Dr. Roger Gerrard Breeze BVMS, Ph.D, MRCVS (10 October 1946 - 14 June 2016) was an English veterinary scientist who was an expert on bio-terrorism and a critic of mass culling to combat foot and mouth disease in animals.^{[1][2][3] [4]}

Education

• Graduated from Manchester Grammar School

• Received his Bachelor of Veterinary Medicine and Surgery and a PhD in Veterinary Pathology from the University of Glasgow (1964-1973)

Career

• Was a member of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons

• Lecturer at The University of Glasgow School of Veterinary Medicine (1968-1977)

• Professor and chair of the Department of Microbiology and Pathology at Washington State University (1977-1987)

• Deputy Director at the University of Washington Technology Center (1984-1987)

• Director at [Plum Island Animal Disease Center] , USDA ARS (1987-1995)

• USDA Agricultural Research Service: Area Director (1995 – 1998) and Associate Administrator (1998-2004)

• CEO/Owner/President of the Centaur Science Group (2004-2015)

• Bio-Security Deputy Program Director at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (2011-?)

Awards

Dr. Breeze received the Distinguished Executive Award from President Clinton in 1998 for his work at Plum Island and in biodefense.^[5]

References

• ^ "Professor Roger Breeze". thetimes.co.uk. Retrieved 10 November 2016.
• ^ "ROGER GERRARD BREEZE's Obituary on The Washington Post". legacy.com. Retrieved 10 November 2016.
• ^ "Roger Breeze, expert in animal diseases – obituary". telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 10 November 2016.
• ^ "PRO/AH/EDR> Obituary: Roger Gerrard Breeze". Retrieved 2020-05-19.
• ^ Threats, Institute of Medicine (US) Forum on Microbial (2007). Forum Member Biographies. National Academies Press (US).

External links

• Obituary

Roger Breeze was honoured in the US

When he was working at Plum Island, the US Department of Agriculture’s research laboratory, Professor Roger Breeze had to collect blood samples from pigs infected with foot and mouth disease to take to a meeting in Washington. The pigs were being held in separate rooms, which meant that Breeze would have to shower and change before going into each room.

“So to save time I just decided to do it naked,” he recalled. “There I was, going from room to room, crawling on my hands and knees with the squealing pigs, buck naked on the cold cement floor. Great fun.”

During his time at Plum Island — the equivalent of Britain’s Pirbright facility — Breeze helped to develop a farm-gate test that could detect the presence of the foot and mouth (FMD) virus in animals. His was a powerful voice against mass culling. He believed passionately that science and not slaughter was the best way to protect the world against outbreaks of animal disease.

He was horrified during the FMD epidemic in Britain as millions of healthy animals were killed, and he continued to campaign for a different approach. As chief scientific adviser to the US defence department’s threat reduction agency, dealing with bioterrorism, he argued that killing animals rather than diagnosing infection made it easier for terrorists to introduce pathogens undetected. “Bioterrorism,” he said in 2001, “is a cheap alternative to nuclear war and, chances are, that is how the US would be attacked.”

Even leaving terrorism aside, animal-borne pathogens, he believed, posed a grave threat. “People have no idea what’s out there,” he said. “It’s all so goddamn crazy. There’s something called mad cow disease in England that we’re keeping a close eye on. We’ve got ostriches from Namibia that could be carrying ticks with Congo-Crimean haemorrhagic fever. We’ve got Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs, alpacas, llamas, you name it.”

Constant border vigilance was vital to protect the US from pathogenic invaders. “We’ve got Russian immigrants trying to smuggle in crates of their pigeons or hide them under their coats. We had one multimillionaire a few years back who had 28 elephants flown to his own private airstrip, just smuggled them in right under our noses. God knows what he wanted them for. Trying to keep pace with all of this, it’s like we’re running round sticking fingers in a leaky dyke.”

Blunt and outspoken, he was recognised across the world for his expertise in animal husbandry, and his knowledge of the diseases animals can carry. He set up a multibillion-dollar programme to establish the surveillance of public health and veterinary disease in the former Soviet Union, co-ordinating a series of laboratories, which also monitor Russia’s biological weapons.

He received the Presidential Distinguished Executive Rank Award — the highest given to a civil servant — in 1998 for his work in safeguarding the nation’s food supply and protecting it against biological threats.

Roger Gerrard Breeze was born at Heywood in Lancashire, where his parents owned a small mixed farm with a dairy herd. His great-grandfather, a gamekeeper, had been killed by poachers, and his widow and her son, were turned out of the cottage to fend for themselves. They survived by hiding in unused buildings and eating off scraps for several years. The fact that his parents had managed to purchase 50 acres and build their own farm on the same land was deeply important to him. It is still farmed by the family.

He won a scholarship to Manchester Grammar School, took a veterinary degree, followed by a PhD in veterinary pathology at the University of Glasgow veterinary school, where he lectured from 1968 to 1977. One of his pupils was the son of James Herriot, the author of All Creatures Great and Small.

He was an adventurous cook, taking weeks to work out his menus

His expertise was informed by his own work as a vet. He recalled one occasion when he was delivering a newborn pig that was stuck in its mother’s womb. Just as he was finishing, he got another call about a sick dog: “I go right over, knock on the door, and a bunch of Hell’s Angels answer. They’re all looking at me kind of funny, but I’m too worn out to care. I examine the dog and see right away that it’s too far gone with distemper.

“So I take the dog out back and shoot it. The bikers pay me my fee, but they’re still staring at me wide-eyed, like I’m some kind of lunatic. It’s not until I’m back in my car looking at myself in the rear-view mirror that I see that my face and hair are all blotched and matted with pig placenta. I looked like the psycho vet from hell.”

He moved to the US in 1977 to become an associate professor at Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine, where he served as chairman of its department of veterinary microbiology and pathology and associate dean for research. He resigned in 1987 after funding was cut.

After taking over as director at Plum Island he oversaw a major overhaul of laboratory facilities and initiated research programmes into the genomic basis of disease pathogenesis, genetically engineered vaccine development and the development of innovative techniques to identify the pathogens responsible for disease.

One of those techniques, the pen-side dipstick test, meant that diseases such as FMD could be identified on site rather than from samples sent to a laboratory. It was, he pointed out, simple to use, effective and quick. Despite all his efforts, neither the US nor UK departments of agriculture were prepared to adopt it. Breeze watched as the killing continued. In despair he wrote: “I have five sons and a daughter so I will add a codicil to my will, tasking a great-great-grandchild to check in on [the department of agriculture’s] progress in 2061. Maybe with a Ouija board he or she can update me.”

Widely read, with a particular interest in books on British and European history, science, and mystery stories, he was an adventurous cook, and would prepare gourmet meals, perusing cookbooks for weeks as he worked out the menus. Despite living in America he read the British press daily and watched the BBC.

He was married twice. There were four sons from his first marriage to Christine Booth: Liam, who works in the chemicals and lab supply business; Roger, who does high-end cabinetry and construction; Matthew, who is a doctor; and Padraic, who manages VIP guests for a casino in Las Vegas. He has two young children, Sarah and Jacob, from his second marriage to Diana Jean Schemo, a journalist.

A reporter who interviewed Breeze described him as “a burly, avuncular man in a tweed sport coat and corduroys, a beguiling mix of Oxford professor and old salt”. On the wall of his office was a large lithograph of medieval invaders storming a well-defended citadel — a fitting image for a man who spent his career repelling invaders, albeit of the invisible variety. “Don’t know who they are,” he said. “Goths or something.”

Roger Breeze, veterinary scientist, was born on October 10, 1946. He died of cancer on June 14, 2016, aged 69

PLAYING WITH FIRE

Former Plum Island Director Dr. Jerry Callis says the association between Lyme disease and Plum Island is absurd. “Not now or ever had we anything to do with Lyme disease,” he says in measured impatience. “It’s existed in Europe for years—I’ve had it three times.” Asked if Plum Island ever worked with ticks on Plum Island, Dr. Callis gave a surprising answer.

“Plum Island experimented with ticks,” he says, adding, “but never outside of containment. We had a tick colony, where you take them and feed them on the virus, and breed the ticks to see how many generations it would last, on and on, until it’s diluted. Recently, they reinstated the tick colony.”

Tick colony?

Journalist Karl Grossman pressed a Plum Island lab chief some years ago about John Loftus’s claims in The Belarus Secret. “My impression is that there is no truth to this,” said Dr. Charles Mebus. But like director Harley Moon, Mebus had not been there in the 1950s to form an “impression.” He did tell the roving reporter what he knew firsthand: Plum Island previously worked on—and continued to work on—tick experiments on “soft ticks” that transmitted heartwater, bluetongue, and African swine fever viruses, but aren’t normally known for spreading the Bb bacteria. But that wasn’t the complete picture.

The lab chief failed to mention that Plum Island also worked on “hard ticks,” a crucial distinction. A long overlooked document, obtained from the files of an investigation by the office of former Long Island Congressman Thomas Downey, sheds new light on the second, more damning connection to Lyme disease. A USDA 1978 internal research document titled “African Swine Fever” notes that in 1975 and 1976, contemporaneous with the strange outbreak in Old Lyme, Connecticut, “the adult and nymphal stages of Abylomma americanum and Abylomma cajunense were found to be incapable of harboring and transmitting African swine fever virus.” In laymen’s terms, Plum Island was experimenting with the Lone Star tick and the Cayenne tick—feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs—during the ground zero year of Lyme disease. They did not transmit African swine fever to pigs, said the document, but they might have transmitted Bb to researchers or to the island’s vectors. The Lone Star tick, named after the white star on the back of the female, is a hard tick; along with its cousin, the deer tick, it is a culprit in the spread of Lyme disease. Interestingly, at that time, the Lone Star tick’s habitat was confined to Texas. Today, however, it is endemic throughout New York, Connecticut, and New Jersey. And no one can really explain how it migrated all the way from Texas.

Entomologist Dr. Richard Endris joined Plum Island in 1981 to spearhead increased tick research. Endris and the African swine fever team leader, Dr. William Hess, went to Cameroon and other parts of Africa on tick-hunting safaris. They stuck their arms deep inside burrows and were occasionally bitten by snakes and rats. They searched out wild warthog burrows in the brush using a “tick sucker”—a reversed leaf-blower with attached sieves and filters—to strain hundreds of tick specimens out of the moist sand. They set out little blocks of dry ice thirty feet apart and watched the ticks march to the smoking lumps (the carbon dioxide attracted them, fooling the ticks into thinking it was the exhale of mammalian hosts). Endris constructed two high-hazard “insectories,” insect labs, one in the back corner of Laboratory 101 and another in the basement. Each insectory was equipped with sand-filled climate chamber incubators with lighting that simulated photoperiods, protective rims around the airlock doors covered in sticky glue, and seals across all windows and drains. The ticks were fed on the blood of hairless suckling baby mice, where they would attach and molt and breed. All told, he reared over 200,000 hard and soft ticks of multiple species.7 Endris handled the tiny parasites with extreme care, using fine art brushes to move the minute nymphs into a transfer container—a urine specimen cup and a screen, glued together with globs of plaster of Paris. To test the ticks, the scientists first anesthetized diseased pigs, goats, mice, and calves, then placed the ticks on the sleeping animals. The ticks immediately attached and dug their mouth parts in. After a few hours of feeding, technicians detached the ticks with soft-tip forceps.

