On a personal level,I have mixed feelings about putting this last part out there,but because it has been in the public domain already for 14 years,and seeing that the purpose of my blog is to share what I am reading,I will stick with the game plan.Very sobering reading,and I still will never be able to understand why they want to put it's replacement smack dab in the middle of tornado alley,sounds like a disaster waiting to happen to me.It will be interesting to hear how Kansas State spins it,to incoming students...
....The further you get into this, the more mind-boggling it will become.
—PLUM ISLAND EMPLOYEE (1997)
Unfortunately, this story doesn’t have a happy ending where the troubles work themselves out into tidy solutions. In fact, there is no ending. The island workforce walked out and went on strike in August 2002. The following June, President George W. Bush moved the laboratory from the USDA to the new Department of Homeland Security. The Plum Island saga gets more intriguing with each passing day.
Dr. Breeze physically departed Plum Island in 1995, but he continued calling the shots from his new office in Washington as a procession of faceless directors came and went. Breeze finally got his man in sixty-five-year-old Dr. David L. Huxsoll, whom he appointed Plum Island’s director in June 2000. “Roger handpicked him,” says one scientist familiar with the decision. “He has that biological warfare background that Roger likes. Breeze has always been into germ warfare. He loves the mystery, and the intrigue—he’s really into it.” Dr. Huxsoll grew up on a farm in the rural town of Aurora, Indiana, where he recalls being so attached as a child to his family’s livestock, he cried for days when the fattened baby calves he had named and petted were sold at market. Like Dr. Callis, Huxsoll attended Purdue University, but the comparisons end there. After a brief vet practice stint in northern Illinois, Huxsoll was drafted into military service and embarked on a three decade military career chasing diseases around the globe. Colonel Dr. Huxsoll was named commander of the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories in 1983, the first veterinarian to hold that command, bringing full circle the veterinarian connection to biological warfare that Plum Island founding father Dr. Hagan began in 1941. “The most valuable thing out there,” says Dr. Huxsoll, “it’s not the gun, it’s not the tank, it’s not the jet fighter—it’s man. So we do whatever can be done to prevent illness, and should illness occur, restore that person to operational status.”
As Fort Detrick’s 1 commander, Colonel Huxsoll saw heavy action during the now-infamous Ebola virus outbreak in Reston, Virginia, featured in Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone. He made the controversial decision to send the Army into a domestic matter that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC)—lacking any hands-on expertise—was having a difficult time managing. “At that time, I considered everything, the potential hazards, and the safety issues.... There comes a point in time when you see—and you know—the only logical response is to make that uncomfortable decision with the best interests of lots and lots of people in mind.” The decision was the right one. Huxsoll’s well-trained medical soldiers—led by virus hunter C. J. Peters, who stalked Rift Valley fever through Egypt a decade before— successfully beat back the Ebola virus.
1 By this point, the Fort Detrick biological warfare laboratories had assumed a friendlier-sounding name: U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID.
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/09/part-7-of-7-lab-257-disturbing.html
