Bioterrorism was a concern of some in government even before Al Qaida-manned planes took down the World Trade Center towers. The anthrax letters gready heightened that concern and extended it to our citizens as well. The nation responded with billions of dollars: bio-defense research and development, medical countermea-sures, equipment, training first responders, and funding construction of numerous high-containment laboratories. A next generation of scientists began working with what had been called, just since the mid-90s, "select agents"; these were generally "high-risk" pathogens, including some that had been studied in state-sponsored biological warfare programs during the Cold War. We spared no expense in attempting to protect the nation from this newly rediscovered threat from biology.
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