Endris set up quite an impressive tick colony when he arrived in 1981. But there was substantial earlier tick research. Dr. Hess’s tick experiments in the 1960s and ’70s with the Lone Star tick and others were conducted in unsafe conditions. Endris said the early tick research wasn’t focused: “Plum Island was not set up to deal with ticks at all.” In 1980, a Plum Island scientific oversight committee urged the USDA to hire “an appropriately trained medical entomologist,” calling it a “priority item.” The consultants also “strongly recommended” the construction of “a modern, approved insectory be undertaken for future research.”8 The advisers had serious concerns 7Dr. Endris also conducted experiments with sand flies on Plum Island in 1987 to test transmission of leishmaniasis, a bacterial ailment that if left untreated, has a human mortality rate of almost 100 percent. It is characterized by irregular bouts of fever, substantial weight loss, and swelling of the spleen and liver. The work was performed under contract for Fort Detrick, and serves as another example of a deadly germ warfare agent worked on at Plum Island for the Army, with no public knowledge or public safety precautions taken. Lab 257 25 with the primitive tick colony then in operation under the veterinarian Dr. Hess, who had been with Plum Island since 1953.

Dr. Endris and his boss, Hess, were both fired in 1988 by incoming director Dr. Roger Breeze, who promptly closed down their precious tick labs. They wrapped up research, put the viruses back in the freezers, and dumped the ticks into the autoclave, which steamed them at over 100 degrees centigrade.9 Endris, who went to work for Merck Pharmaceutical, scoffs at a Plum Island–Lyme disease connection. “Those kind of comments . . . indicate a gross ignorance of Lyme disease.” Before being fired by Dr. Breeze, Endris served as the scientific member of Southampton’s Joint Lyme Disease Task Force, and says with conviction he never heard of any Lyme disease relationship.

But Dr. Endris wasn’t on Plum Island in 1975; his entomology expertise and the “modern, approved” tick insectory he built were a full six years away. Unfortunately, Dr. Hess, who could shed light on the old tick experiments, died in 1999 in New Hampshire. It is clear, though, that he was proud of and cherished his thirty-five-year scientific career there—his family scattered his ashes in Plum Gut among the trade winds of Plum Island.

Dr. Garth Nicolson, a national expert on immune system disorders, isn’t satisfied with the ecological Lyme disease theory. “There’s a high possibility,” says Nicolson, who runs a California medical institute and has testified before Congress on Gulf War Syndrome, “that Lyme disease is a combination of infectious agents let loose from a laboratory, possibly from Plum Island by birds to the coast, causing multiple infections.” Nicolson contends Bb is often found in tandem with mycoplasma bacteria, which causes many of Lyme’s debilitating symptoms. Mycoplasmas found in foreign countries were studied on Plum Island since its inception; they may have been cross-contaminated with Bb and escaped the lab in the 1970s.

Dr. Wally Burgdorfer, who discovered the Lyme disease bacteria that bears his name, says, “The big question is where the ticks came from.” He believes that imported deer from Europe brought the deer tick species, and with it the bacteria, to America, where all three proliferated. I ask Dr. Burgdorfer about the Lyme disease connection to Plum Island. “Touching on something like that may cause a hell of a lot of problems,” he says.

“You have to show a development in the 1960s and 1970s, and it seems impossible—

“Unless,” he continues, “they cultivated the tick species on Plum Island, and unknowingly fed some ticks on animals or humans and a Borrelia spirochete [bacteria] accrued.” Dr. Wally Burgdorfer isn’t ready to prove the link, but he’s quick to point to the proven track record that helps make the case: “Plum Island is proof of the existence of breaks in biological safety.” And of a proposed biosafety-level-four upgrade at Plum Island, the most dangerous, he admits, “Even if it’s biosafety level four [the highest containment level], that doesn’t mean it’s safe.”

Birds were losing their minds at the Bronx Zoo. Some flew in perpetual circles. Others died in their cages. Veterinarian in charge [Dr. Tracey S. McNamara (born 1954)] was concerned about the twenty-four birds— ducks, owls, a bald eagle, a black-crowned heron, and magpies— suffering in perhaps the most famous zoo in the world in August 1999.

McNamara had recently attended Plum Island’s foreign animal disease school, where vets were taught how to diagnose exotic disease outbreaks and respond. But when she dialed the emergency telephone number set up to report possible foreign animal diseases, she found the line disconnected. The program was presided over by new Plum Island acting director Dr. Lee Ann Thomas, who had recently replaced director Dr. Alfonso Torres, who had replaced director Dr. Harley Moon when he left to return to Iowa in 1996, who replaced director Dr. Roger Breeze. Since Dr. Breeze’s departure, there had been no continuity in the laboratory’s leadership. According to sources, no one wanted the job because Breeze pulled the lab’s strings from afar.

In the last few days of that August, Dr. Deborah Asnis, a specialist in infectious disease at a small Queens hospital, noticed an unusual pattern. Two and then four hospital patients, all elderly, contracted fevers with headaches, muscle weakness, and mental ailments that progressed

[....]

Pg 33 :

If Plum Island was uninterested in West Nile virus in the past, it seems to have acquired a taste for the germ. In October 1999, on the heels of the outbreak, Lab 101 held four healthy Equus caballus, the common domestic horse. They were given intravenous injections of a West Nile virus strain obtained from Dr. McNamara’s Bronx Zoo collection of frozen infected birds. Each day, as the horses progressively sickened, animal handlers examined them. The scientists noted that the virus was not detectable in the blood until thirty days post-infection, but occurred within forty-five days; all four succumbed. Autopsies were performed, and four new “horse adapted” virus strains were extracted for the Plum Island virus library. If West Nile virus is not detectable in horses for thirty days, that means the North Fork horses became infected with the virus bug in July of 1999, and perhaps earlier.

This all begs the question: did Plum Island have West Nile fever virus at the time of the outbreak? [Dr. Robert Ellis Shope (born 1929)]’s Yale Arbovirus Research Unit (YARU) across Long Island Sound held twenty-seven different strains of West Nile virus in its New Haven, Connecticut, freezers until 1995, when he moved to the University of Texas and took his strains with him. YARU and Plum Island often trafficked in viruses, most notably the dangerous Rift Valley fever virus in 1977. Had Dr. Shope shared West Nile virus reference samples with his friend Plum Island director Dr. Roger Breeze—the island laboratory being the only official location where foreign animal germs like West Nile virus are supposed to be studied? When I ask him, former Plum Island director Jerry Callis says he didn’t think it was in the virus repository in August 1999. “I never thought it was important enough.

It’s more of a mild virus, not among the serious animal virus diseases,” he says, even though it appears fatal to birds. But Callis had left Plum Island in 1987 when Dr. Breeze came in. USDA official Wilda Martinez confirmed Dr. Callis’s beliefs when she assured the public that West Nile wasn’t studied there prior to the outbreak—but she declined to say whether the virus was in their freezers.

[...]

THE RIFT VALLEY FEVER EXPERIMENT

Unlike bacteria, which can be seen easily under a traditional microscope, viruses are too small to be detected. To measure the concentration of viruses, scientists use the plaque-reduction method, whereby a visibly clear area in a culture dish, called a plaque, is left behind after the virus destroys the healthy culture cells. By measuring the plaque—essentially the damage the invisible viruses have done—you can get an idea of the titer, or how virulent and concentrated the virus is. Viruses are measured in plaque-forming units, or PFUs. In the Plum Island study of the deadly strain of the Rift Valley fever virus, the lab techs took a starter culture of African green monkey kidney cells out of the freezer and propagated them in culture plates using a growth medium of amino acids and heated calf fetus serum. To brew large quantities of virus, they fed Zagazig 501-plus on the monkey cells they cultured inside sterilized fermenters, not unlike the ones seen at a microbrew pub. Zagazig 501 was the Rift Valley fever strain pulled from a fatal hemorrhagic human case during the Egyptian outbreak. Peters added some kick at Fort Detrick—the plus—when he passed the virus through two sets of lung cell cultures taken from rhesus monkey fetuses. It was potent as hell. From the fermenter, they decanted the slurry into hundreds of 1-milliliter ampoules and stored them in nitrogen-cooled freezers at minus 70 degrees Celsius. They thawed each ampoule immediately before pacing briskly through the “hot corridor” to the animal room to inject a test animal.

Rift Valley fever virus affects its victim much like the well-known Ebola virus. Ten of the sixty sheep were used as controls, meaning they were not afforded the luxury of a vaccine. Twelve hours after the unlucky ones are exposed to the virus, viremia—the onslaught of a virus infection within the body—begins. Their temperatures rise sharply and their hearts beat rapidly in an attempt to circulate an immune response to parts of the body suffering from localized attack. But their immune systems cannot counter the multiplying germ. The blood circulates viruses to all quarters of the body, where they attach to the surface of organ and membrane cells, then infiltrate those cells. Within the cytoplasm, the virus hijacks the cell’s machinery and replicates itself exponentially. Inside of one hour the cells lyse, or burst, unleashing thousands of new baby viruses upon neighboring healthy cells, where they attach and repeat the vicious cycle ad infinitum.

The exploded cells cause edema, or large buildups of fluid in the connective tissues throughout the body. The sheep spasm and lose their gait, leaning up against the cell-block wall of the windowless room to stay upright. A pregnant ewe spontaneously aborts her young onto the floor in a grotesque scene. The sheep vomit blood and discharge red-tinged mucus from their noses. The dizziness in their heads makes them slide, one by one, down the wall and onto the concrete floor.

Within forty-eight hours, eight will be dead. Samples of each animal’s blood-riddled excreta are taken to see if the virus passed through. The two that make it to recovery are then killed, along with the fifty sheep in the test flock. Each is lifted onto a cart by an animal handler and wheeled into the necropsy room. On kill day, veterinarians necropsy (animal autopsy) each of the animals under bright examination lights, snap photos of the diseased internal organs for later analysis, clip tissue samples from here and there, and send the carcasses down the chute to the incinerator charging room.

The initial experiment was a success. The human vaccine produced immunity in all of the vaccinated sheep and warded off the virus.

With the April 1 safety deadline met, the Plum Island scientists decided to push their luck. They revaccinated employees and continued the groundbreaking research, extending the study through the end of April and into the start of the mosquito season. Supplanting the ubiquitous foot-and-mouth disease virus work, Rift Valley fever fast became the island’s germ of choice. Eight Shetland ponies injected with Rift Valley fever were observed daily and their rectal temperatures recorded for forty days to see if they were susceptible hosts or carriers. Necropsied on day forty-one, the ponies showed no internal signs of disease or clinical signs. However, the vets found that the Arabian horses maintained low levels of viremia, and, as such, were potential reservoirs to infect biting mosquitoes.

Next, they brought in another sixty-three sheep for a third Rift Valley fever project. This study revealed that infected sheep could pass USDA food inspections for human consumption. Drs. Dardiri and Walker observed the virus lingering in spleen tissues, but reasoned that “the spleen is not normally eaten.” The scientists also announced in a press release that they produced “antigens and reagents” for future use. Put more plainly, they were brewing Zagazig 501 virus in gross quantities on Plum Island.

