By Joby Warrick October 24
She was an ordinary lab technician with an
uncommonly dangerous assignment: drawing blood
from Ebola-infected animals in a secret military
laboratory. When she cut herself at work one day, she
decided to keep quiet, fearing she’d be in trouble.
Then the illness struck.
“By the time she turned to a doctor for help, it was too
late,” one of her overseers, a former bioweapons
scientist, said of the accident years afterward.
The
woman died quickly and was buried, according to one
account, in a “sack filled with calcium hypochlorite,”
or powdered bleach.
The 1996 incident might have been forgotten except for
the pathogen involved — a highly lethal strain of Ebola
virus — and where the incident occurred: inside a
restricted Russian military lab that was once part of
the Soviet Union’s biological weapons program . Years
ago, the same facility in the Moscow suburb of Sergiev
Posad cultivated microbes for use as tools of war.
Today, much of what goes on in the lab remains
unknown.
The fatal lab accident and a similar one in 2004 offer a
rare glimpse into a 35-year history of Soviet and
Russian interest in the Ebola virus. The research began
amid intense secrecy with an ambitious effort to assess
Ebola’s potential as a biological weapon, and it later
included attempts to manipulate the virus’s genetic
coding, U.S. officials and researchers say. Those efforts
ultimately failed as Soviet scientists stumbled against
natural barriers that make Ebola poorly suited for bio
warfare.
The bioweapons program officially ended in 1991, but
Ebola research continued in Defense Ministry
laboratories, where it remains largely invisible despite
years of appeals by U.S. officials to allow greater
transparency. Now, at a time when the world is
grappling with an unprecedented Ebola crisis , the wall
of secrecy surrounding the labs looms still larger,
arms-control experts say, feeding conspiracy theories
and raising suspicions.
“The bottom line is, we don’t know what they’re doing
with any of the pathogens in their possession,” said
Amy Smithson, a biological weapons expert who has
traveled to several of the labs and written extensively
about the Soviet-era weapons complex.
At least four military labs have remained off-limits to
any outside scrutiny since the end of the Cold War,
even as civilian-run institutions adopted more
transparent policies and permitted collaborations with
foreign researchers and investors, U.S. officials and
weapons experts say. Even acknowledging — as most
experts do — that Russia halted work on offensive bio
weapons decades ago, the program’s opacity is a
recurring irritant in diplomatic relations and a source
of worry for security and health experts who cite risks
ranging from unauthorized or rogue experiments to
the theft or accidental escape of deadly microbes.
Advertisement
Enhancing the threat is the facilities’ collection of
deadly germs, which presumably includes the strains
Soviet scientists tried to manipulate to make them
hardier, deadlier and more difficult to detect, said
Smithson, now a senior fellow with the James Martin
Center for Nonproliferation Studies, a research
institute based in Monterey, Calif.
“We have ample accounts from defectors that these are
not just strains from nature, but strains that have been
deliberately enhanced,” she said.
Other countries, including the United States, also
conduct military research on defending against
biological threats, including Ebola — a fact that draws
criticism from some health experts and charges of
hypocrisy from Russia. Pentagon officials counter that
U.S. biodefense laboratories are subject to oversight
and regular inspections by outside agencies.
Russian officials defend their right to military secrecy
and point to tangible benefits from years of Ebola
research.
This month, Russian officials announced
experimental Ebola vaccines developed by the same
two labs that lost workers to Ebola accidents: the
Defense Ministry’s Microbiology Research Institute at
Sergiev Posad and the Vector Center for Virology and
Biotechnologies in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
“Vaccines are ready,” Valery Chereshnev, chairman of
a science committee in the Russian parliament, told the
news agency Tass last week.
Two Ebola accidents
The Sergiev Posad lab was the site of the first of the
two Ebola accidents, which today remain the only
known cases in which lab workers died from
inadvertent exposure to the virus. Similar exposures
occurred in labs in the United States, Germany and
Britain, but in those cases the victims survived.
In the 1996 incident, first documented in Russian-
language news accounts and later described by author
David Quammen in his 2012 book, “ Spillover ,” a
worker named Nadezhda Makovetskaya cut herself at a
facility that was developing an experimental treatment
for Ebola derived from blood serum from horses.
Advertisement
The job was unusually risky because of the test
animals’ size, Lt. Gen. Valentin Yevstigneyev, a Defense
Ministry official overseeing biodefense work, was
quoted as telling Russian journalists.
