Science and the anthrax case: Case closed?

The debate among scientists continue with regard to how solid s science case the FBI has against accused anthrax attacker Dr. Bruce Ivins. The FBI held a telephone conference call between journalists and their scientific back-up to answer outstanding questions. Some questions were answered by promising that the science would be submitted for peer review to the scientific literature, but other questions remain, some scientific but mostly about how the science fits in to what would have had to have been “evidence beyond a reasonable doubt” in what the FBI says would have been a death penalty case. An Editorial, titled “ase Not Closed,” and accompanying new sarticle in the 20 August 2008 issue of the prestigious Nature lays out some of the scientific questions which remain:

• Only full disclosure can lift suspicions that the FBI has again targeted an innocent man.
• For example, many of the documents are just search warrants — a reminder that, despite extensive searches of Ivins’s house and cars, the FBI failed to come up with any physical evidence directly implicating him in the attacks. Similarly, the bureau has no evidence to place Ivins at the postboxes in Princeton, New Jersey, from which the anthrax-laden letters were sent.
• The core of the case against Ivins, as released so far, is contained in just a couple of dozen pages of affidavits — only four paragraphs of which discuss what the FBI says is the smoking gun: the genetic analysis of the anthrax powder from the letters. The FBI says it found four distinctive genetic mutations in the anthrax used in the attacks. It tested for these mutations in isolates of the Ames anthrax strain from sixteen domestic, government, and university laboratories, alongside ones from labs in Canada, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
• In all, more than 1,000 samples were collected, only 8 of which had the 4 mutations, according to the affidavit. Each of these isolates, it says, was directly related to a strain batch named RMR-1029, which was created in 1997 and held in a flask at the U.S. Army research facility in Fort Detrick. The affidavits describe Ivins as the “sole custodian” of that batch. Many other researchers had access to it, but the FBI claims to have eliminated them as suspects.

We note that the New York Times, in an editorial titled “Too Little Infomration,” reaches similar conclusions to those of Nature about whether or not the anthrax case is closed.