As the studies progressed, tensions eased between the Plum Island and Suffolk County officials. Together they drew up emergency plans for hurricanes, civil disobedience (like violent animal rights demonstrations), fires, sabotage, radiological incidents, and unauthorized removal of an exotic pathogen. But the détente was short-lived.

Dr. Martin Mayer, the county’s disease control chief, got a call from an investigative reporter over the weekend of April 29. Did he know Plum Island extended research until May 8, eight days into the mosquito season and six weeks after they promised to conclude? “No, I’m completely unaware,” Mayer said. He called the island first thing Monday morning, and Walker promised him they would be finished—honestly, this time—by week’s end. “A couple of extra days aren’t going to hurt,” conceded Mayer, calling it a “minor” deviation. Yet mosquitoes in the region were hatching and beginning to fly, according to the county’s mosquito control chief, who told Newsday the pests would not be swarming for another week or two over “dry areas” like Plum Island. This “dry area” boasted three freshwater swamp beds covering 120 acres of an 843-acre island, and over twenty different species of mosquitoes called Plum Island home. Dr. Callis said the project ran late because researchers were in the middle of their studies.

While Plum Island faced three ongoing investigations—one for a virus outbreak, one for a construction fiasco, and one for criminal fraud—scientists uncorked vials of deadly Zagazig 501 (and its progeny) and infected cattle, horses, sheep, pigs, and even seals. Few of the air filter, incinerator, and negative airflow repairs were complete.

The labs were vulnerable, and the USDA was compounding the risk.

[...]

A TROUBLING SCENARIO

Discussing Rift Valley fever—over a decade before the West Nile virus became part of the American lexicon— [Dr. Clarence James Peters (born 1940)] and Plum Island director Dr. Roger G. Breeze wrote, “[T]he most probable routes of introduction of Rift Valley fever into the United States are via a viremic person who will be bitten by a mosquito or an infected mosquito aboard a plane.

The infected mosquito will then infect a susceptible animal in which the virus will be amplified for the infection of more mosquitoes.”

But what if the virus performed an end run, not from the nation’s international airports, but from within, set free from a poorly run top-secret facility where it was kept in large quantities? What might have happened?

And how?

147 to 150

All the negative press, the PR missteps, the biological bungling, and the outright mismanagement had impacted Dr. Callis’s reign as Lord of the Manor. No longer was he the twenty-seven-year-old kid scientist who, at Doc Shahan’s side, helped build the “World’s Safest Lab.”

One source described the situation on the island at the time as “stagnation.”

Another, “benign neglect.” “Jerry had a helluva vision about Plum Island,” says his successor, Dr. Roger G. Breeze. “But that vision sort of ran its arc. And I’m not trying to be critical about where that arc comes to rest.”

But rest it did.

A former official cites the director’s penchant for travel as a contributing factor. “I’d say he was one for the ages, one of the few scientists who was a good leader and a good scientist. But by then his mission wasn’t running Plum Island—it was running around the world, visiting other countries doing disease work, addressing meetings, and attending seminars—that was his agenda. And that’s one of the reasons why Plum Island went to hell.”

All the negative newspaper stories, egged on by Karl Grossman, Newsday, and others—much of it warranted, but not all of it—weathered the old veterinarian beyond repair. “There’s one thing I think Jerry failed at,” says Dr. Jim House, “and every director after him has also failed at—public relations. There was and is no program to explain the benefits of the place, the fact that it is a national treasure, that it is needed. Nobody does that—nobody goes out and gets the community involved and lets them understand it.”

Much of that failure was an extreme desire for secrecy. “I think Jerry had this old-school cold war mentality,” House contemplates. “You must remember, the Russians thought Plum Island was a really wild site out there. They knew it existed, and they played this game, they built it up in areas, saying it was a biological warfare site, or at least something of cold war value. And this just carried on.” Dr. Carol House, also a retired Plum Island scientist (and Jim’s wife), adds, “I think Jerry liked that.” Though the outside advisory committee—now headed by Dr. Robert Shope—urged Plum Island to hold frequent press events, the hurtful, enduring sting caused by Grossman’s 1971 AP germ warfare story caused Callis to lock up the gates tighter. Problems and difficulties on Plum Island were met not with candor and public recognition, but with suppression. Ironically, the lack of sunlight on Plum Island’s activities over the years would lead the public—and rebuffed curious news reporters—to always assume the worst, fanning the flames of mystery, intrigue, and rampant speculation.

In one of his final communications, an uncharacteristically dry memo lacking the usual pleasantries, Dr. Callis told Plum Island employees that federal budget reduction legislation called for 5 percent cuts across the board, further depleting Plum Island’s shoestring budget. To fight skyrocketing costs, he was considering a proposal to consolidate the two laboratory buildings into one, close the old Army-vintage administration buildings, and make Laboratory 101 a self-contained operation. This might—might— require cuts in staff, he said, but lest anyone worry, he would reduce positions through natural attrition, not through layoffs. By this time, Callis twice had stopped a move to privitize the federal workforce and reduce salaries, benefits, and the total number of staff positions. Callis may have faulted in many areas, but he remained doggedly loyal to his people, and to the promises he had made to them a quarter century ago: “respect personal dignity . . . recognize work achievement . . . provide work security. . . . Believe in the Golden Rule and always practice it.”

Just days after his memo, the USDA hammer came down heavily.

Regime change came quickly on Plum Island—Washington called up Jerry Jackson Callis, and told him his time was up.

“Let’s just say retirement was not his own idea,” says a source. “It happened abruptly—there were a lot of people and politics involved. He had really been there too long. We needed much better progression. We didn’t need one person in one place—no matter how good he was.” While Dr. Robert Shope maintains Callis’s retirement was his own decision, other sources confirm he was “pushed out.”

The USDA “elevated” him to the post of senior research adviser. This allowed him to maintain regular contact with his beloved island and offered another perk. Says one administrator familiar with the offer, “They said to him, ‘We’ll give you an office on the island, and carte blanche for several years on travel.’ And Washington did that by dragging in money from other agencies and hidden places. They took real good care of him. It was a payoff, a golden parachute, if you will—they had to give it to him.”

Dr. Roger Breeze, his successor, elaborated. “Jerry Callis is a very exceptional person. The United States never had a facility like Plum Island, until the debacle in Mexico hit between 1946 and 1952. People had to go out there, find it, and build it. Meanwhile, Jerry went over to Holland to learn about viruses from the Dutch. Now if you said to someone today, ‘Hey this is the federal government and we want you to go to a foreign country to learn this whole new thing, and when you come back, we’re going to build a laboratory for you,’ people would laugh in your face.

‘Yeah—sure—bullshit—can I get that in writing?’ But Callis did it.” Lucrative offers from private laboratories had come his way for years, and he turned them all down. Plum Island was his life, and the island’s life was in many ways his—it was his first job out of school, the only job he’d ever worked. Like a parent to his child, he could never see fit to abandon it.

And there he remained for four decades.

Most of those interviewed for this book have the highest respect for Jerry Callis. “Jerry built Plum Island into a very prestigious place,” says Carol House. “I think [his successors] had a hard time following in his shoes—anyone would, because of his memory and his depth of knowledge on everything that was Plum Island. A good—no, a very good manager.”

Dr. Shope acknowledges that “every leader has some disgruntled employees,” but he found Dr. Callis nothing but “a real straight arrow.” John Boyle, a former budget director at Plum Island, called him “a brilliant man, at one time a great scientist, and probably still that way today.” Over time, a fondness and respect bonded the staff to their beloved director. “It wasn’t always perfect,” says building engineer Stanley Mickaliger. “There were discrepancies, and sure there were gripes—which were all normal. But we all understood something very important—Jerry Callis took care of us.”

When asked about his retirement, Callis says simply and humbly, “I’ve enjoyed my career tremendously.”

Plum Island librarian Frances Demorest—second in seniority to the now retiring director—saluted her director:

Dear Doctor Callis:

Our thoughts return to 1953 and the local turmoil over the decision to locate the Laboratory at Plum Island off Orient Point. The representatives from USDA were not received warmly but, as time went on, the turmoil and anger subsided. It has been a long time and we have crossed a lot of water together!

Through the efforts of two fine Directors, Dr. Shahan and yourself . . . the Center was recognized both nationally and internationally. Also, the Center made a tremendous economic impact on this end of Long Island.

Harrison and I trust you will experience a busy, fruitful, productive retirement, and enjoy GOOD HEALTH and fond MEMORIES for a “JOB WELL DONE.”

Not everyone lamented his retirement. Some expressed glee over the change in the guard and looked forward to replacing the dusty old administration with fresh new leadership. “A lot of people thought of him as an emperor who treated Plum Island as his personal fiefdom,” one former scientist says, “and to a degree, I believed he did. Whether your [research] program was funded depended on whether he liked you or not.” But those who cheered Callis’s departure didn’t realize how good they had had it. “I tell you what,” says one of them. “Six months later we were making novenas to Saint Anthony that he’d come back.”

Because what came next would be far worse.

“You know, there’s this old saying on Plum Island,” says one worker.

“ ‘When Dr. Callis went, the island went with him.’ Once they moved him out, everything went downhill.

“In my humble opinion, this is when the whole island started to fall apart.”

Roger Breeze wanted to be a vet because the local veterinarian was the most successful person who came by his family’s sixty-acre dairy farm in the north of England. The Breezes milked cows and raised chickens in the 1950s. They delivered creamy milk each morning to their customers’ doors, along with fresh eggs and chickens, eking out a living by profiting on both production and delivery.

Roger’s idea was to follow in that country vet’s footsteps. When he was seventeen, he attended vet school at the University of Glasgow in nearby Scotland, one of the oldest universities in the world. Though it wasn’t his original plan, upon graduation he was given the coveted opportunity to teach at Glasgow. It was a prestigious appointment he couldn’t turn down. To help make ends meet, he opened a local vet practice and worked nights and weekends. “I had some crazy nights,” Breeze told Outside magazine:

• Once I had just finished pulling a newborn pig that was stuck in its mother’s womb when I get another call about a sick dog. I go right over, knock on the door, and a bunch of Hell’s Angels answer. They’re all looking at me kind of funny, but I’m too worn out to care. I examine the dog and see right away that it’s too far gone with distemper. So I take that dog out back and shoot it. The bikers pay me my fee, but they’re staring at me wide-eyed, like I’m some kind of lunatic. It’s not until I’m back in my car looking at myself in the rearview mirror that I see that my face and hair are all blotched and matted with pig placenta. I looked like the psycho vet from hell.

Two years into his professorship Breeze emigrated to America—a bold and unconventional move. He saw that young go-getters like himself, no matter how bright they were or how hard they worked, would be shunted into Glasgow’s faculty caste system. There were eighteen veterinary pathology positions in all of Britain, and a slow thirty-two-lockstep ladder of advancement. Every professor parked on the same step was paid the same meager salary. “It didn’t matter whether you taught Sanskrit or law,” he remembers. “ ‘As long as there is still death, there’s hope,’ we used to say.”

