Humanitarian Resource Institute:  A U.S. & International Resource on the Scope of Humanitarian Assistance
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September 2004

Contact: Stephen M. Apatow
Director of Research & Development
Humanitarian Resource Institute Legal Resource Center 
Biodefense Reference Library
Eastern USA: (203) 668-0282  Western USA: (775) 884-4680
Internet: http://www.humanitarian.net/law/biodefense
Email: s.m.apatow@humanitarian.net

BUTLER CASE IMPACTS U.S. BIODEFENSE RESEARCH & EDUCATION,  CRITICAL TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF THERAPIES FOR TREATING ILLNESS CAUSED BY SELECT AGENTS AND TO VACCINES TO PROTECT THE PUBLIC FROM HARM

As the Butler case  moves into the international spotlight, questions remain regarding the risk to U.S. biodefense research and national security.  The Belfast Telegraph (A Poisonous Kind of Justice: 31 August 2004) reports:
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 -- It was a January weekend in 2003. Dr Thomas Butler, a world-renowned expert on bubonic plague, had called in at his laboratory at Texas Tech University. The 62-year-old microbiologist had worked with the disease for decades and always kept a meticulous record of what was in his lab and where. That day, he noticed that 30 vials of plague were missing. It was the beginning of a nightmare.

-- Eighteen months on, Thomas Butler is no longer a doctor. He turned in his medical licence before it could be taken from him. His family - wife Elisabeth and four children, including a five-year-old son - are broke. He has lost his job and his lab, and he sits in a medium-security prison in Fort Worth, Texas. He is the most notorious scientist in the world, and probably the recipient of the most heavy-handed meting out of criminal justice in recent memory.

-- After Butler had spent the weekend looking for the vials, he did what he was supposed to do and called the university security officer. Together they searched again. Maybe the containers had been misplaced or accidentally sterilised. It happens in labs: vials go through the autoclave at the end of a busy day by mistake. It's no big deal. But Butler didn't find them, and the FBI was called in.

-- Within 48 hours, 60 agents had descended on Lubbock, Texas, a town of just 200,000 inhabitants. This was the largest single deployment of FBI personnel since September 11. Butler was interrogated for two days straight. Agents searched his house in front of his children. They asked his wife whether her husband was in sufficient financial distress that he would have sold plague to terrorists. "In Lubbock!" says Turley. "You can throw a stick at any corner in Mozambique and get plague vials. You can get it easily in Russia. What terrorist is going to risk a trip to Lubbock?"

-- It did not matter that the FBI soon came to the conclusion that the vials had probably been destroyed accidentally. These 30 containers of yersinia pestis were now a national emergency, and Dr Thomas Butler, who had written a paper in the 1970s that pioneered oral rehydration therapy for diarrhoea and who could thus, with no arrogance, claim to have saved millions of lives, was now Dr Plague, suspected bio-terrorist.

-- Dr Plague cooperated fully with the investigation. He even waived his right to an attorney. He had worked for the government all his life, since his days as a navy doctor in Vietnam, and he trusted them.

-- But Butler had signed and things got even worse. House arrest; constant monitoring; nine months of intense pressure. According to his lawyers he was offered a deal - plead guilty and get six months in jail. He wouldn't plead guilty, he said, because he wasn't guilty. So the prosecutors threw the book at him. "It's called count stacking," explains Turley. "They throw as many counts as they can at the jury and hope they'll split the difference."

-- By the time the case went to trial last November, Butler was facing 69 charges and life in prison. But most of the offences had nothing to do with the missing plague. He was accused of fraud; embezzlement; tax evasion. And most of the charges came from his employer. Thanks to a complicated distinction between "clinical" fees (that scientists are supposed to pay universities) and "corporate" fees (for external consultancy, which they're not), five months after his original indictment bosses at Texas Tech decided that Butler owed them $1m.

-- The scientific community was in uproar. To date, several Nobel prizewinners - Peter Agre, Sidney Altman, Robert Curl and Torsten Wiesel - have spoken out in support of Butler and have donated to his legal fund. The National Academy of Sciences, not known for its bleeding-heart politics, has made Butler one of only two American scientists it has ever publicly taken on as a cause (the first was Wen Ho Lee, the Taiwan-born American physicist wrongly accused of espionage in 1999). There probably isn't a single microbiologist on earth who doesn't know about Tom Butler, and doesn't think it could happen to them, too.

Donald A Henderson, a smallpox expert who ran President Bush's emergency response programme against bio-terror attacks in 2001 elaborates:

"It's a gross overreaction.

"There's plague all over the [US] South-west. It's endemic in animals, and there are a dozen cases reported in humans every year."

"The National Academy tried very hard, the Committee dealing with scientists being persecuted in their own countries took this up as only the second case involving an American in the U.S and money was raised by many of its membership to defray legal costs.  His defense lawyers worked pro bono and were among the best in the country.  A very great deal of time, effort and energy were devoted to this case which so many of us found to be among the most troubling we had ever witnessed.

The description of the case (Belfast Telegraph) and its outcome are basically accurate as best I know the facts. It poses the question as to what is the status of justice in America today."

In the 15 October 2003 letter to Secretaries Ann M. Veneman and Tommy G. Thompson from the presidents of the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), Association of American Universities (AAU), Council on Governmental Relations (COGR) and National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, it was emphasized that:


"The research and education conducted by educational institutions is a critical part of protecting the public from the threat of bioterrorism. These are the activities that will lead to the development of therapies for treating illness caused by select agents and to vaccines to protect the public from harm.  Any interruption of such research will place the public further at risk."

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