In the ‘Hot Zone’-Rocky Mountain Labs is center of heated debate over plans to turn facility into high-level biological research center.

HAMILTON – Five steps from the front door of Rocky Mountain Laboratories, past the prison fence and the security guards, there is a moat.

It’s filled with nothing but asphalt now. But Marshall Bloom smiles as he recalls the original plan: to fill the moat with DDT, an insecticide so toxic it was banned in 1973.

By JENNIFER McKEE Missoulian State Bureau

Back then, said Bloom, a virologist and assistant director of the labs, the lab was studying tick-borne Rocky Mountain spotted fever, still a quick and mysterious killer. The people of Hamilton feared the tiny parasites would escape from the lab and infect the town. The DDT moat, it was thought, would stop the ticks.

The moat, of course, never was filled. But now, decades later, Rocky Mountain Labs finds itself in another debate that centers on issues of safety – both local, in the Bitterroot Valley, and national.

The lab, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, plans to build a Biological Safety Level Four Lab – in the lingo of scientists, a BL-4. It’s a laboratory designed to safely handle the deadliest pathogens known – bugs like Ebola, the disease made infamous in the nonfiction best seller, "The Hot Zone" – that kill and have no cure. Only a handful of similar labs exists in the country.

The plans have sparked concern in the Bitterroot Valley. But across the nation, academics and critics are also watching, questioning the Hamilton lab’s plans and several other proposed BL-4s – all announced after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Bush unveiled plans to plug $6 billion into bioterrorism protection. The result is a national debate about the wisdom of proliferating such research and doing it with federal biodefense dollars.

Their concerns run the gamut, from fears of deadly leakage to accusations that the government, under pressure to look tough on terrorism, is pushing a pell-mell expansion of dangerous biological research. That research, critics argue, could in fact make the country more vulnerable to biological attack, while diverting money from more pressing public-health research.

But other scientists disagree. Karl Johnson, the virologist who built the world’s first BL-4 and first identified Ebola, says science has suffered from a lack of BL-4s and that Rocky Mountain Laboratories, a civilian lab with a respected track record, is a great place to put another.

It is a uniquely post-terrorist attack debate, with Rocky Mountain Labs pinned in the middle, criticized for having too little security, then hit for planning secret research.

Tracking biological research, especially of the BL-4 variety, has become a trickier business since Sept. 11. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which regulates the shipment of all pathogens in the country and keeps a log of what kind of laboratories are where, declined to say exactly how many BL-4s exist. Llelwyn Grant, a CDC spokesman, said there are "between four and five" such labs in the country. One is located at the CDC headquarters near Atlanta, a second is owned by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Md., and a third has been built in Galveston, Texas. Grant wouldn’t say where the other one to two are.

In the last year, plans have been announced that would almost double that number. In addition to the Hamilton lab, the University of New Mexico announced this spring it wants to build a BL-4 at its medical school in Albuquerque. Victor Sidel, a founder and former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility and one of those urging caution in the building of more BL-4s, said a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab on Plum Island, N.Y., is also being upgraded to a BL-4.

Rocky Mountain Labs, Bloom said, started thinking about building a BL-4 years ago. It seemed like a good fit.

Rocky Mountain Laboratories started in 1902, when researchers at what was then the U.S. Public Health Service journeyed to western Montana to find out about a mysterious illness that was killing folks in the West. Known as "black measles," the disease started out like the flu, but quickly ravaged the body. Its final symptom: a purplish, pinprick rash on the hands and feet that spelled death for 30 percent of its victims.

Working first in tents and later in crude woodsheds, the researchers eventually cracked the disease: It wasn’t measles at all, but a pathogen spread by the bite of an infected tick. They called it Rocky Mountain spotted fever, and named the bug Rickettsia rickettsii after Howard Ricketts, the doctor who isolated the disease in Hamilton, and ironically died of typhus, another Rickettsia disease. By 1924, researchers in Hamilton had developed a vaccine for the disease, which today, although not eradicated, is rarely fatal and rarely seen in Montana.

Since then, researchers at the Hamilton lab have made a name for themselves studying what are dubbed in academic circles "emerging, infectious diseases" – new pathogens that show up, kill people and baffle science. It was a Rocky Mountain Labs scientist who cracked Lyme disease, another tick-borne illness. Hamilton scientists did some of the first research on AIDS back in the early 1980s, Bloom said, when the ailment still lacked a name and no one knew what it was or how it was spread.

Today, scientists at the lab are working on another baffler – transmissible spongiform encephalopathies or TSEs, the mysteriously infectious brain proteins that cause mad cow disease, chronic wasting in elk and deer and a similar brain-wasting disease in people.

"There is a unique community of scientists that exist here. This is a logical place to build a (BL-4) facility," Bloom said.

Rocky Mountain Labs had been thinking about building a BL-4 even before last September, which would add a new building onto its 33-acre campus along the Bitterroot River in the shadow of the Bitterroot Mountains.

