Jim Choate forwarded mail from keyser-soze@hushmail.com:
---------- Forwarded message ---------- To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: CDR: Brothers in arms?
Anthrax is almost the same organism as Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is produced commercially as a pesticide. The two organisms can be grown and prepared in the same way.
Because Bt is generally considered harmless, the facilities producing it probably have not been investigated as possible sources of the anthrax material.
Bacterial taxonomy is in a state of flux at the moment (that's an understatement - trust me on this!). Lots of people don't think of /Bacillus/ /anthracis/ as a separate species at all - some taxonomists include it as a part of /B./ /cereus/ which is a very, very, common soil bacterium. Bacteria have a sort of modular genome (*), they can sometimes snap-fit bits of code in to do a set of related functions. So there is, for example, a <nitrogen-fixing> module, forms of which exist in many not-very-closely related bacteria & which genetic engineers have consistently and spectacularly failed to add to anything else. There are a great many <antibiotic-resistance> modules which move from species to species quite freely. These "modules" are sometimes, but not always, carried in plasmids which are bits of DNA separate from the chromosome(s). (It is possible that some viruses may, in effect, be descended from modules that "escaped") /Bacillus/ /anthracis/ may, in effect, be just one set of closely related strains of a very polymorphic population that happen to have a <virulence> module and an <infectivity> module. It is possible that those "modules" could be passed to other species of bacteria, and certain tyhat they can be removed from /Bacillus/ /anthracis/, which is why you can get a non-virulent live form which can be used as a vaccine. (And why for some diseases a vaccine can be made from the blood of a survivor). If you have access to an academic library (or http://www.sciencedirect.com) you could look at papers like: Ruiting Lan and Peter R. Reeves (2001) "When does a clone deserve a name? A perspective on bacterial species based on population genetics" (Trends in Microbiology, vol. 9 pp. 419-424, Sept 2001) Abstract: "Molecular population-genetic analysis has revealed that for several human diseases, including tuberculosis, plague and shigellosis, the generally accepted taxonomic status of the organisms involved does not fit the usually accepted genus or species criteria. This raises the question of what species concept to apply to bacteria. We suggest that the species definition in bacteria should be based on analysis of sequence variation in housekeeping genes, and also that the 'clone' be given official status in bacterial nomenclature. This will allow demotion of the species or genus status of several traditionally recognized human pathogens, but retention of current names of anomalous species and genera as clone names." Ken Brown (*) AFAIK I thought up that phrase and it is mine. But a simple Google search shows dozens of other people thought of it too. Curses! Foiled Again! And isn't the Science Citation Index wonderful?