Ed Lake: “No experts who examined the spore powders have actually said they SAW any silica”.
“Demon in Freezer”
October 24, 2001
Meeting with Attorney General and executive government officials.
Jahrling cleared his throat and directed everyones attention to Geisbert’s pictures of the anthrax skulls. (Staffers had passed them around.). He pointed out the freid-egg goop flowing off the spores in some photographs. This, he said, was probably an additive.
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He said that by tomorrow the Army would have a better idea what the additive was.
October 25, 2001
Tom Geisbert drove his beat-up station wagon to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Northwest Washington, carrying a whiff of sterilized dry Daschle anthrax mounted in a special cassette. He spent the day with a gropu of technicians running tests with an X-ray machine to find out if the powder contained any metals or elements. By lunchtime, the machine had shown that there were two extra elements in the spores: silicon and oxygen.
Silicon oxide.
Silicon dioxide is glass.
The anthrax terrorist or terrorists had put powdered glass, or silica, into the anthrax. The silica was powdered so finely that under Geisbert’s electron microscope it had looked like fried-egg gunk dripping off the spores.
My consulting military scientist who makes anthrax simulant for a living (and I’ve shared the SEMS and other pictures with you) says the Daschle product likely was made from the use of siliconized solution prior to drying.
Use of 10 or 20 percent amorphous silica would have resulted in pictures such as in Microbial Forensics and is not what was pictured in the SEMS seen by Alibek and Professor Meselson. To get something that appears to be “pure spores” but results in silica being detected, a surfactant is used prior to drying. This is what Ed has argued but then he would add a mistaken alternative about lab contamination, not realizing that Professor Meselson’s use of the 1980 study was just to explain why the solution gets absorbed in the exosporium is then detected by the EDX..
So Ed’s recent “horse and buggy” analogy is appropriate so long as he appreciates that the horse even then was Secretariat. And so long as he concedes the big sticking point and flaw in his undertanding concerning the usefulness of silica. But as the molecular biologist explained before the Congressional committee, this approach is an advance from what we’ll call the Soviet use of silica for bombs.
You folks should not get hung up on the word “coating.” One man’s coating is another man’s absorbed residue. The silica used in the Dugway simulant used in the Canadian experiment was mixed. Spraydrying was done in Denmark but mixing was done in Wisconsin. No coating was or could have been added after the dairy processor. Sequential filtering likely is what was done to “tweak” it.
Ed meets your quotes from “Demon in the Freezer” with his “To Err is Human” argument, so your quotes doen’t advance your disagreement with him. Instead, it will just result in repost of the same material you two have been posting for 5 years. The SEMS provided by the military scientist, however, do. Looking back at the reporting, it looks like Deb MacKenzie had it accurately stated within a few weeks of the mailing to the Senator without breaking into a sweat. So it’s not as if there is any new breakthrough in understanding.
But Matsumoto’s SCIENCE article is validated. The Congressional testimony by the molecular biologist is probably the most useful characterization — it is sophisticated but the nature of the advances in science are that the advances are occurring in other areas (outside of bioweapons). (So some might say they are not super-sophisticated).
It’s my understanding that this method was the biochemistry information that the FBI suspects Al-Timimi from accessing at the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense. You two have been so overly focused on this narrow issue you have totally abandoned common sense true crime considerations of means, motive, modus operandi and opportunity.