Between global warming, which could bring a host of new pathogens to North America, and the dark emergence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, the lab started looking at the need to expand its research, Bloom said. The lab submitted requests to build a BL-4 several years ago, but nothing happened until the terrorist attacks, said Pat Stewart, the lab’s chief administrator.

"After that, it moved up the priority list," she said.

In April, two months after the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the arm of the National Institutes of Health that oversees Rocky Mountain Labs, unveiled its biodefense research plan, Rocky Mountain Labs announced its $66 million BL-4 intentions. The lab would employ up to 65 new scientists, said Bloom, and dedicate only a small portion of its square footage to the most deadly pathogens. The rest of the space would be a BL-3 lab, a less-restrictive type of research laboratory of which there are hundreds nationwide, including a new one at Rocky Mountain Labs.

The lab hired MCS Environmental to conduct an environmental study of the proposed BL-4, which is not yet complete. The study will look at possible environmental effects of the lab and will factor in the concerns of both local and national critics. Ultimately, however, the National Institutes of Health will make the final decision about whether to build the lab.

The announcement triggered concerns among some Bitterroot residents, and the most vocal critics coalesced into a group called Citizens for a Safe Lab, headed by Mary Wulff. Wulff, a former Southern California police officer, moved to the valley 12 years ago.

"What if something gets out and people end up dying?" she asked. "What if terrorists bomb it or otherwise breach security?"

So far, the lab has not announced what organisms it will be studying, and that bothers Wulff. It has also left a void of information quickly filled by rumors and fear: that in small-town Hamilton, an outbreak could be quickly contained.

That Hamilton’s historic inversions would trap leaked microbes close to the ground.

That no one would question the lab’s activities in an out-of-the-way place like Montana.

These rumors raise the kinds of questions Wulff said she wants answered.

"We have a list of questions," she said. "We want to know everything."

Wulff said information about the BL-4 plans has been slow in coming. A federal Freedom of Information Act request the coalition sent in July seeking detailed records of spills, mishaps and injuries at Rocky Mountain Labs has gone unanswered, she said. No one from the lab attended a community meeting the coalition organized this summer to air local concerns.

"They should put the whole thing on a military base and not in small town, USA," she said.

The group has asked the NIH to conduct a more thorough environmental study than the one currently under way. Any new study wouldn’t start, however, until after the ongoing one is complete.

Concern has resounded far beyond the Bitterroot.

Richard Ebright, a Rutgers University molecular physicist and one of academia’s louder voices urging caution in the spread of BL-4s, doesn’t deny Rocky Mountain Laboratories’ long and respected track record. But, he said, the rationale for doubling the number of BL-4s in the country evaporated when the FBI’s investigation into last fall’s anthrax attacks settled, not on a foreign terrorist, but on a group of Americans trained at one of the country’s existing BL-4s. Only one of the "persons of interest" on whom the investigation has focused has been identified: Stephen Hatfill, a bio-weapons expert who once worked at the Army’s Fort Detrick, where the United States once pursued an offensive biological weapons agenda. Hatfill has adamantly denied any role in the anthrax cases.

"Now the correct syllogism is not to build any more," Ebright said. "I can’t imagine a scenario where more BL-4s would make our country more safe. Now, there will be twice as many people with access."

But instead of putting the brakes on building, an infusion of federal money is pushing BL-4s through with little planning, he charged.

President Bush has vowed to spend just shy of $6 billion in bioterror preparedness. In the president’s budget request, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases stands to get an increase of $1.2 billion for biodefense, according to the institute, which has been identified as the lead government agency on biodefense research. That sum represents the lion’s share of all bioterrorism dollars flowing into the entire NIH. According to NIH statistics, the agency expects to get $1.7 billion for bioterrorism research, an increase of $1.4 billion from the year before.

The blend of federal money, BL-4 labs and the amorphous term "biodefense" bothers University of Illinois law professor Francis Boyle. Boyle wrote the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act, signed by President George H.W. Bush, which outlawed offensive biological research. The United States is also signatory to the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which forbids such research on a global scale. But, Boyle said, the United States, at a December meeting of all the signatories, blocked the verification portion of the treaty.

Boyle said he didn’t think scientists at Hamilton or other labs would be rushing to make biological weapons. But the line between research to prepare against an attack and research to launch one is very fine, sometimes nonexistent. To know how to prepare against an attack, you must "weaponize" a bug, he said. Of course, then you’ve made a biological weapon. And since the United States blocked the verification stipulations of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, there is no way to know exactly what happens at any government BL-4 or what scientists later do with that information, Boyle said.

Such arguments are not merely hypothetical. In their 2001 book, "Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War," three New York Times writers reported that the United States early last year began trying to genetically modify anthrax. The goal, the book said, was to make a vaccine-resistant strain of the bacteria like one the Russians reportedly had created. Unable to get the strain from Russia, the United States launched its own program. The Army wanted to know if the current anthrax vaccine was any good, but its actions still raised eyebrows and treaded the line between offensive and defensive research.

