# Manufacturing Anthrax
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/manufacturing-anthrax/87919
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [October 17, 2001, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/manufacturing-anthrax/87919 "2001-10-17T05:47:51Z")
**Posts on this page:** 3
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@suziek](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/suziek)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2001, 5:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/manufacturing-anthrax/87919/1 "2001-10-17T05:47:51Z")
Now that Tom Daschel’s office was sent a much purer form of the Anthrax spore, I am more worried. Before, I figured it was just some nut like the Mad Bomber. How elaborate do the lab facilities have to be to carry out the process and what supplies would one need? Could someone do it in secret like in their garage or basement? Or in a shack in the Montana wilderness? Could you buy what was needed without arrousing suspicion? If not, someone out there knows who is doing this and it is only a matter of time before they send an anonymous tip to the FBI. Or, I wonder if there were any reported thefts from labs in the past few years? I understand there aren’t that many facilities that handle Anthrax. Anyone out there know the details?
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### Author:  [@JillGat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JillGat)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2001, 6:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/manufacturing-anthrax/87919/2 "2001-10-17T06:03:07Z")
From what I’ve read, it’s extremely easy to get and grow anthrax. You know where the USSR got their first supply of spores for their biowarfare program? They ordered it mailorder _from a U.S. science catalog_. This is why so many bad guys have it.
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### Author:  [@Larry\_Mudd](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Larry_Mudd)
#### Post date: [October 17, 2001, 7:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/manufacturing-anthrax/87919/3 "2001-10-17T07:18:32Z")
What about [Larry W. Harris](http://www3.cnn.com/US/9802/19/fbi.arrest.pm/), a [Christian Identity](http://www.religioustolerance.org/cr_ident.htm) white supremacist who was charged with **mail fraud** after procuring _bubonic plague_ bacilli by mail?
> [@](#):
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> In 1995, he was arrested after purchasing three vials of bubonic plague by mail from a Maryland laboratory.
>
> That was not in and of itself a crime, but Harris was convicted on two counts of mail fraud and one count of wire fraud for misrepresenting the purpose of the purchase, a federal offense.
He later was found to have cultivated anthrax, and had talked about releasing plague in NYC and blaming it on Iraq.
> [@](#):
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> According to an affidavit filed with his arrest warrant, Harris told a group last summer of a 1995 plan to “place a ‘globe’ of bubonic plague toxins in a New York City subway station, where it would be broken by a passing subway train, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
>
> He told the group, according to the affidavit, that “the Iraqis would be blamed for that event.”
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> However, Siller said that there is as of yet no indication as to “what the target might have been or even if there was a target at this point.”
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> In New York, Mayor Rudy Giuliani called a news conference to discount any connection between the arrests in Nevada and a plan to attack New York.
(The article is from 1998.)