A Trying Time for Science

Dr. Thomas Butler entered the courthouse in chains.

Clad in a blue prison jumpsuit, the 62-year-old physician shuffled into the building led by armed federal agents, his hands and legs bound.

The image of the white-haired doctor in court has shaken American science to its roots.

Butler -- a well-known researcher of bubonic plague -- is facing a 69-count federal indictment, including charges he smuggled plague bacteria and lied to the FBI.

He is, by all accounts, no terrorist, but a respected scholar who may be the first scientist to face trial on bioterrorism-related charges.

“This case has been chilling,” said Paul Keim, a microbial geneticist at Northern Arizona University, and a key consultant to the government on the 2001 anthrax mail attacks. “Every time we do something in the laboratory now, we wonder if we are going to have to be ... worrying about criminal prosecution.”

Butler’s case stems from a report he made in January that 30 vials of plague bacteria had gone missing from his lab at Texas Tech University. He said he presumed them stolen.

The FBI and the Lubbock Police Department sent 60 investigators to scour the university and town in search of the missing vials. Under intense interrogation, Butler signed a statement that he had actually destroyed the vials and had lied to the FBI about their disappearance.

Since then, Butler has said that he signed only under duress -- pressured by the FBI to reassure the public that there was no danger. He has recanted his confession and pleaded not guilty to all the charges. His trial is scheduled to begin Monday. The prosecution has not indicated its theory for Butler’s motivation for allegedly destroying the cultures.

A gag order prevents both sides from discussing the case, but it has sparked an outcry from the usually staid scientific establishment, some of whose members feel they are being threatened by a witch hunt.

“Butler is probably the nation’s most eminent expert on the plague [bacterium],” said Peter Agre, the winner of this year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry and a former student of Butler’s. “Are students going to want to work on tropical medicine if there’s a chance they might lose some samples, then be hauled off in the middle of the night?”

Leaders of the National Academies, the nation’s preeminent scientific society, wrote to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft in August, warning that prosecution of so respected a scientist could quash initiative by other researchers.

But the government has argued that, in a new era of terrorism, Butler represents a perilous naivete and sloppiness in adhering to restrictions on handling hazardous organisms.

“An incident that could have sparked widespread panic of a bioterrorism threat in west Texas was stopped clean in its tracks,” U.S. Atty. Jane J. Boyle said when the indictment was first announced.

The case has disoriented many in Lubbock -- a town of 200,000, where until the Butler case, the biggest news story in recent years was the hiring of Bobby Knight as Texas Tech basketball coach. Lubbock, in the heart of conservative George Bush country, calls itself “the flattest city on Earth” -- a joke about the town’s vast, undeveloped tracts of land and featureless horizon.

There is an unfamiliar discomfort in this normally placid town about Butler’s case.

“Our neighbors and friends who support him are afraid. People at the university fear for their jobs,” said Donald May, a neighbor of Butler’s who recently ran for Congress as a Republican. “It’s like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.”

Even some supporters of the government’s approach see tragedy in Butler’s case.

“I was very sad when I saw him walk into the courtroom in shackles,” said prosecution consultant Victoria Sutton, director of the Texas Tech Center for Biodefense, Law and Public Policy.

“It struck me how much the world had changed. When you have a change like that, you’re going to have some casualties,” she said.

There seems little question that Butler will be among them.

Inside his modest, suburban-style ranch home, his blue-gray eyes showed a cast of fatigue as he sat for only his second extensive interview since his indictment. Attorney fees have already drained his life savings, and Texas Tech has begun proceedings to fire him from his job as head of the university’s infectious disease department.

He entered the deadly world of infectious diseases in the 1960s as a medical resident at Johns Hopkins University, which offered a program treating cholera patients in Calcutta.

“Calcutta was a life-changing experience,” he said. “The poverty, the crowdedness ... the extremes of the human condition -- what a human being can really endure and survive.”

Butler was drafted into the Navy in 1969 and found himself in Vietnam at age 28. While serving at the U.S. naval hospital in Da Nang, he volunteered to treat Vietnamese patients at a local hospital, where he saw bubonic plague for the first time. The patient was a 5-year-old boy who was burning with fever and had a painful, egg-sized bubo, or swollen gland, distending his groin -- an unmistakable mark of the “black death.”

Despite a frantic effort to revive him, the boy soon died -- one of thousands of Vietnamese killed annually by plague at the time. With a momentary grimace, Butler recalled the wailing of the child’s grief-stricken family, and their word for the dread disease -- dich hach.

Although he left active duty in 1971 as a lieutenant commander, he returned to study and treat plague victims in Vietnam each year until the end of the war in 1975. He left on one of the last commercial flights before the fall of Saigon -- precious plague specimens in hand.

After stints teaching at Johns Hopkins and Case Western Reserve University, he spent four years in Bangladesh treating cholera patients. He made dozens of other trips to the developing world -- many after 1987, when he joined Texas Tech.

“The tropics are sweltering squalor, and he was there, trying to gather diarrheal specimens ... things that you can rarely find western medical scientists willing to do,” said Agre, who plans to donate some of his Nobel award to Butler’s legal defense.

The skills of operating under stressful, primitive conditions became second nature to Butler.

Yet some colleagues said they noticed that with his dedication came occasional impatience and a tendency to overlook the complicated security and paperwork required by the government to counter the growing threat of bioterrorism.

Col. W. Russell Byrne, a bacteriologist at the U.S. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., wrote to the prosecutor in Butler’s case, lauding the scientist’s character but also noting his sometimes casual approach to the bureaucratic details of his dangerous work.

“Dr. Butler, being of the ‘old school,’ clinical researchers, did not appear to be as attentive to [security] issues as we were compelled to be,” Byrne wrote.