Roger Breeze disliked the stuffy peerage. What does your father do? Who do you know? What high school did you attend? No one seemed to care about what was really important—one’s talent and ability to perform. “Can you imagine people in America asking, ‘Where did he go to high school?’ ” Breeze asks. “How the hell would anybody know where to look, let alone care?”

The religious discrimination also bothered him. Once a man “of great power” at Glasgow asked him to return to his alma mater to teach a discipline he didn’t know. When Breeze explained his lack of knowledge in the discipline, the man said it didn’t matter, saying, “There are too many English Catholics up here teaching and we need more Scottish Protestants.” Ironically, Breeze was neither a Scot nor a Protestant—but with his University of Glasgow pedigree, they assumed he was.

All those stodgy trappings—and the royal mahogany paneling and leather furniture—never aroused him. No one in America cared what the laboratory lobby looked like and what the scientists’ last names were, so long as they produced great science. In America, Breeze was more at home than he ever was in Britain. “Here it’s ‘On with the job!’ That’s what I like.”

THE BREEZE REIGN

For all but a few of today’s scientists, it’s not about the money. It doesn’t matter if you earn a million per year if five years down the road you are less employable than you were when you started. It’s about science, but also, apparently, the glory. “They all want the glory,” Breeze asserts. “That’s what the whole thing is sold on today, and as director, your job is to provide that.” To reach scientific brilliance, you need the proper tools, and that means expensive equipment. Most scientists do not question their ability; what they do question is whether a potential employer can offer the equipment and support they need.

Dr. Breeze’s theory, honed in his first career post in the New World, went like this: institutions like Yale and Columbia, because of their reputations, have no problem recruiting postdoctorates for their three-year apprenticeships with lab chiefs. In this regard, America was little different from the Old World. Elsewhere down the ladder of prestige, that isn’t quite the case; competition is fierce among the rest, and to prevail, a lab director must deliver the resources.

In 1984, after just a few years on United States soil, Dr. Breeze rose to chairman of the microbiology department at the Washington State University vet school, where he oversaw twenty-five faculty members. The school had a unique approach to its faculty recruitment that fit well with Breeze’s management style. “It was a very entrepreneurial university,” he recalls. “You could walk into the president’s office and tell him you had a problem and you could cut a deal.” He could reduce a salary or eliminate a position altogether and use those funds to buy an electron microscope for a star faculty member. Utilizing this flexibility, Dr. Breeze built the best department of its kind in the nation. In the mid-1980s, however, a new provost arrived. Out went the freewheeling philosophy. Now, over half of Breeze’s powerhouse faculty was being courted by rival universities and bombarded with lucrative job offers.

On a cold January morning Breeze went to the provost’s office to plead his case. “Listen,” he said in his deep Scottish-sounding brogue. “You have to give us the flexibility we once had—please—or we’re going to lose our people!” The provost leaned over his desk and lectured his spunky department chair. “Roger, you need to understand something. WSU is never going to be a great university. We’re going to be a place where people pass through to achieve their best elsewhere. You’ve done a fantastic job developing these people—really you have—but you’ll have to accept that.” Breeze could hardly believe his ears. What the provost was really saying was that there’s a cap on one’s success, that one could go no further. And in America, no less!

“I told him, ‘I have never heard so much bullshit in all my life.’ ” Breeze turned and walked out of the provost’s office, feeling like he was back at Glasgow. He trudged back to his campus office, darting between waist-deep snowdrifts. He spied an orange slip of paper on the windshield of his car parked out in front of the quaint brick vet school building. “What the hell is this?” he yelled out. It was a $10 parking violation: Parking Without a Permit. “When it snowed,” recalls Breeze, “they only brushed off the windshield on the driver’s side looking for the permit.” His parking permit had slid to the other side of the dashboard.

The ticket was enough to push Breeze over the edge. “I absolutely became unglued.” Breeze stormed up to his office and resigned his chair. Previously, the USDA had asked him to run the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. He had responded by asking, “Are you crazy?” The gig came with a $20,000 pay cut, made worse by a cross-country move and a huge cost-of-living increase. Now he was the crazy one. Breeze renounced his British citizenship, pledged allegiance to the United States, and cast his lot with Plum Island, an island monarchy all his own. To Breeze, unless one’s science was “the very best in the field,” one’s career was finished. He left WSU, taking with him the “entrepreneurial style” he perfected there.

“The whole management style I have is this—you have to go in, not just with money, but with resources.” He could help the USDA deliver those resources at Plum Island. Or, as one familiar with Breeze puts it, “He could go up there and kick some ass.”

When Roger Breeze arrived, he found Plum Island’s laboratories “literally falling into the sea.” Turning Plum Island into a gleaming new facility would take a tremendous financial effort, and money was unavailable. “Nobody said to me, ‘Come to Plum Island and we’ll pour money into it. . . . ’ Washington thought the money they poured in gave them more of the same—the same science that wasn’t good enough.” The goal then would be to take Plum Island’s small budget and stretch it as far as possible, to lure the best scientists with new lab equipment, and keep them happy once they arrived. “I told [USDA headquarters] we either have to do it this way or recruit only Czechs, because this place looks like Prague in 1956 and they’ll feel right at home here.” Meanwhile, the National Academy of Sciences, having excoriated Plum Island, said it couldn’t be fixed and urged it be closed down. While Breeze spoke persuasively to the skeptics about how the island would turn around, privately he harbored doubts. He knew all eyes were on him, looking for his tenure to end in disaster. His first failure could very well be his last.

Taking over the Plum Island kingdom, Roger Breeze had put himself up against the proverbial wall. He had some snake oil to sell. The question was, could he sell it?

The first thing Breeze’s “science first for glory” regime did was tear apart Plum Island’s budget. Since the Army had left Plum Island in 1954, ongoing funding problems were par for the course. Dismayed over early cuts in his budget, Doc Shahan said, “The project may stand or fall, depending on adequate support in the beginning. . . . [USDA] cannot properly discharge its responsibilities without such a facility as Plum Island which is at present only an infant facing gargantuan tasks.”

When Dr. Callis first took the reins in the 1960s, he too felt the money crunch: “For the last several years, the salaries of wage board employees have increased annually . . . [but] our budget has not been increased by an amount equivalent. . . .” And in the 1980s, Dr. Shope’s advisory board proposed Plum Island prepare two budgets—one outlining the costs of a mainland laboratory, and another showing the additional costs of operating a facility on an island, in an effort to sway Congress into properly funding Plum Island. This way, Congress could understand why it had to fork over such large chunks of money to support functions as compared to research. Without the necessary funds, said the advisers, Plum’s mission could be “jeopardized.”

To raise Plum Island from its depths, Breeze first focused on where the money was going. For this, he needed a crack accountant, a brilliant numbers guy. Enter John Patrick Boyle, known as one of the best number crunchers in the business. An Irishman of medium build, with a frosty white beard, Boyle in his heavy Boston accent recalls Breeze’s offer: “ ‘You’ll have to build it up from nothing, John,’ he said to me. ‘It presents a real challenge.’ ” As they discussed the opportunity, something about the Scot (though he was really a north-Englishman, everyone thought him a Scot) captivated Boyle. He saw in Breeze a rarity in government service—a visionary with an ambitious plan, backed up with the enthusiasm and an uncanny relentless drive to carry it through. Boyle signed on.

Boyle’s first visit to Plum Island was like something out of an episode of The Twilight Zone—to him, it was an eerie isle that time forgot. The once impeccably groomed and abundantly flowering “plantation” was now a wildly overgrown jungle. Paint had chipped off Lab 101’s walls and huge chunks barely clinging on were flapping in the ocean winds. “Scientists were just sitting around doing nothing.” Or at least Boyle thought they were scientists. “You couldn’t tell the difference between a scientist, a tech, or the guy who swept the floor.” The place had gone to pot—it was filthy and carried a rank, musty smell. The floors, caked with stains, hadn’t been mopped in ages. On laboratory bench tops, which required an ultrasterile surface for virus research, Boyle spied dried soda pop, crumbs, and papers strewn about in piles. He took his index finger and swiped it along a pipe that ran along the wall, removing a quarter-inch layer of dust. “It was just ugly,” says Boyle. “And everyone had the same attitude—‘fuck it.’ ”

Plum Island was also a mess in other ways, especially when seen through the assiduously burning eyes of an accountant. “There was a lot of what we call indirect research cost [IRC],” remembers Boyle. “Scientific money that is eaten up by administration, support, building maintenance, grounds crew. And this side of Plum Island was essentially a Golden Cow.” John Boyle explained how it worked during the reign of Dr. Callis: “Engineering would say, ‘Well, we have this hurricane season, and we need [power] redundancy up here because we may lose a 50,000-kilovolt transformer that might go out on a Saturday night, when there’s no one around.’ They would use scare tactics like these, and add, ‘Now if we lose that 50-KV transformer, then we lose power to Lab 101, we lose our negative airflow, and there’s danger of what we have escaping out into the atmosphere.’ And it would scare the bejesus out of management, so they’d say, ‘Here, take this $75,000 and purchase a generator.’ They dazzled them with footwork.”

No longer would the tail wag the dog. To Breeze and his man Boyle, the primary need was not support, but rather Plum Island’s pièce de résistance, its holy grail: the science. Without science, there could be no glory. “The IRC was outrageous—it was 78 percent [of Plum Island’s yearly budget] when we got there.” At a normal lab, Boyle says, it would be in the low twenties. To improve science and keep the island from being shut down? “Shave the IRC down to a bare minimum,” says Boyle. No longer would engineering and plant management be the Golden Cow that got whatever it wanted. Boyle sharpened his pencil and got to number crunching, putting in late nights and seven-day workweeks, huddled over stacks of spreadsheets and financial data. With a stroke of his pencil, he slashed the animal supply contract and whittled down oil and new vehicle purchases. Next, he started counting up all the widgets—electric saws, toilet paper, circuit breakers, circuit boards, soap, hammers, nails, lightbulbs—and figured out where costs were coming from. “We bought thirty items, used twelve, and they reported six in inventory,” he recalls. “People were carrying stuff off the island on Sundays, typical stuff people try to steal from the government— except here, they were doing it wholesale.”1 He installed a phone switchboard that provided reports of outgoing calls. “The day after I announced that one, there were cries I was violating people’s privacy.” But it worked—the monthly Plum Island phone bill plummeted in just one month from $7,000 to $3,000.

“John, I am hiring a doctor and I need an X-ray crystallography machine,” Breeze told Boyle early on. “It costs half a million dollars—now go find me the money for it.” Coming up with that kind of dough stumped even the uncanny number cruncher, who had just completed chiseling together a budget. He tore the whole thing apart again and found Breeze another $500,000, securing a renowned doctor’s transfer to Plum Island. “He was very demanding to work for,” Boyle says, smiling fondly, relishing working on the Breeze dream team. “I had to pull a string here and there and unravel it all and put it back together—and of course I found the money.” But from where had it come?

“If you watch the pennies,” Boyle’s parents had taught him growing up in hardscrabble Dorchester, an Irish Catholic inner-city Boston neighborhood, “the dollars will take care of themselves.” Now he was watching nickels and dimes, too, and to Breeze’s delight. “We cut a substantial amount of money,” says Boyle. “We cut well over a million dollars.” He believes even more could have been slashed. After six years on the job, says Boyle, “I still didn’t know where all the waste was. There was still some shit going on that I couldn’t put my finger on—which tormented me to no end.”