"All this research is dual-use," Boyle said. "You simply cannot have this kind of extremely dangerous type of research and technology and have no idea what’s going on."

Boyle offered an antidote chorused by others: Make all the research completely open. Tell everyone what is happening at Rocky Mountain Labs.

Otherwise, he said, "You’re getting a pig in a poke."

Victor Sidel, of Physicians for Social Responsibility, likened the current explosion of deadly biological research to the proliferation of nuclear science that happened after World War II. Because all nuclear research was classified, both the United States and the Soviet Union amassed an exhaustive and expensive nuclear weapons arsenal, each trying to clandestinely outdo the other during the Cold War. Sidel is also a former president of the American Public Health Association and of the Nobel Award-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War.

"We’re heading right for a similar kind of mess," he said.

Sidel is author of an upcoming book titled "Terrorism and Public Health," which argues for a more studied approach to bioterrorism research and preparedness.

"There is starvation all over the world, infectious diseases all over the world," he said. "There are endless numbers of current public health issues that need investment, rather than pouring the money into bioterrorism preparedness."

Nature tells the story, Sidel said. Five people died last fall in the United States due to the anthrax letter attacks. Almost a million – 975,000 – died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, an utterly natural occurrence.

Which is not to say there isn’t a risk of a bioterrorist attack, Sidel said. But the risk is low, and in an article published in the journal Medicine and Global Survival in February, Sidel argued that the risk of an accident at one of the growing number of BL-4s may actually be greater than the risk of biological attacks the BL-4s are working to counter.

Accidents happen. A researcher in Texas working on the anthrax attacks came down with anthrax himself this March. Another researcher, working at the Army’s Fort Detrick lab in Maryland, caught glanders, a disease best known in horses that causes ulcers in the lungs and respiratory tract and is thought to be a possible bioterrorist agent.

But others take a different view. Karl Johnson, the virologist who built the first BL-4 in 1978 in Atlanta and gained fame as the researcher who identified Ebola, said Hamilton and the Bitterroot Valley have nothing to worry about. BL-4 labs are safe, necessary and will allow even better research to go on in Montana.

"I’m not convinced there are too many," he said. "BL-4s are springing up like mushrooms all over there world and there aren’t any problems with any of them."

Johnson is on a committee reviewing the design plans for Rocky Mountain Labs’ proposed BL-4. Now living near Placitas, N.M., Johnson has tracked elusive diseases all over the world. After retiring from stints with the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control, Johnson moved to Bozeman in the 1980s, taught at Montana State University and served on the governor’s whirling disease task force in the 1990s.

The scarcity of BL-4s has stymied science, he said, particularly in the area of anti-virals. Not only is there a lack of the facilities, but there aren’t workers trained to do research in a BL-4.

"Most of my career, I haven’t had colleagues to work with because there aren’t any trained people," Johnson said.

As for the danger of leakage or accidents, Johnson said BL-4s are the cleanest labs in the world and the science behind them has never failed.

"Too many BL-4s? We still don’t have enough," he said.

And rather than being barricaded and isolated, he said, BL-4s should be at world-class research facilities like Rocky Mountain Labs, a sentiment Bloom echoes.

Putting a BL-4 behind a fence in the middle of nowhere wouldn’t attract the kind of top-notch researchers Bloom hopes to woo to Hamilton – people with families who want to put down roots and do good civilian research.

Research on bioterrorism won’t divert money away from other public health projects, said Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci told the Anser Institute of Homeland Defense, a public policy think tank, that his researchers will be doing basic biology, like finding treatments for Ebola, that can be generalized to other microbes.

He likened the situation to the flood of anti-viral studies surrounding AIDS, which although aimed at one organism, ended up producing some of the best treatments for hepatitis, another viral disease.

Bloom said Rocky Mountain Labs has never kept any of its research secret. The lab doesn’t have a formal process to share information about ongoing research, but that’s because, until now, nobody really cared. Last week, the lab took its first steps to remedy that, forming a group of 20 Bitterroot residents and leaders to help organize public outreach, first on the BL-4 lab, but on other research, too.

And, Bloom said, that other research would get a boost from the additional scientific clout that the BL-4 would bring to Hamilton and Montana.

"It would be like having a university dropped in your town," he said.

While the debate rages in the Bitterroot and across the nation’s scientific establishment, at least one resident of Hamilton is taking the whole issue in stride.

Vicki Stiller owns A Place to Ponder, a deli and bakery a few blocks from the lab. She’s planning on adding a new sandwich to her menu: The BL-4.

"It’s a BLT, with turkey and avocado, your choice of cheese," she said.

Is that a political statement?

No, she said: "It’s just a sandwich."