I was a high school student who sang in the 10:30 Sunday "Folk Mass" at St. Johns. Bruce played the keyboards. He took an interest in me because I was interested in science and had the beginnings of a civic consciousness. He congratulated me once for an editorial I had published in the Frederick News-Post defending the rights of women. He said he was proud of me for caring and told me it was important to express my thoughts in a public sphere. Bruce encouraged me in the sciences. He even took me to his anthrax lab one day for job shadowing. That day they had some kind of a breakthrough and everyone was very excited.
I remember Bruce being joyful then, and joyful when he played on the keyboards at mass.
Bruce was tall, thin, gangly and awkward. He seemed to have no concept of himself in physical space. His pants were always high waters, and he wore threadbare oxford shirts. I remember that he wrote letters to the editor all of the time, perhaps every week. He was extremely political, vociferous, yet believed in humanity.
When I heard yesterday that he was the main suspect in the anthrax murders, I really couldn't wrap my head around it. I thought about the scenario all day and just couldn't put it together in my brain. I said something to my dad about it today. He said, "when a friend does something truly terrible, it shatters you for a while."
I did a Google search on the anthrax scare and saw the envelopes and letters. I don't know how I missed seeing them before but I recognized Bruce's handwriting on them immediately. To this day, I remember his handwriting on letters to the editor he was writing and on his notes for church. It was the worst I had ever seen. He seemed to have no concept for spatial relationships. Some letters were squashed together. Some spaced too far apart. And he seemed to have no sense for where lines should be on paper. Forgive me if I am wrong but when I saw those envelopes I though he must have done it. The letters, I must say, I did not recognize the handwriting on. But the envelopes were unmistakable.
It also seems to make perfect sense that many of the anthrax letters were letters to the editor. But the Bruce I thought I knew would never harbor hatred against Muslims. I thought he could not have possibly written those letters. But then I went to the Frederick News-Post and looked at their collection of editorials from Bruce (which must be incomplete, by the way, because I remember there were many more) and saw that the last one in 2004 was horrible. Completely anti-Muslim, it defended the right of a Rabbi to refuse an audience with an Imam because the Imam was a "gentile." This was not the Bruce I knew in the early 90's.
I spent a lot of yesterday trying to integrate my thoughts but it wasn't possible. In the end I gave up. Bruce may have been a person with a mental disorder that got progressively worse. Or maybe it was there for years and I just did not know him well enough to see it. I may never know what happened to Bruce Ivins, if he was a lone wolf or co-conspirator. I may never know his motives: Was he in some paranoid anti-Muslim fantasy trying to aggravate the tensions with the Middle East? Was he trying to test his own vaccine in real life to assert the importance of his line of study, and get better funding? Was he playing megalomaniac savior to a plague he himself created in an over-scale version of Münchhausen by Proxy? I may never know how to integrate what I knew then about Bruce Ivins the mentor and what I think I know now about Bruce Ivins the killer.
What seems more important is how to deal with the future. A small number of firemen are pyromaniacs. A proportion of priests are pedophiles. And perhaps a small number of scientists who deal with infectious diseases will be tempted to unleash them on the public. If this is true, we need more safeguards on these diseases to prevent people from wreaking havoc. It's also clear that we need more reinforcement on lab safety, considering the anthrax leaks at the Fort Detrick lab. Most of all, we must halt the production of weaponized biological agents that is criminal according to international law and the Geneva convention.
For me, I am going to remember Bruce Ivins as I knew him: a concerned citizen and scientist who helped me to find my path as a communicator of scientific principles to the public at large, in an effort to make the world a better place.
Nature Magazine's Climate Feedback blog reports that scientists have found physical evidence that the permafrost holds 60% more carbon than previously thought (98.2 million tonnes of carbon, or 1/6 of the amount currently in the atmosphere). This means that as the permafrost melts, it will release more greenhouse gases than previously thought and will therefore accelerate global warming at a faster pace. The research was done by scientists who collected permafrost samples using jackhammers.