With the budget in Boyle’s capable hands, Breeze next brightened up the physical appearance of the laboratories, taking special interest in the toilets. “Nobody had cleaned these rest rooms—there would be no toilet paper, and the sinks were filthy. I wasn’t prepared to live with people not doing their job. Everything at Plum depends upon a handful of scientists who are pulling the train.” At a minimum, those scientists had to have sparkling bathrooms, perhaps the most basic of all provisions. “I had to completely remove all of the furniture in the toilets because it was so bad—so dirty—it couldn’t be cleaned.” Breeze ordered brand-new porcelain, metalwork fixtures, shiny faucets, and gleaming tile, and refinished the rest rooms. Then he explicitly set forth the frequency and manner in which they were to be cleaned. He also conducted unannounced spot checks throughout the week to ensure full compliance.2 “It was a personal tour de force,” Breeze gloats.

But that was only child’s play compared to what he did next. Within a year, the new administration had become a lean and mean machine, deaf to the rants and raves of the support staff and their supposed needs.3 So when Walter Sinowski, the building foreman of Lab 257, told them in early 1991 that an emergency backup power cable needed repair, management had a different answer this time around: no.

Roger Breeze had become a slave to science.

Soon after taking over the reins, Breeze set out to acquaint himself with the island’s three hundred daytime inhabitants. “When he first came in, we really thought he might be one of us,” says one worker. Whereas Jerry Callis wore a suit and tie to work each morning, Dr. Breeze scarcely looked like a doctor, let alone the director. Sporting a plaid shirt and jeans and smiling broadly, Breeze was slapping workers on the back as if they were old friends. Veteran employee Martin Weinmiller recalls Breeze coming ashore on his first day. Heading home after the graveyard shift, Weinmiller watched the ferry bearing the new director tie up at the harbor dock. “He walks off the boat, and looks out at the island for a time. Then he says, ‘Either I’m going to make this place or I’m going to break it.’ ”

Easing himself quite comfortably into the chair occupied by Dr. Callis for decades, Breeze quickly set the tone with employees with his newsletter, the Plum Island Diary:

• I am sure that the last many months have been very frustrating and disheartening. . . . This Center is not going to close, we are not moving to another location. . . . Together, we are going to plan and build the next proud 35 years of our history.

• The impression potential recruits gain of [Plum Island] must be diminished by the shabby state of most of our buildings and grounds resulting from years of neglect—and I know that our loyal E&PM [engineering and plant maintenance] staff who have tried so hard to do so much must also be discouraged.

• If we complain about federal salaries, crumbling buildings, and bureaucratic inertia, it should be no surprise that people lost interest in working here. Let’s be proud of what we do and speak positively wherever we can.

• Those with problems and suggested solutions can help me more than those with problems alone. . . . Thanks for your input in advance.

The whispers began: Hey, look out for this guy. When Jerry Callis looked out upon his island from his office perched over the Army parade ground, he saw an honorable band of three hundred loyal, dedicated employees. Breeze saw support staff and veteran scientists as a motley gang of serfs, a drain on science funds that did little more than punch the clock and collect an oversized paycheck.

In Breeze’s first big move, he fired three scientists and forced a fourth into early retirement. He called the African swine fever virus team from the lab to his office and told them they had two weeks to pack up and leave. They were dumbfounded. “We had experiments with years of work gone into them,” says Dr. Richard Endris. “With Roger, there was no kinder, gentler way,” said another source. The team complained to the swine industry and the local congressman that taxpayers’ work was “going down the tubes.” That bought them a six-month reprieve. But once that time was up, Drs. Endris, Jerry Pan, Gertrude Schloer, and their leader, Bill Hess—a forty-year Plum Island veteran—were out on their rears. “He’s seen fit to change directions,” the seventy-two-year-old Dr. Hess drily told a reporter, “which is his privilege.”

In Breeze’s opinion, the four scientists were repeating the same science, or as one Breeze official said, “Reinventing the wheel, over and over again,” testing viruses on one tick species after another. Said the official of the sacked four, “They were the worst of the worst—one of them hadn’t published a research paper in nine years. Another one hadn’t written one in five years. Sat there on their dead asses leaning on their elbows. They knew it was coming.”

Contrary to what others said, Dr. Endris and Dr. Hess had published scientific papers in recent years. Breeze’s reasoning that it was time for a genetically engineered vaccine for African swine fever made little sense to Endris, who says African swine fever antibody proteins (like Dr. Bachrach’s VP3) just didn’t have the prophylactic properties necessary. “[Breeze] did not understand the biology of it, didn’t have the grasp of it— but he didn’t let that get in the way of his politics.” Ironically, Endris was one of those few on Plum Island who thought Dr. Callis’s departure might be a good thing. A new director could rejuvenate the crumbling laboratory and reinvigorate its mission, he thought. Now he knew just how wrong he was. “Personally, after I saw what replaced [Callis],” he admits fifteen years later, “I wish he had stayed.”

Breeze then confronted the remaining scientists. Sitting them all down, he berated them with facts and figures—the number of test animals purchased compared to the number of scientific papers produced. The number wasn’t nearly high enough and the few papers published were terrible. “This was really sad,” Dr. Jim House would growl years later. “The part that’s bothersome is that he tried to play down the accomplishments of those who had been there before him—not one time, but numerous times. He tried to make their accomplishments look petty.”

There was another reason the scientists were pushed out—to make room in the budget for a new ferry.

MELTING SNOWBALLS IN THE ANTARCTIC

Just when it seemed like things were clicking into place—the budget being tightened, unwanted scientists pushed overboard, and new equipment for new scientists under requisition—the roof caved in. Or rather, the dock caved in. The ubiquitous autumn storms that pounded Plum Island smashed the harbor dock to pieces. The $700,000 cost to replace the bulkhead blew a hole straight through Boyle’s crafty budget and jeopardized monies earmarked for the new crystallographers, spectrographs, and electron microscopes. Washington told Breeze that Plum Island had to pay for the repair, putting him in the unenviable position of reneging on promises to his recruits. Says Breeze, “That would be like telling recruits at Columbia University, ‘I can’t buy your scientific equipment for you, because I have to go fix a piece of West 168th Street.’ They would look at you like you were crazy.” With the dock standing in the way of scientific glory, he had to do something.

In its long history, the secretary of agriculture’s advisory committee, made up of representatives from livestock industries, had never met outside of Washington, D.C. Breeze proposed to Washington that the committee meet this year in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to see Plum Island. As a friendly gesture to their new exotic disease lab director, the aggies agreed to organize it—but on one condition: he would not, under any circumstances, ask the committee for money. “The Department was going to put $1 million into the island and that was going to be it—and I was not to ask them [for any more],” says Breeze.

They all came out one morning—the National Cattlemen’s Association, the Pork Producers’ Council, and the dairy and poultry associations— all the groups that had a multibillion-dollar stake in what some might label “corporate welfare.” Plum Island had always been painted as essential to the American people—wholesome, apple pie research to protect the food supply, defensive research that private industry just wouldn’t do. But when the twenty dark suits crowded onto a boat bound for Plum Island with “Cap’n” Breeze, the scene looked less vital to the taxpaying public than to the billion-dollar agribusiness conglomerates the captain’s passengers represented.4

In evangelical tones, Dr. Breeze walked and talked the group through the deteriorating laboratory, preaching how he planned to shore up its crumbling foundations, rid the place of the driftwood, clean the bathrooms, shine the floors, and bring science—glorious science. “He was very charming,” says one observer. “So charming he could melt snowballs in the Antarctic.” But meeting again the next day, the Pied Piper’s smile had turned down at its corners. He talked hard and fast at them in his distinct accent.

“This place is never going to fly. You can’t keep doing this business with the island falling down. We need $40 million here. We need it. I’m delivering the program, I’m hiring the people—but it won’t work without $40 million.” Breeze had previously been told by his engineers that it would cost about $25 million in total to repair the island into tip-top shape. He paused and looked at them, head cocked for effect.

“Now if you don’t want to do it, that’s fine—and we’ll all walk away. No problem—I’ll go find another job.” But heads in front of him were nodding. We’re with you, Roger, we are—we are!

They were. Thumbing his nose at his superiors, Breeze had secured, in a matter of days, a construction program that Plum Island had failed to get under way for decades. The livestock groups got behind it, and leaned heavily on reluctant USDA officials and Congress to give way. Though infuriated with their insubordinate new director, there was little Washington could do about it. How did his superiors respond? “Well,” says Breeze, smiling, “everybody changes. If there was no money, it was all over, and they might as well have known that. You cannot make bricks without clay.” Breeze soon had $22 million of clay in his hands ($3 million shy of his personal goal, but still enough) to build some 58,000 square feet of new space and renovate another 45,000 square feet. It was a truly remarkable feat.

Successful in dividing Washington officials from their industry advisory group, he trained his sights on the island, and on how to grab the animal kingdom for himself.

Long Island’s North Fork was far too remote a place to attract good scientists, said Breeze. The cost of living there was far too high for government-salaried postdocs. Opportunities for spouses were also limited, except maybe to wait tables or work retail cash registers. As far as raising children, some scientists thought the school system fell short. “You’d have to go way up the Island to find any real sophistication,” says one. And another, “The area is dead . . . it is not the type of place to attract young, upwardly mobile professionals. God knows how many miles you are from the nearest quality health care.” Locals couldn’t fill the scientific need, Breeze believed; they lacked the requisite education and experience. Recruiting would soundly fail. The laboratory would indeed fall into the sea, and with it would go Cap’n Breeze.

But there was a solution. By running a ferry across the Sound to Connecticut, Breeze could provide the scientists with a better place to live, one with a lower cost of living and better schools and real employment opportunities for spouses. At the same time, Plum Island would be connected with the Amtrak station there, allowing a link to universities like Yale and the University of Connecticut. “This ferry will turn Plum Island around,” the new director boldly predicted. “It will help make us the number one research center in the world.”

The Connecticut ferry’s first customer was none other than Director Roger Breeze. He moved with his wife and children to a house in Cheshire. “I had to be on [the Connecticut boat],” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me where I live. I just didn’t think people would take it seriously without me being there.” {But Dr. Breeze didn’t even attempt to live on Long Island. The director lived alone on Plum Island in an old Army barracks until his family moved east from Washington State and joined him in Connecticut. } The ferry’s heaviest load was a mere seven or eight passengers. Former ferry engineer Ed Hollreiser says the boat often ferried a single passenger. Once, one of the new scientists Dr. Breeze recruited (all of whom “chose” Connecticut as their place of residence) realized he’d forgotten an important book while en route to the island. The ferry was sent all the way back to Connecticut, where a deckhand went and fished the book out of the scientist’s trunk and brought it back—to the tune of $400 in marine fuel.

