even attracted federal funding by circumventing the process the government uses to dole out research money. But their theories and goals are dismissed, and sometimes even discredited, by the scientific establishment.
It wasn’t always this way. For centuries, amateurs were the backbone of science. The founder of microbiology, Anton van Leeuwenhoek, was a Dutch fabric salesman who enjoyed making optical instruments out of glass lenses that he ground himself. One of his inventions was the first microscope. He used it to explore previously unimaginable worlds in drops of pond water, leaves, even his own body fluids. In plaque taken from the mouths of old men he found “an unbelievably great company of living animalcules. . . . All the water . . . seemed to be alive.”
Leeuwenhoek had discovered bacteria. It was 1683.
More than three centuries later, the opportunities for a lone, untrained amateur to make a major discovery appear to be long gone. Now that the basic discoveries have been made, it takes millions, or even billions, of dollars to pursue unanswered questions such as mapping the human genome. Science has grown so big that even the most revered Nobel Prize winner is only a small part of an enormous research establishment
Still, the do-it-yourselfers persist. Some have dreams of miracle cures and billion-dollar patents. Others pursue wild conspiracy theories. A few, including Harris, have even dabbled in chemical or biological weapons.
He once tried to use somebody else’s credentials to mail-order the organism that causes bubonic plague. He said he needed the bacteria to do research for his book, a guide to biological warfare defense.
Harris might have succeeded if he hadn’t called the biological supplier a few days later to inquire about his shipment. The employee who took his call at the American Tissue and Culture Collection in Rockville, Md., became suspicious and notified authorities. The day after the bacteria arrived at Harris’ Ohio home, so did a swarm of federal agents. He eventually pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to 18 months’ probation.
The incident also got Harris kicked out of the American Society for Microbiology (which doesn’t require academic credentials for membership). He is the only person ever expelled by the organization.
Three years later, Harris was involved in another dust-up with federal officials. In February 1998, federal agents learned that he was in Las Vegas, proclaiming that he had enough anthrax to wipe out the entire city. The FBI arrested Harris and William Job Leavitt, another amateur scientist, and towed Leavitt’s Mercedes off in a sheath of plastic.
Officials later determined that Harris had only the harmless type of the bacterium used to vaccinate farm animals.
Several years ago, Harris said, he inoculated himself and his dogs with an anthrax vaccine that is federally regulated for animal use.
“I injected it just under my skin, and I got a little red circle and after that was gone I was safe,” he said.
An FBI agent in the region said the agency is familiar with Harris and is “taking appropriate actions.”
Some Potential Threats
Jessica Stern, a Harvard University bioterrorism expert familiar with Harris, thinks he’s harmless. “I don’t think he would actually do anything,” she said. But she’s not so sure about some of the other do-it-yourselfers.
When she first heard about the high-quality anthrax sent to South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle’s Capitol Hill office, Stern said, she thought immediately of James Dalton Bell.
The MIT-trained scientist might have been a prime suspect except for one thing: He was locked up in a federal prison in Lompoc, serving a 10-year sentence for stalking two federal agents.
When agents investigating the stalking case raided Bell’s house, tucked on a quiet street in Vancouver, Wash., they found a basement lab with dozens of chemicals. Among them: a toxic nerve agent and other dangerous or deadly substances, according to court records.
On his computer they found recipes for chemical weapons. Witnesses told investigators that he had tried to use green beans to make botulinum toxin. He had also boasted of making sarin gas, the agent used in a Tokyo subway attack that killed 12 and sickened thousands, court records say.
“James Dalton Bell is the model of the lone wolf that the FBI worries most about,” Stern said. “Someone who is technically proficient, who has it in for the government.”
Thomas Leahy is another. Police searched Leahy’s home in 1996 after he shot his stepson in the face with a pistol (the boy survived). They discovered an arsenal of chemical and biological weapons.
Leahy had mixed nicotine with a solvent that allowed it to penetrate skin, enabling him to deliver a lethal dose with a few spritzes from a spray bottle. He had also produced a small amount of ricin, a lethal toxin derived from castor beans. Authorities said it was enough to kill more than 100 people.
Leahy is now in prison, serving an eight-year term for the shooting, to be followed by 6 1/2 years for possessing dangerous materials.
Ideas Shared on Internet
No one knows how many do-it-yourself biologists exist. But like most once invisible subcultures, they now share theories, results and concerns on the Internet. A few have even been accused of using the Internet to subvert traditional scientific peer review.
For example, former University of Texas cancer researcher Garth Nicolson shows up frequently on Internet bulletin boards devoted to the Gulf War Syndrome.
Nicolson now runs his own private research laboratory, the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach. The lab, with a sign out front, sits in a quiet business park with wide streets and sprawling parking lots. Inside, dozens of bustling scientists in lab coats work with more than $1 million worth of centrifuges, filters, homogenizers, incubators, mixers, sterilizers and other sophisticated equipment.
Nicolson’s laboratory makes money by testing hundreds of blood samples each week for bacteria, minerals, proteins and other substances. The lab also attracts contributions from private donors, mostly to fund research into a process to detect low levels of bubonic plague in blood samples. The institute’s IRS forms don’t name the private donors, but report that the nonprofit organization gets more than $1 million in contributions a year.
Most of the papers published by the laboratory’s 40 researchers involve cancer metastasis, a subject Nicolson has studied for three decades. But his studies of Gulf War illness have drawn the most attention. Nicolson believes the mysterious symptoms some veterans of the Persian Gulf War have are caused by infection with an obscure microbe known as Mycoplasma fermentans, which he believes Iraq may have used as a biological weapon.
Epidemiologists who have studied Gulf War illness dismiss Nicolson’s hypothesis. Efforts to replicate his findings have failed. But because of intense pressure from veterans’ groups and other advocates who believe Nicolson, the government has funded his research anyway.
Another controversial Gulf War researcher, retired New Orleans physician Dr. Edward Hyman, recently procured $3.5 million in federal funding for his Louisiana Medical Foundation by appealing to his congressman, Rep. Robert Livingston, R-La., who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.
Other do-it-yourself scientists haven’t been so fortunate. Jay Chaplin and his colleagues at the nonprofit Institute for Applied Biomedicine have developed an innovative concept for an AIDS drug. But because they are wary about turning over the rights to their research to a for-profit biotechnology company or university, most of their funding comes from raffles, wine-tastings and bowl-a-thons.
“This is going to take time, but in the end we’re quite confident this is going to be an important drug,” said Sherrie McMahon, operations director at the institute.
The odds are long. In the era of biotechnology, major advances are almost never made outside the university, government and corporate laboratories of the scientific establishment. Except for those whose experiments with dangerous substances attract the attention of law enforcement, most do-it-yourself biologists are destined for obscurity.
