Renegade microbiologists worry federal agents

LANCASTER, Ohio -- 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 small refrigerator and holds it between his thumb and forefinger. He peers at it through his reading glasses, his Santa Claus beard spreading across his chest like a bib.

It is anthrax, albeit a harmless form of the bacterium used for inoculating livestock against the disease.

This cramped home laboratory could never produce anything like the high-grade anthrax that started turning up at news organizations and in Capitol Hill mailboxes this fall. Harris' lab bench is an old bedroom vanity. The centrifuge on the dresser might look familiar to anybody who took high school biology in the 1950s.

Even so, federal agents investigating the mail attacks have taken a keen interest in Harris and anybody remotely like him. An FBI profile issued in November describes a loner with "access to some laboratory equipment" who "has a scientific background to some extent, or at least a strong interest in science."

That's Harris. And the FBI profile more or less describes a suprisingly robust network of people like him.

Various qualifications

Some don't have college degrees; others have Ph.D.s and experience directing university laboratories. Some perform their experiments in basements or spare bedrooms using secondhand equipment; others have their own research institutes.

Most of these citizen scientists 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.

Harris got himself in hot water a few years ago when he 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 became suspicious and notified authorities. The day after the bacteria arrived at Harris' home, so did a swarm of federal agents. Harris eventually pleaded guilty to wire fraud and was sentenced to 18 months' probation.

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. Stern said when she first heard about the high-quality anthrax sent to South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle's Capitol office, she thought immediately of James Dalton Bell.

Already imprisoned

The MIT-trained scientist might have been a prime suspect except for one thing. Since August, Bell has been serving a 10-year sentence at a federal prison in Lompoc, Calif.

Agents raided Bell's house in Vancouver, Wash., after he threatened two federal officials. Inside they found a toxic nerve agent and other dangerous substances in his basement lab. On a computer they found recipes for making chemical weapons. Witnesses told investigators that he had tried 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 said.

"James Dalton Bell is the model of the lone wolf that the FBI worries most about," Stern said.

No one knows how many of these closet biologists exist. But like many once invisible subcultures, they now share theories, results and concerns on the Internet. A few have been accused of using the Web to raise money outside the traditional scientific peer review process.

"Some of these people have sort of a cottage industry," said Gregory Gray, an epidemiologist at the University of Iowa.

Former University of Texas cancer researcher Garth Nicolson now runs his own private research laboratory, the Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach, Calif. Most of the papers published by the lab's 40 researchers concern cancer metastasis. But it is Nicolson's studies of Gulf War Syndrome that have drawn the most attention. Nicolson believes the mysterious symptoms experienced by some veterans of the Persian Gulf war are caused by an obscure microbe he believes Iraq may have used as a biological weapon.

Epidemiologists who have studied Gulf War illness dismiss that hypothesis, and efforts to replicate his findings have failed. But because of intense pressure from other advocates who believe Nicolson, the government has funded his research anyway.