It was an open secret that new hires must hail from the Nutmeg State. “Anyone that wanted to work on Plum Island at that time—even on support staff—had to be from Connecticut,” says a worker. Among the scientists and support staff interviewed who ventured opinions on the ferry, all of them suspected Breeze’s wife was the motivation behind it. They say she disliked the countrified North Fork, and the closest university teaching positions for her were miles away at Stony Brook. With its many colleges and universities, Connecticut offered far better opportunities for her and the children. While all of this may be true, the director’s own motivations seemed far deeper than pleasing his wife.

As ridership on the Connecticut ferry increased, professional camaraderie at the laboratory began to decline. People were beginning to fraternize based upon which boat—and from which state—they hailed. The move “set up two classes on the island,” said Ed Hollreiser, “[Breeze’s] people from Connecticut and us peons from Long Island.” “I don’t have a personal problem with him,” notes Dr. Jim House. “But he caused a divisiveness between the New York and Connecticut people. He created the Connecticut people because to him, no one smart would live on [the New York] side. But for forty years it had worked without it.” Dr. Carol House agrees. “He would have conversations with people on the Connecticut boat that [the New York staff ] wouldn’t be privy to.”

The ferry was a top-of-the-line, luxurious $1.2 million, 540-horsepower, 110-foot-long boat—but there were flaws from the start. Hollreiser said there were design problems with the engines, and the exhaust noise ran afoul of local town ordinances. “It was like they bought a Yugo,” says a former worker. “The engines constantly blew up and it cost the government big dollars in repairs.” When they finally got the leaky, noisy, shuddering craft running, it cost a hefty $100,000 a year to operate—a significant chunk of funds for a “cost cutting” regime to bear.

Dr. Breeze maintains that “[i]t had been difficult to fill jobs in the past,” but nothing in the records indicate that local hiring over the previous four decades had been problematic at all. As veteran Fran Demorest wrote, “The professional staff moved to Long Island, bought or built homes, raised their families and used our school systems. These families joined in the many local community activities, services, churches, and other programs.” Breeze’s detractors, large and small, would always say the Connecticut ferry was a colossal waste, a sham, all the way down to the nifty uniforms he dressed the marine crews in. Even the local congressman decried the move. “It sounds like a total waste of money,” snapped George Hochbrueckner, a Democrat representing New York’s First Congressional District. “It sounds like a few people—including Mr. Breeze—decided they wanted to live in Connecticut. The taxpayers shouldn’t be paying for this. . . . This does not make any sense to me.” But the USDA had paid for it, and the congressman’s objections were for naught.

Even had he tried, Hochbrueckner could never have reversed the ferry. Because Dr. Breeze saw to it that undoing his Connecticut boat would be akin to unscrambling eggs. In a masterstroke, he did the one thing that would grant his new ferry perpetuity. He lionized the one man whose name was inextricably entwined with Plum Island, invoking in a simple step the potent feelings of a warm and distant past that instantly hushed would-be critics.

He named the boat after Jerry Callis.

The opinions of two of his allies are enlightening. “Yes, it was Roger’s idea,” says John Boyle, when asked who named the Connecticut ferry. “In my heart of hearts, I would never tell you what my honest opinion of that particular thing is. There are still a few things about him I can’t quite figure out. He can be inscrutable—even to his closest friends.”

The definitive word comes from Dr. Breeze’s dear friend Dr. Robert Shope, with whom Breeze had lived after he legally separated from his first wife.7 “He lived in Connecticut and wanted the ferry for himself. The excuse was that it would bring in a broader group of scientists—and it was a very controversial move.” What did Shope think of the naming of the ferry? “It was very clever,” Shope mused. “The J. J. Callis—he had it painted on the boat before anybody knew it—[after that] you couldn’t take the boat away and nobody could counter the move.” [...]

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

By this time, in the words of one observer, “[Employees] were praying that Breeze would die and Callis would come back.” No longer was Dr. Breeze the rustic faux Scot, turned backslapping American cowboy. He now charged around the island with a flashy imperiousness. Says a retired Plum Island engineer, “You know, a lot changed when Breeze came in. He seemed real worried about climbing the ladder. He could care less about us Americans—or American labor, for that matter. The island was all for his own benefit. I remember one time, he was coming over on the early morning ferry, and we’d been coming off from the night shift. He shook his finger at Walt [Sinowski, Lab 257’s building foreman] and said, ‘I’m gonna get your job. I’m gonna have your job one day. It’s not long now. Not long.’ “Meanwhile, Walt had been retired already from another job, and working at Plum was something he was good at and enjoyed doing. Walt said to him, ‘You can take it right now, Breeze. Go right ahead.’ We’d sit there and take that crap from him, day in and day out.

“And then one day—it happened. It really, truly happened.”

The A-76 federal privatization program had visited Plum Island two times since its inception in 1980. The rules stated the government had to step aside when the private sector could perform the government’s nonprofessional tasks, provided no “overriding factors” required the government to keep those functions federalized. On both previous occasions, Dr. Callis invoked the “overriding factors” exception and staved off privatization, arguing that Plum Island functions were far too sensitive to be contracted out.

Placing two high-hazard biological containment laboratories in the hands of a private company would shift the emphasis from safety to profits. And it would kill employee morale. Why take the chance? Plum Island remained under federal control. Until Dr. Breeze arrived.

In 1988, a year after Breeze took control, a performance work statement (PWS) was prepared. This was essentially a chart of all the tasks that private contractors (and the government’s own “in house” team) would bid on. From the start, there were signs that the PWS was prepared incorrectly.

In an internal memorandum, the government review panel noted “many misleading statements concerning the real situation with underground storage tanks, existing fuel spills, the chemical management program . . . etc.” The panel said the PWS had been “sugarcoated” and charged it did “not reflect the reality of the true pressing problems” at Plum Island. It seemed like the PWS was being rigged to lure an unsuspecting outside contractor into snatching the bid.

“It was a political decision to do it,” Dr. Breeze says today of the Plum Island privatization. “It had nothing to do with me or anybody else in USDA—that’s just the way it is.” But at the time, responding to the review panel, Dr. Breeze exploded. “There are no misleading statements,” he wrote. Instead, the panel had “misunderstood several issues. . . . There are no obvious deficiencies we know of. . . . If [the review panel] feels this PWS is ‘sugarcoated,’ I am very willing to make their specific concerns known.” Definitive words from someone who supposedly had nothing to do with it.

On Thursday morning, February 21, 1991, four sealed envelopes were opened in Washington. Burns & Roe Services Corporation of New Jersey was awarded the five-year Plum Island contract, with the lowest and best bid: $16.3 million. The government’s in-house team had bid $23.7 million on the same exact PWS. The private contractor had underbid the in-house bid by $7.4 million—more than 30 percent lower. The disparity meant one of two things. Either the private contractor grossly underestimated the costs of the Plum Island project, or the in-house government team engaged in the unfathomable: it tanked its own bid.

Breeze explains his point of view. “There is no secret to this. There’s no way you can shuffle cards around, if you are giving people decent jobs with full medical benefits and all the other benefits that accrue with having a job with the federal government. You cannot compete with people that are being paid minimum wage, with minimal benefits—it’s not possible. It’s actually not something I agree with. I don’t think it’s the right thing to do by any means. But that’s the process.”

Breeze says the two bids during the Callis regime beat the private bids because they combined tasks. Those bids said: “Firefighters would act as janitors, and take away the garbage and clean the toilets and mop the rest rooms . . . the boat crew will maintain motor vehicles, and et cetera. And if that would have been clear up front, that firefighters weren’t going to clean rest rooms, there would have been janitors and the government would have lost.” John Boyle, who admits he was “heavily involved” in the privatization process, said, “You have to be really, really creative to have the government submit the winning bid. We put together a good bid—a competitive contract. To preserve it, [the union] had to give something up, and they didn’t want to give up some jobs. I was quite frankly afraid we were going to win it. I didn’t want to win it.”

Most Americans instantly recall exactly where they were and what they were doing at the moment they heard President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. For Plum Islanders, May 3, 1991, was one of those days.

John Boyle recalls the moment he heard Plum Island would be privatized for the first time in its history. “I was sitting in my office, staring out on the lawn, out on Gardiner’s Bay, just daydreaming for a few moments, when Ernie [Escarcega, Breeze’s facilities manager] calls me and says, ‘A-76 is coming in!’ And I thought, ‘Well, thank God.’ I personally considered it a blessing. . . .” Walking out of his office, Boyle saw men wringing their hands and women crying in the hallways. “Crestfallen is way too mild a word. For these people, it was like getting news your son was killed in a car crash. I am not overstating it, either.” Dr. Breeze also remembers the scene. “Chaos—it was the first time any of the employees had an inkling they might really lose their jobs.”

Seizing the moment, the very next morning Burns & Roe executives called an all-hands 8:00 a.m. meeting in the old Army chapel. Exhausted, Stanley Mickaliger had just finished an eight-hour graveyard shift in Lab 257 and trudged over to the chapel. “When I got to the meeting hall, they were already introducing each other, giving all these speeches—all these men with suntan lotion on all over, you know? It clearly wasn’t the government anymore. They were these big contractor types.” As the crowd slowly filed in, they were handed sealed envelopes holding the documents that determined the fate of their careers. Mickaliger walked over to an official-looking woman for guidance. She told him they were not taking questions, not now—“You have to catch the ten a.m. boat because we’re not going to be paying overtime anymore. You can look at your letter on the boat.”

Shunted onto the ferry, Mickaliger and the others tore open their letters. “It had all this information, on a bunch of papers, but I didn’t understand a lot of it.” One thing was clear, though—he’d been fired. And the severance package was nil. The fifteen-year-veteran’s remaining choices were a bit limited. “I could have went to Calverton [National Cemetery, a nearby federal facility with openings], but that wasn’t my cup of tea. See, I had been a master plumber for forty years. Now I’m going to dig graves and bury people? My wife and I lost our health insurance at age sixty—I had to pay 102 percent of the cost. The letter said if I retired, I got only 40 percent of the eligible Social Security benefit I paid into all those years. I remember complaining to them, saying, ‘Hey, I know guys here have thirty years in. But I’ve put in a good fifteen years—do you think you can help me?’ They gave me COBRA for six months.”8

The days of “respecting personal dignity . . . recognizing work achievement . . . providing work security” were over. So was the old feeling that working on Plum Island was like being part of an extended family, that it was a career. For the roughly one hundred support workers left behind (which would decrease to seventy-five by 1995), employment at the Plum Island exotic germ laboratory would now simply be a job. And thereafter it would have all the dedication to mission, attention to detail, pride in workmanship, and camaraderie that accompanied a job.

A newspaper editorial published at the time captured the moment: “How would you feel if you worked for somebody for 15 years and a new boss came in and told you that you were losing your seniority and most of your benefits? What’s more, you will be paid half of what you were paid to do the same job and your annual vacation days will be reduced from 25 to zero in the first year.” And that was only if the contractor kept your position—“ Remember,” says one employee, “those that were allowed to stay were offered ‘a’ job, not ‘your’ job.” And those were the lucky ones. A deeper sympathy was reserved for the seventy-five or so that were fired or pushed off the island into the bitter seas of early retirement. The negative effects on the community of the privatization layoffs at Plum Island, the east end’s largest employer, were real.9

Even the USDA grudgingly admitted it had been a “challenging transition period.” A former Plum Island official described the transition with a bit more flavor. He calls it “the biggest clusterfuck you ever saw in your life.”