Some scientists -- used to open labs where researchers, students and technicians wander at will, and infectious samples are routinely procured or destroyed -- still regard careful, but less formal methods of handling hazardous organisms as superior to today’s cumbersome rules. But by 1996, laws such as the Public Health Service Act -- one statute Butler is accused of violating -- made filling out customs forms and keeping precise records a strict requirement.

After Sept. 11, 2001, severe penalties were included in the USA Patriot Act for security lapses.

So far, three scientists, including Butler, have run afoul of the new security climate.

Steven Hatfill, a former military biodefense researcher, was named as a “person of interest” by the Justice Department in the 2001 anthrax mailings. Hatfill has denied all wrongdoing and has not been charged. Last year, Tomas Foral, a graduate student at the University of Connecticut, was charged under the Patriot Act with illegal possession of anthrax held in cold storage. Foral admitted to unknowingly violating the law and, in a plea bargain, was ordered to perform community service.

Hundreds of pages of regulations now govern the storage, handling and sharing of potential bio-weapons agents -- measures intended to transform the laissez-faire atmosphere of a university lab into the stricter culture of a biodefense facility.

“Scientists don’t want regulation any more than accountants want regulation,” said Richard Ebright, a biodefense expert at Rutgers University. But, he added, “If there is a serious threat of bioterrorism, it is absolutely incumbent on the researchers to prevent their own research from increasing the threat.”

The transition has not been easy, as Butler’s case shows.

University officials, prosecutors, the FBI and defense attorneys could not comment on the case, but a voluminous court record details their accounts.

Butler’s plague research at Texas Tech stemmed partly from rising concerns in the late 1990s about treatments for plague. Military and Food and Drug Administration researchers approached him for help in determining which modern antibiotics should be used after a bioterrorism attack.

To test new antibiotics, he needed fresh blood and tissue samples from plague victims -- hard to obtain in this country, where only a handful of people contract the disease each year. So, Butler traveled to Tanzania in April 2002 and returned with samples using what researchers jokingly refer to as the “VIP” method -- vials in pocket -- once a common way to transfer all manner of microbes.

That move would, it seems, lead to the unraveling of Butler’s career.

On Saturday, Jan. 11, Butler noticed that 30 vials of plague cultures had gone missing, he said. He asked his lab staff and colleagues if they had moved or destroyed the specimens, but no one offered a clue.

Although plague requires skill to weaponize, the specimens could pose a danger if they fell into knowledgeable hands. He notified university officials first thing Monday morning.

“[Theft] was my leading concern,” he told the CBS newsmagazine “60 Minutes” in an interview just before the gag order was imposed in his case. “Maybe a terrorist” could have taken them, he said.

On Jan. 14, FBI agents and local police officers fanned out across the campus and questioned dozens of possible witnesses. Fears of terrorists getting hold of the samples spread across Lubbock and beyond.

Butler was questioned during most of the next 24 hours. He waived his Miranda rights and voluntarily took polygraph exams. Those tests, the FBI said, showed he had lied about the samples having disappeared.

Near the end of the tiring interrogation, the FBI promised to release him if he confessed to the lie, Butler told “60 Minutes.” Hours after signing the confession, he was arrested.

“I was tricked and deceived by the government,” Butler said in his CBS interview. “[The FBI] wanted to conclude the investigation and, they told me, reassure the public that there was no danger.”

Stacey Patty, a local minister and friend of Butler, visited him in jail that evening. “He looked confused, exhausted and could just not believe that he had spent so much time helping people, and this is what happened,” Patty said.

A federal grand jury delivered a 15-count indictment in April. In addition to the charges of lying to the FBI and smuggling plague samples from Tanzania, Butler was accused of improperly exporting plague cultures to Tanzania, moving specimens in his car to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention facility in Fort Collins, Colo., and transporting smuggled plague via American Airlines to the Army’s biodefense lab in Maryland.

On top of the primary charges, the indictment included a count of tax evasion -- followed in August with a raft of new charges alleging that Butler defrauded Texas Tech and embezzled about $321,000 -- funds ostensibly supporting his research.

“The new indictment is an attempt to buttress a weak criminal case by piling on any conceivable criminal charge,” his attorney, Jonathan Turley, said in a statement issued before the gag order was imposed.

The 30 vials Butler reported missing -- the linchpin of the case -- remain a troubling mystery.

Butler’s future is also perilously uncertain: If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison and be liable for millions of dollars in penalties.

For science, however, the effect of his case has already been felt.

The seriousness of the threat many scientists feel is implicit in the National Academies letter supporting Butler -- just the second time the group has intervened in a criminal proceeding involving a U.S. scientist. The first was for Wen Ho Lee -- a physicist at Los Alamos National Laboratory whom the FBI accused of mishandling nuclear-weapons secrets. Lee was later exonerated.

Keim, whose own lab was investigated and cleared on charges of illegally shipping anthrax to a federal lab, has adapted to the new realities by adding extra staff to manage the paperwork and security procedures.

“I would predict that there is not a laboratory in this country that has complied with 100% of the regulations, because they are so complex and hard to understand,” he said.

Other scientists have simply found it easier to abandon such work, even if they believe it critical for medical science and the country’s anti-terrorism efforts.

“It’s going to be scary for many people to work with these kind of agents due to what’s happening with Tom,” said Charles C. J. Carpenter, a professor of medicine at Brown University and a friend of Butler.

To avoid new regulations, they have destroyed rare specimens of hazardous microbes and retreated to safer research.

But there is no way to completely escape the fact that their once-obscure world of exotic diseases has changed: The dangers they face are not just from the pathogens that swirl beneath the lens of a microscope but also from the suspicions of zealous government authorities.

“All of us are worried we are going to fall into some trap that we don’t know about,” Keim said.