“It is difficult to describe working with a horse
infected with Ebola,” he said. “One false step, one torn
glove and the consequences would be grave.”
Despite wearing layers of protective clothing, the
woman suffered a cut that penetrated her gloves, he
said. Makovetskaya hid the accident from her bosses
until it was too late, he said. Her death would be noted
in records of the World Health Organization as the
first Ebola fatality stemming from a laboratory
accident anywhere in the world.
In the second incident, a Russian lab worker contracted
Ebola in 2004 while working with infected guinea pigs
in the Vector virology research center outside
Novosibirsk. The victim, Antonina Presnyakova, 46,
was drawing blood from one of the animals on May 4
when she accidentally pricked her left hand with a
needle that pierced two layers of gloves.
Presnyakova was immediately hospitalized, but despite
medical treatment she contracted the disease and died
two weeks later.
A notorious past
The facilities that reported the accidents have a
notorious past, having once been part of a larger
complex of Soviet laboratories and testing facilities
devoted to the science of biological warfare.
Russian President Boris Yeltsin confirmed the existence
of the secret program to top U.S. officials in the early
1990s after declaring an end to bioweapons research in
the months after the Soviet Union’s dismantling.
Afterward, successive U.S. administrations dispatched
experts and resources to the former Soviet republics to
help secure dangerous pathogens and support the
transition to peaceful research at civilian-run labs,
including Vector, one of two known repositories for the
smallpox virus.
U.S. experts collected first-person accounts of the
research and visited outdoor testing facilities where
dogs, monkeys and other animals were exposed to
deadly pathogens, encounters described in the Pulitzer
Prize-winning history “ The Dead Hand,” by former
Washington Post editor David Hoffman. But Russian
officials refused to grant access to military laboratories
and never offered a full accounting of past weapons
research or described how they disposed of
weaponized biological agents.
Advertisement
But more recently, new historical scholarship, drawing
from Soviet-era records and interviews with Russian
scientists, has offered deeper insight into Soviet efforts
to make weapons out of a wide range of pathogens,
from anthrax bacteria to the viruses that cause
Marburg fever and Ebola.
According to these accounts, much of the Ebola
research appears to have been devoted to developing
vaccines to protect Red Army troops against the
disease. But scientists also ran experiments intended to
optimize the virus’s growth and isolate the parts of its
genome that make it deadly, said Raymond Zilinskas, a
microbiologist and co-author of “ The Soviet Biological
Weapons Program ,” an exhaustive history published in
2012 by Harvard University Press.
As Soviet scientists worked in secret to manipulate the
virus, other teams constructed large fermenters and
production facilities that could reproduce the altered
pathogens on an industrial scale, Zilinskas said.
“There is only one reason why you would have a large
production of these viruses, and that’s for offensive
purposes,”said Zilinskas, who, along with co-author
Milton Leitenberg, spent more than a decade
interviewing Russian scientists and other officials with
direct knowledge of the program.
In the years just before the Soviet Union’s collapse, the
program’s managers plunged into novel experiments —
with code names such as “Hunter” and “Bonfire” —
that sought to create superbugs that would resist
common antibiotics, or combine elements of different
microbes to increase their lethality. Sergei Popov, a
former Vector scientist who defected to the West,
described work on creating a “completely artificial
agent with new symptoms, probably with no ways to
treat it.”
“Nobody would recognize it. Nobody would know how
to deal with it,” Popov said in an interview broadcast
on the PBS program “Nova” in 2002 , a few years after
the scientist settled in the United States. Popov
declined a request for an interview this week.
Ultimately, the effort to concoct a more dangerous
form of Ebola appears to have failed. Mutated strains
died quickly, and Soviet researchers eventually
reached a conclusion shared by many U.S. biodefense
experts today: Ebola is a poor candidate for either
biological warfare or terrorism, compared with viruses
such as smallpox, which is highly infectious, or the
hardy, easily dispersible bacteria that causes anthrax.
Advertisement
Things might have turned out differently if the Soviets
had continued their work, Zilinskas and Leitenberg
suggest in their account. The science of genetic
modification was still in its infancy at the time Yeltsin
outlawed the program, essentially freezing the
research in place.
“Most, if not all, of the recombinants created in the
laboratory were not close to being weaponized,” the
book states. Still, it adds: “One must assume that
whatever genetically engineered bacterial and viral
forms were created . . . remain stored in the culture
collections of the Russian Federation Ministry of
Defense.”
No comments:
Post a Comment