Like he did with the ferry debacle, Congressman Hochbrueckner complained again, saying privatization “was handled poorly. The workers were treated shabbily.” For a politician who publicly bemoaned the woes of Plum Island numerous times, he accomplished surprisingly little. Says Dr. Breeze of Hochbrueckner’s rants, “He said, ‘I’m going to block it,’ and that was just disingenuous at best. He knew quite well the way privatization worked. He knew exactly what was going to happen.”

The congressman wasn’t the only one feigning powerlessness. “I wanted the government to hold a series of meetings where you explained to the workers the process under way,” explains Dr. Breeze. “Absolutely nobody would do that and it wasn’t up to me to do it. I actually couldn’t get it done.” Those meetings never happened. Breeze says he had nothing to do with the privatization or the transition, though the record clearly indicates the opposite. He could have, like Dr. Callis before him, warded off the A-76 guillotine by invoking the “overriding factors” exception, based on the island’s unique risks and unfathomable dangers among federal facilities. After all, Plum Island was no run-of-the-mill federal office building, where you’d apply for a passport or pick up a Social Security check. “When Dr. Callis was there, we had the rigid safety standards that almost made it impossible for the contractor to bid,” says a longtime Plum Island scientist. “And they could have applied for an exemption this time around, but they didn’t.”

Retired Plum Island scientists Drs. Jim and Carol House believe without question that Breeze had the power to halt the privatization steamroller. “He could have stopped it, prevented it,” says Jim. “Oh yeah, absolutely.” Carol adds, “The next time [privatization] came up, [Breeze] threw in all of the inside support services, so it became a big enough ‘plum’ to bid on—he reengineered the [PWS] so that more was included. He personally did that.” “We said from day zero that this is a place that should not be contracted out,” continues Jim House. “It can’t be—there are just too many concerns.” Despite their beliefs now, Plum Island scientists remained silent, instead of speaking out to fight the process. As a result, many of the support workers, says union leader Ed Hollreiser, felt betrayed.

As one employee said, “All it took was the swipe of a pen” to prevent Plum Island from being contracted out. But Dr. Breeze kept his pen in his pocket protector.

[...] John Boyle [...] felt at that time [...] that getting into the private sector would [...] "get rid of the riffraff , and it would run more efficiently for less money.” The USDA, indeed, trumpeted the Plum Island privatization. They said contracting out to Burns & Roe would save taxpayers $1 million a year, and that support costs would decline by $5 million, or 20 percent, over the length of the contract.

[...] Later, it would be learned that the PWS grossly underestimated the required material and manpower to run Plum Island.10

After Burns & Roe came in, John Boyle was let go, the contractor having no need for his services. But eight months later, the contractor begged the financial wizard to come back because things were spiraling out of control. When he returned, Boyle didn’t find a mess—he found nothing. “They had no accounting system to speak of. They had hired a bookkeeper who did not know what cost accounting was. I built a new accounting system there, from the ground up.” And when he finished his task, he delivered some bad news. “They were over $1 million in the red. I knew about it two or three weeks before, when I started seeing the signs, and I was thinking, ‘Jesus, this isn’t going to turn around.’ They wanted to shoot me.”

In most organizations, taking out the trash, tending the grounds, mowing the lawns, and providing clerical support seem like responsibilities that should be handled by a contractor. But Plum Island is not your typical institution. Positions like firefighters, security guards, ferry operators, engineers, incinerator operators, ventilation system operators, electric operators, nitrogen freezer caretakers, power monitors, and sewer decontamination plant operators hold seriously heightened responsibilities. At the home of the most dangerous germs known to man, even the grounds crew and typists must be specially trained and abide by complicated guidelines. Ed Hollreiser comments, “My take is that management was so poor, contracting out would be an easier way to go. This way, they could yell at someone now besides themselves. They could hold [a contractor] accountable and blame them for all the mishaps.”

A USDA laboratory in Ames, Iowa, was also put out for privatization at this time. Though the Ames lab houses far less dangerous germs, the staff there, surprisingly, remained under federal government control. And it remains in federal hands today. In August 2003, Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fought off a renewed push to privatize Ames by introducing legislation barring non-governmental workers at the laboratory. He called Ames’s research “a vital function of the federal government, and it should remain the responsibility of federal employees.” There seems to be no other reason for this glaring inconsistency between the two laboratories than the personal wishes of a director looking to slash nonresearch costs and yoke his workforce. Breeze muses, “It’s sort of surprising that Ames hasn’t gone out to a contractor. I think it will eventually go to a contractor—it’s just a push that various administrations do to different degrees.”

Privatization resulted in federally trained, highly skilled workers with decades of experience being bartered away in exchange for a cost-cutting, efficiency-driven private contractor. But on paper, it looked good, and the credit redounded to Plum Island’s director, Dr. Breeze. Most important for Breeze, it freed up more funds for science, his primary goal. At least that’s how it was supposed to go.

Back in 1965, Jerry Callis described his island laboratory at an international conference by saying, “Safety is uppermost in our minds in everything we do.” If that meant less money for science, then so be it. Some three decades later, costs, not safety, were uppermost in management’s minds. With the support staff slashed by 40 percent, and the Breeze team cutting every support line item, some other details—like biological safety and security—were compromised. For starters, the two-day Plum Island orientation course, after which new employees were ordered to study a three-inch-thick safety manual as if it were the Bible, was now boiled down to a forty-minute VHS tape and a two-page flyer. The “Nothing Leaves” policy was abandoned. Vehicles and items trafficked among the two laboratory buildings, Long Island, and Connecticut without being decontaminated at all. Contractors, who once had to be escorted (“The escort had to take a shower with these men, take their cigarette breaks with them, even go into the bathroom with them,” remembers one), now roamed free.11 The color-coded badge system was discontinued, and the identification num- bers disappeared. Against the advice of an outside consulting firm, the fiveman full-time professional fire department was converted to one firefighter and a bucket brigade of volunteers.12

For years, security on intruders was “like white on rice,” as one veteran employee describes it. The once thirty-four-man-strong armed guard platoon—checking off ID numbers at the ferry dock, manning the lab compound gatehouses—was dispensed with. One “safety technician” now stood in place of all the guards. He wore an empty gun holster to scare away intruders. One of the fired security guards, Phillip Zerillo, told a reporter there was “a total disregard for security. . . . The place is just going crazy.

It’s running by luck now.” Today it’s no different. “You could walk onto that island right now,” says an employee. “Two Eskimos in a kayak could invade and take Plum Island.”13 There are two private security firm guards, one at Orient Point and one protecting all of Plum Island. The U.S. Coast Guard patrolled the island’s surrounding waters until 1977, when it decommissioned the Plum Island Lighthouse. After a brief Plum Island detail following September 11, 2001, Coast Guard cutters again retreated, leaving Plum Island without any marine patrol.

An internal memorandum dispensing with and erasing away decades of safety closed on an bizarre note: “We welcome any and all suggestions, recommendations, criticisms, and attaboys . . . as well as fishing tips, a good joke, and restaurant recommendations.”

In perhaps the most egregious of the safety lapses, the sentinel animals, Plum Island’s “canaries in the mine,” were eliminated. These test animals were kept outdoors and tested periodically to ensure no germs had escaped the lab. Said a USDA safety director of the move, “From a biological safety perspective, the best thing that ever happened to Plum was the discontinuation of Animal Supply,” because he believed it eliminated the threat of disease transmission. But it also eliminated the island’s last line of defense.

After all, they had successfully alerted the Plum Island scientists to the virus outbreak. Having the control animals outside “keeps you honest,” says Plum Island scientist Dr. Doug Gregg. It was akin to a mother removing the smoke detector from her baby’s bedroom. The laboratories, now more than ever, became ticking time bombs and the public, unknowing sitting ducks.

But one thing remained clear: the new way was certainly cheaper. And the cost-conscious attack on safety soon became literal—the Plum Island biological safety office itself suffered. First it was divided into contractor safety and government safety. Then contractor safety was eliminated, and the government safety department was slashed down to three staffers. The money saved went toward recruits’ salaries and their new scientific equipment, and amenities like touring bicycles and a high-tech exercise gym.

Veteran scientists became concerned over the hacking away of four decades of carefully thought-out biological safety procedures. Former Plum Islander Dr. Ronald Yedoutschnig told a reporter, “When I was there, every person on the island was the same. But today, there are fewer permanent employees. I would be more safety conscious because the [new] people are less safety conscious. The agents we are working with are highly infectious.” Says Dr. Richard Endris: “When I was there, the safety was good. Now when it went from a system that is based on employee loyalty and integrity to one of the lowest bidder, I was very concerned that safety would be compromised. Little things, like the backup power generator going out during a storm. The redundant systems are the absolute key. You have to maintain air pressure, the airflow, the freezers. . . .”

Dr. Gregg ponders what privatization has wrought upon the island’s morale. “Morale is not as good,” he says. High turnover in the workforce contributes further to the problem. “The contracting out was a major blow to the unity of the island,” says Dr. Jim House, “and it’s still a problem today. A lot of the esprit de corps with the people is gone—they’re not there for more than a year and there’s a turnover. The turnover after two, three years had 90 percent of the people gone—people that had been there for years.” Unfortunately, low morale often translates into poor performance on the job.

The USDA should best be able to assess Plum Island’s safety. Out of a possible 100 points under rating system, the USDA scored Burns & Roe, the contractor they chose to run Plum Island, 54.3, 43.9, and 60. The score of 60 was the minimum acceptable performance number.

Sometimes poetry captures the human condition better than prose. Plum Island Lighthouse keeper Captain William Wetmore penned “Plum Island” in the mid-1800s:

• There is a rock-bound Island off Long Island’s shore;

• Where you hear the music of the Ocean’s roar.

• There you see a light-house on a rocky bluff—

• Tides there a roaring, surging; waters sometimes rough.

One hundred and fifty years later, this line and verse was pulled from a file in Lab 101:

• What in the world’s going on over there;

• We heard that there is a “new Breeze in the air.”

• Who denounced the achievements of thirty-some years;

• And announced that a time of success would appear.

• Just what has he done in three years on the job;

• See those new scientists that fancy boat bobs.

• Back and forth, forth and back to Connecticut and

• Of course the new carpet has served to expand

• USDA’s credit both here and abroad;

• That use of our taxes we can all applaud.

• It seems that there’s only one thing to say:

• That new Breeze just may blow Plum Island away.

One employee summed it up more succinctly: “Breeze? “Breeze was a fucking doomsday machine.”

Dr. Roger Breeze left Plum Island in 1995 for a better career opportunity.

His two predecessors had been honored by the ferryboats M. S. Shahan and J. J. Callis. “They won’t need a boat to remember me by,” Breeze told a Newsday reporter who asked him about his legacy. He was even more direct with me when we spoke. “My memorial has to do with the people I got there. I’m not interested in any damn boats and buildings. Facilities and boats don’t do the research. People do. You can set out a stack of my scientific papers, and I’ll be judged by those. I come back to this—it’s the glory at all levels, and not in a negative kind of way.”

