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On Oct. 15, 2001, a mail cart containing an inconspicuous letter was wheeled into a room in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. When an intern cut open the envelope, addressed to Sen. Tom Daschle, D-S.D., she found a photocopied handwritten message in bold, black letters:
“YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.”
Along with the letter, the envelope contained a fine white powder later identified as the highly purified spores of Bacillus anthracis, a disease-causing bacterium. This moment in the mailroom marked another disturbing development in what would become known as the “Amerithrax” attacks, the first large-scale deadly use of a bioweapon on U.S. soil.
In the span of several days, spores from four other letters mailed to politicians and news outlets on the East Coast infected 22 people, killing five.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t the first time bioterrorism plagued the United States — and it would hardly be the last. Just two years later, in 2003, a sender identifying themselves as “Fallen Angel” launched an unrelated attack by mail using ricin, a highly toxic plant protein. In 2013, Mississippi resident Paul Kevin Curtis used letter-borne ricin to target President Barack Obama, Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and Judge Sadie Holland of Lee County, Florida. Even as far back as 1989, suspected eco-terrorists bred and released large quantities of Mediterranean fruit flies to damage crop harvests in California. Biological threats persist, with no way to tell the next form they could take.
As federal funding for biological research at the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense continues to decrease, will the United States be prepared to handle a modern attack?
“Our response to something like this has been dismantled,” Dr. Henry Heine, a program director at the University of Florida’s Institute of Therapeutic Innovation, told me in an interview. “You don’t have that capability in any one place. It may exist, but it’s scattered all across the country.”
Heine spent 11 years as a researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases, including when the institute was tasked to analyze the spores from the letter to Daschle’s office.
Like many researchers at IU and across the country, his research project was derailed by the ongoing funding cuts implemented in President Donald Trump’s second term. Before it was discontinued, his project focused on developing an antibiotic against three bacterial species with a risk for use in bioterrorism.
“We were at the point where we're actually getting ready to do what we call the pre-clinical trials with that drug, and they've stopped all funding,” Heine said. “They've stopped not only funding of our project, but they stopped funding of all bacterial work completely in the DOD.”
Among other things, Trump’s cuts addressed purported government misspending by the NIH and the NSF.
Three weeks after Trump took office, the NIH announced a 15% cap on current and future grants’ indirect costs — the additional expenses required to maintain a functional research environment, like shared equipment, custodial services, utilities and maintenance. For universities like IU, this is a massive decrease from the 50-60% they have historically received. Before this change, a typical $3 million research grant at IU would include $1,755,000 from the NIH in additional indirect funding. After, it would come with just an additional $450,000.
Dr. Julia van Kessel, an associate professor of biology at IU, is concerned this change might become permanent. Her lab, which studies the pathogenic bacteria Vibrio cholerae, the cause of cholera, is funded with three NIH and two NSF grants.
“All institutions across the United States were panicking about how they're going to pay for things. And we're still kind of in limbo. We don't really know officially yet,” van Kessel said. “The long-term implication of that is very impactful on big universities and small universities in the sense of how we pay for the lights to be on, and the electricity, all the things that keep a university running.”
These changes mark a sharp deviation from the tradition of American scientific research and are concerning from a defense perspective because, although universities like IU don’t study biological weapons, they provide the basic research that ties more practical discoveries in other fields together.
“Something that's being done in, you know, immunology or with some other organism, and maybe even a virus, may have obviously no direct link to anthrax, but something that they find in the process of doing those studies may be useful and may be applied to that,” Heine said. “That's the nature, particularly, of biological science."
As for what a modern biological weapon might look like, Heine is particularly concerned about bacteria.
“It doesn't take a lot of infrastructure to support bacteriology work, even molecular biology, I mean, almost all of it is kits. You could do this in your kitchen,” Heine said. “It’s the poor man’s weapon of mass destruction.”
Basic research provides public health an advantage against much more than man-made threats, however. It also serves as our last line of defense against naturally-emerging pathogens. Previously harmless to humans, HIV wasn’t studied before it appeared in the early ‘80s — basic research was the primary source of information at that time. Forty years later, our response to the COVID-19 pandemic relied heavily on the basic research conducted in immunology and virology over the past decade.
“I would argue, I think a lot of scientists would argue, that all the basic vaccine and mRNA biology and viral biology that had been done prior to the COVID year enabled a lot of places to very quickly develop COVID vaccines,” van Kessel said. “I don't think the public probably understands how much work went into that.”
Basic biological research shields us from threats that are evolving by the day. While it’s rarely in the spotlight, the research conducted by universities across the country is at the heart of our response to bioterrorism as well as to emerging, contagious diseases. Slashing funding from the agencies and organizations which support that research directly threatens American lives.
“Funding biology, funding basic science is absolutely critical for the health and well-being of every U.S. citizen,” van Kessel said. “And if the COVID pandemic didn't teach them that, I'd shudder to think what will.”
Spencer Schaberg (he/him) is a sophomore studying microbiology.
