process that he used to clean them, and also sent e-mails to various people noting his frustration that he had to wash them. To the Dugway Spores, Dr. Ivins added concentrates of 22 two-liter batches of spores which he himself prepared with the help of a laboratory technician. He combined his spores with those from Dugway, and put them in two flasks, labeled “GLP [Good Laboratory Practices] Spores.”[1] In addition, he created a Reference Material Receipt record on which he made the following notation: “Dugway Proving Ground + USAMRIID Bact’D – highly purified, 95% unclumped, single refractile spores.”[2] Finally, in his laboratory notebook 4010, page 074, he described the end-product of these efforts as “RMR-1029: ≥99% refractile spores; < 1% vegetative cells; < 1% non-refractile spores; ≤ 1% debris.” See Attachment F.
According to a copy of the Reference Material Receipt record, these new spores were to be stored in Building 1412; however, at some point, Dr. Ivins used “white out” to delete that entry on the sheet and wrote in Building 1425 – where his office and lab were located. This notation is consistent with his laboratory notebooks, which show that he created RMR-1029 in Building 1425 and never actually sent the flasks to Building 1412, as apparently was originally planned. Over the course of the ensuing years, Dr. Ivins recorded the transfer of spores from the RMR-1029 flasks, including date, recipient, and quantity. There are some problems with his record-keeping, primarily in that he failed to record consistently all the transfers, and he made a math error, resulting in a 100 ml deficit of the material on his log sheet.[3] However, investigators
- ↑ Although he received 164 liters in total, once combined, the spores themselves were harvested and resuspended in a total of approximately one liter of liquid, divided into two one-liter flasks. At some point, when the volume was sufficiently depleted, Dr. Ivins combined the spores into one flask. See Attachment E.
- ↑ During his many interviews with various agents in the early few years of the case, Dr. Ivins never mentioned his own spore contributions to RMR-1029, stating only that these spores came from Dugway. On June 29, 2004, Dr. Ivins was informed that the FBI was tracking the history, including the genealogy and usage of Ba isolates, requiring access to all of his laboratory notebooks – which contained the information detailing his 15% contribution to the “Dugway Spores.” In July 2004, the FBI began reviewing these laboratory notebooks. In an FBI interview on September 8, 2004, Dr. Ivins first acknowledged that he contributed some of the spores to RMR-1029.
- ↑ Investigators attempted to account for the 100 ml math error identified in Dr. Ivins’s RMR-1029 Receipt Log, scrutinizing each entry by reviewing the associated laboratory notebooks, and interviewing each of the researchers to whom the material was transferred. In addition, investigators reviewed every lab notebook associated with aerosol challenges and vaccine research in general, looking for work using RMR-1029 that was not recorded. Investigators identified 14 unrecorded “withdrawals” from RMR-1029 prior to the mailings, including usages by Dr. Ivins himself and transfers to other researchers, each of whom was investigated. According to this review, there was approximately 220 ml of RMR-1029 that was unaccounted for on Dr. Ivins’s Reference Material Receipt record prior to the mailings in 2001.
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