QUOTE (keithisco @ Jan 27 2008, 04:53 PM)

Just how much of a fool are you?
This particular bacterium was bred in the Labs, Mutated so the signature would be identifiable, and it's source could be derived!!! Do you think it is easy to get out of these labs with a petrie dish??? Your naívete is incredulous!!
The checks these people NORMALLY have to go through every time they enter or leave the labs is very thorough. The fact that this bacterium left the labs is proof-positive that there was collusion.
Stop believing that your government cannot be involved.
I just find it unlikely that "the government" which is after all a collection of PEOPLE, can be so uniform of purpose and action. It is far more believable that one or a very few people would do such a thing than to assume it was a large operation. I'm not disputing at all that the bacterium originated in a US lab, and I'd say someone at the lab was pretty much certainly involved.
Side note - it wasn't mutated so that it would have an identifiable signature. It was a specific selectively bred weaponized strain which, when you analyze its DNA, is unique from other strains (all strains will be unique such that you can tell them apart).
Also - anthrax is a bacterium. You only need to get a single bacterium out of the lab to grow as much as you want. I've worked at NIH with genetically modified bacteria (a harmless strain of E. Coli, and i only put fish blood genes in it, don't worry!) that I had to make huge cultures of. From a single bacteria dropped in liquid onto an agar plate, in 2 days I was able to make liters of broth containing TRILLIONS of bacteria - and that was only limited by the size of the flasks we had and the fact I had to make sure the bacteria were in fact modified the way I wanted them to be.
My point, of course, is that I find it completely plausible that someone could somehow smuggle a TINY sample of weaponized anthrax out of a lab easily - either to sell to someone or use themselves. And that whenever you postulate that more people are involved, the chance that one of them would either stop the operation or let others know increases.
In addition, I also find it entirely plausible that the government is not investigating it to their full capability because it would be embarrassing and inflammatory if it was found out that they accidentally let someone slip a sample of this bioweapon out of a lab somewhere.
<edit> again - "never attribute to malice what you can instead attribute to sheer stupidity" - in this case, rather than malice on the government's part i find it far more believable that they were just incompetent in stopping someone from smuggling the bug out. </edit>