Roger Breeze drew responses out of people, whether they were his superiors, his scientists, or his support workers. A head Washington-based USDA official said, “Some people just think he’s the best—and some don’t.” From that distant official’s vantage point, Dr. Breeze was “innovative and dynamic.” He had reworked Plum Island’s entire scientific program, rebuilt the facility, and saved Plum Island from imminent demise.

Ed Hollreiser sees Breeze as a “strange guy, very cunning—he’d call me in for little chats and tell me things that he said he didn’t wanted repeated, but he really wanted me to spread the word.” Plum Island safety officer Tom Sawicki says, “Breeze was here for a reason, he did what he had to do, and a lot of people didn’t like it.” Fran Demorest says, “It was his steppingstone.

And he made enemies there.”

Dr. Robert Shope, who had lived with Breeze for a time in Connecticut, takes a middle view. “He did some things that weren’t too popular with his superiors at USDA. And he may have gotten rid of some people at Plum who were deadwood, and in that sense, he wasn’t very popular. But I think he was part of the driving force of the island.” When asked to compare him to his predecessor, Shope thought of Breeze as “a totally different type of person—and still is. He’s a wheeler-dealer type, and Callis was very conservative and played by the book and that sort of thing. Just two different people.”

“My problem with Roger,” says Dr. Carol House, “is that he still has an influence. He still shows up at town meetings and stands in the back, hovering. He still has a large influence over there, and he has pulled potential [Plum Island director] candidates.”

“Roger’s very hard to talk about,” Dr. Jim House says, slowly, measuring his words. “Not one of the brighter moments in Plum Island history.

Roger had a way of manipulating situations so he was always politically on top. No matter what he did, he would come out smelling like a rose. He was very, very clever.

“He did make strides, enhancing the amount of molecular virology done, but he even took that to an extreme. He was somewhat of a visionary, and he’s into biological warfare, his new thing now. But he didn’t have the vision or skills as a manager to run Plum in a smooth and productive manner. I didn’t have a lot of respect for him scientifically. He was selling genetically resistant animals, and we didn’t do genetics of animals. We had this genetically resistant cow, and transgenic pigs. Of course that never went anywhere.

“A lack of perspective—of all the things you’d say about him, that would be the one—a lack of perspective.”

The two research groups at Plum Island are without question the best of their kind in the world,” boasts Dr. Breeze, “and that wasn’t true when I went there. If there’s one thing I do know about very, very well, it’s how to motivate scientists to go beyond what they think they can do—that’s what I do best.” But in some cases, the science on Plum Island may actually have been set back. Proof of that, says Dr. Richard Endris, is that some three years after the four scientists had been dismissed, one of Dr. Breeze’s new recruits reestablished and set up—from scratch and at great cost—the same African swine fever tick colony research that Breeze disbanded upon his arrival. As for the new laboratory facility, it included a new animal isolation wing, and a fancy sandstone two-story brick office complex slapped across the front of Lab 101. The brown brick and shiny glass façade conceals the deteriorating 1956 laboratory facility behind it.

Retired from government service, John Boyle still follows the career path of his old boss. “You saw what happened after Roger left Plum Island—he became an associate area director, he then became an area director. Now he is a big-time guy in Washington.” Dr. Breeze is the associate administrator for “special interagency programs” for Agricultural Research Service. With his boss, Floyd Horn, at the Department of Homeland Security, Breeze oversees a good part of the USDA’s scientific research.

Undoubtedly, the steep trajectory of his career path in America trumps the sluggish thirty-two-step ladder he left behind at Glasgow University.

Is it possible that Dr. Breeze was blinded by his own ambition? “He is a very talented guy, and cares very deeply,” says Boyle. “I think he cares so much that maybe it even overrides his talent, because he is so tenacious, once he sets out to do something, it will get done. But he really cares about science—good science. It’s why he took a liking to me, because I worked so hard to get him the ferryboat.” Blinded by the glory of science, or blinded by unadulterated ambition—or perhaps both—Dr. Breeze’s curriculum vitae soared while the people of Plum Island tumbled and the island itself crumbled.

In the wake of that unbridled progress, people’s lives changed, and not necessarily for the better.

“If this place wasn’t going to be different,” Breeze told a reporter, reflecting on his tenure, “it was going to be gone.”

For certain, Roger Breeze had made Plum Island different.

“Living with success,” he says, “is harder than living with failure.”

Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a happy ending where the troubles work themselves out into tidy solutions. In fact, there is no ending. The island workforce walked out and went on strike in August 2002. The following June, President George W. Bush moved the laboratory from the USDA to the new Department of Homeland Security.

The Plum Island saga gets more intriguing with each passing day.

Dr. Breeze physically departed Plum Island in 1995, but he continued calling the shots from his new office in Washington as a procession of faceless directors came and went. Breeze finally got his man in sixty-five-year-old Dr. David L. Huxsoll, whom he appointed Plum Island’s director in June 2000. “Roger handpicked him,” says one scientist familiar with the decision. “He has that biological warfare background that Roger likes. Breeze has always been into germ warfare. He loves the mystery, and the intrigue—he’s really into it.” Dr. Huxsoll grew up on a farm in the rural town of Aurora, Indiana, where he recalls being so attached as a child to his family’s livestock, he cried for days when the fattened baby calves he had named and petted were sold at market. Like Dr. Callis, Huxsoll attended Purdue University, but the comparisons end there. After a brief vet practice stint in northern Illinois, Huxsoll was drafted into military service and embarked on a threedecade military career chasing diseases around the globe. Colonel Dr. Huxsoll was named commander of the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories in 1983, the first veterinarian to hold that command, bringing full circle the veterinarian connection to biological warfare that Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan began in 1941. “The most valuable thing out there,” says Dr. Huxsoll, “it’s not the gun, it’s not the tank, it’s not the jet fighter—it’s man. So we do whatever can be done to prevent illness, and should illness occur, restore that person to operational status.”

As Fort Detrick’s1 commander, Colonel Huxsoll saw heavy action during the now-infamous Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, featured in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. He made the controversial decision to send the Army into a domestic matter that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—lacking any hands-on expertise—was having a difficult time managing.

“At that time, I considered everything, the potential hazards, and the safety issues. . . . There comes a point in time when you see—and you know—the only logical response is to make that uncomfortable decision with the best interests of lots and lots of people in mind.” The decision was the right one. Huxsoll’s well-trained medical soldiers—led by virus hunter C. J. Peters, who stalked Rift Valley fever through Egypt a decade before— successfully beat back the Ebola virus.

After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, Huxsoll served on three U.N. biological warfare inspection teams in Iraq, leading two of them. In Iraq he interrogated directors and middle managers of medical and academic facilities like the University of Baghdad and the College of Agriculture. As with the United States, following the veterinarians revealed clues about germ warfare.

Says Huxsoll, “Probably the greatest capability in addressing the biological villains, and those having a true understanding of it, was at the veterinary vaccine places.” Special military satellite image maps enhanced by computer line drawings afforded the inspection team an uncanny recreation— down to exact shapes and sizes—of each suspected germ weapon manufacturing plant. Among the long sheet maps Huxsoll unfurled in front of his impressed Iraqi hosts (“I think it got to the point they probably thought we had more capability than we really did”) was a single-cell protein facility at Al-Hakam. Ostensibly, that operation grew colonies of bacteria in big fermenter vats to be dried and milled into high-protein animal feed. But the team discovered a fair amount of evidence that it was used for biological agents, and ultimately the Iraqis admitted it. It wasn’t easy to determine, however. “The plant that would produce biological agents for weapons purposes,” Huxsoll notes, “may not look too much different from the plant that produces biological agents for vaccine purposes or for making beer.” Chemical agents are another story. Chemical plants have what is

called a large “signature,” while biological facilities have a far smaller footprint.

“If you’re going to dump chemical agents on a significant portion of Long Island,” Dr. Huxsoll postulates, “you have to have tons of the stuff.

Now, in the case of biological [agents], you can measure what you need for the same area on Long Island in kilograms, not tons. That’s because you can disseminate them in an aerosol, and if you are good at this, you can spread it over a huge distance.” Following those tiny footprints all throughout Iraq, Huxsoll’s teams uncovered volumes of anthrax, botulinum toxin, ricin, gas gangrene, and other anticrop and antilivestock germs being prepared and weaponized on the tips of bombs.

[...]

In its final battle, Pat Acampora’s task force faced down mad cow disease.

At an early morning meeting in Acampora’s office, with Dr. Breeze present, USDA officials were asked if Plum Island had ever studied bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. This animal infection’s human variant, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, gnaws away at brain tissue and has a 100 percent mortality rate. {4Mad cow disease and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are caused not by live germs, but inanimate “prions,” freefloating snippets of infectious DNA material that lack the structure that characterize viruses and bacteria. More resilient than any known germ, they resist the decontaminating processes of steam autoclaving and even incineration. Little is known about prions, but they are known to be extremely dangerous to animal and human life. } The Plum Island officials told the group they had not worked on mad cow and weren’t equipped to study it. But a few months later, when 255 sheep in Vermont were suspected of contracting mad cow, the USDA made plans to ship the carcasses to Plum Island for necropsy, tissue and blood samples, and incineration. Tipped off of the plan, Acampora went livid. When she confronted Plum Island about it, the USDA told her, “Well, the situation has changed.” “They don’t even have a state permit for their incinerator!” she roared, and threatened a showdown: if they carted the sheep carcasses through Manhattan or Connecticut onto Long Island soil, she would get the police in Nassau and Suffolk counties to barricade the roads.

Fearing a public relations debacle with national implications, the USDA backed off, and trucked its infected sheep refuse to the Ames, Iowa, laboratory. “It became such a hassle, they decided not to do it,” Acampora recalls with modesty; the truth is, she was the hassle. So many others— politicians, media, community groups—had failed over the years in trying to fight Plum Island. Finally, the task force had won a battle. It was a start.5

“Look at our space shuttle,” Acampora says. “We spent billions of dollars on the space mission, hundreds of engineers, technicians, scientists, and safety experts to make sure the flight was fail-safe. We watched in awe. We clapped. And then it exploded in horror. That’s what I’m worried about.”

Even to this day, while other local officials have accepted tour invitations, the feisty assemblywoman won’t go to Plum Island. Why is that? “It’s really a simple reason,” she laughs. “They say that when you go there, you have to scrub down, and get all washed up. And no one’s going to see my hair wet.” One gets the impression her fears go far beyond a bad hair day.

“There have been a lot of mishaps out there,” she says, “and let’s face it— Long Island has a lot of wind, and should something happen there, and the wind’s blowing in the wrong direction, that could be pretty problematic.

“When you are a mile off the coast of a heavily populated area, an area for which we have no real evacuation, I have a concern.” Indeed, there is only one arterial road off the North Fork and one out of the Hamptons, spilling into the heart of Long Island. From there, Long Island’s 7.2 million people bottleneck into ten narrow bridges and tunnels that themselves empty into the cluttered congestion of New York City, where 11 million more people reside.6 Indeed, Plum Island lies on the periphery of the largest population center in the United States.

“You know, a lot of people really don’t know Plum Island even exists,”

Acampora muses as her smile fades to a smirk. “People move here from New York City, they come here, play here—and they have no idea what’s going on one mile off the coast.”