FBI and Sandia were unable to produce an identical spore preparation: so how could they prove Ivins made the spores on Fort Detrick equipment??

Audio and Text from the National Academy of Engineering Anthrax Close-up, Part 2 12/14/2008 The FBI says spores from the anthrax attack letters are genetically linked to spores in a flask controlled by Fort Detrick researcher Bruce Ivins. But high-tech microscopic analysis shows what might be a key difference.

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Randy Atkins: The chemical element silicon is in spores from the letters, but not in the flask. This means the spores used in the attack weren’t taken directly from the flask, but grown elsewhere…in the presence of silicon. But Serguei Popov, a George Mason biologist and former Soviet bioweapons researcher, says the levels of silicon are too high to be an accident – that it was either purposely added to weaponize the spores or…

Serguei Popov:...could have come from the use of foam suppressant agents, typically employed in the process of large scale fermentation of bacteria.

Randy Atkins: While the FBI thinks Ivins grew the spores at Fort Detrick, they haven’t been able to re-create them. Paul Kotula, an electron microscope expert at Sandia National Labs…

Paul Kotula: We looked at over 200 samples in our lab that were various attempts to reverse-engineer the process under which these powders were made and did not find a match.