Word: germ
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...could have been horrific. To triumph in that war, the cult built a series of munitions factories within its complex at the foot of Mount Fuji. Aum researchers were trying to develop germ weapons -- including the Ebola virus -- and an assembly line was about to produce automatic rifles. Behind one building's false walls was a $700,000 lab able to turn out 60 to 80 kg a month of the nerve gas sarin -- enough to kill 6 million to 8 million people. One plan called for releasing the sarin over Tokyo from 1.65-m-long remote-controlled helicopters. Asahara...
...perhaps. But the police accounts include details that challenge the group's technical proficiencies, portraying it as a cult that couldn't shoot straight. The remote-controlled helicopters, purchased from a dealer in northern Japan for $20,000 each in 1993, crashed during the first two practice sessions. The germ-warfare team, despite experiments with botulism, never produced a working weapon. During one of its experiments, a chemical vaporized into a foul-smelling gas, escaped into the outside air and precipitated, coating nearby cars with brown ooze...
...moved the timetable forward to 1995. He had funds -- a senior cult member admitted that Aum has assets of more than $1 billion -- and an inner circle of Ph.D.s that was split into groups to produce conventional arms, chemical weapons, biological weapons and drugs. The least successful initiative was germ research, even though Aum sent a medical team to Zaire in 1992 following mistaken reports of an outbreak of Ebola. The most successful was the sarin production unit. Chief chemist Masaya Tsuchiya, 30, told police that he concocted a total of 25 kg of sarin between November...
Steele's wisecrack raises a serious question. Might some of these microorganisms be dangerous -- an ancient Andromeda Strain like the killer germ in another Crichton novel? Absolutely not, argues Steele, who stresses that Ambergene is very selective in the microbes it chooses to cultivate, carefully checking their genetic and ecological profiles to exclude possible pathogens. In addition, she notes, most of Ambergene's microbes are related to modern-day organisms of known habits. Still, experience with rabbits in Australia and kudzu in the Southern U.S. shows that seemingly innocuous plants and animals can misbehave when taken out of their original...
...medicine's worst nightmares is the development of a drug-resistant strain of severe invasive strep A, the infamous flesh-eating bacteria. What appears to make this variant of strep such a quick and vicious killer is that the bacterium itself is infected with a virus, which spurs the germ to produce especially powerful toxins. (It was severe, invasive strep A that killed Muppeteer Jim Henson in 1990.) If strep A is on the rise, as some believe, it will be dosed with antibiotics, and may well become resistant to some or all of the drugs...