Plum Island is a legend, but not a myth. Just off Orient Point, Long Island, and six miles from the Connecticut coast, Plum Island is the site of a United States Agriculture Department Animal Disease Research Center. The USDA acquired the island from the War Department at the end of World War II with a charter from Congress to study animal diseases such as Foot and Mouth Disease. In surrounding communities, distrust of Plum Island runs deep. Lyme Disease takes its name from a Connecticut town across from the island: many wonder whether birds or swimming animals could have brought the disease from Plum Island. Some suspect this might be the case with West Nile Virus as well. Plum Island officials, of course, dismiss such hypotheses as fantasy.

Therefore, citizens were galvanized by the news, beginning with a September 22, 1999 New York Times article, that the USDA plans to expand its Plum Island laboratory to make it an ultra high-hazard Biosafety Level Four (BSL-4) facility. BSL-4 status would allow the lab to study zoonotic diseases, such as the Nipah Virus, anthrax, and Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis, all lethal to both animals and humans. The Times article, edited by national security correspondent Judith Miller, said that Floyd P. Horn, Administrator of the Agriculture Research Service, had persuaded President Clinton to include Plum Island in his expanded program on bioterrorism. Horn’s reasoning suggested terrorists might target livestock to hurt the US economy.

In stormy public hearings in Connecticut and on Long Island, citizens challenged both the safety and the purpose of the expanded laboratory. Many consider it an intolerable risk in a highly populated area. Though on an island, Plum Island's lab is not truly quarantined. Scientists and other laboratory workers commute to Connecticut and Long Island. At the public hearing in Waterbury, Connecticut, one Plum Island scientist told the audience “we hug our kids every night,” so trying to persuade the audience that he considered the work safe and they should too. The audience was not reassured. In August 1994, a worker at Yale’s Arbovirus Laboratory became infected with Sabia Virus but went home and then to Boston before realizing his symptoms were serious. The risk of accidental exposure would be greater on Plum Island, where instead of cultures in flasks (as at Yale), there are animal populations infected with zoonotic diseases (an illness communicable from animals to humans under natural conditions). Such diseases have incubation times of days: a worker could easily go home or travel without realizing that they had been infected.

Representatives of the laboratory say it has never had a serious accident – although a contractor was fined in 1995 for improperly storing hazardous chemicals. But in high-risk technologies, performance is best judged by examining a detailed record of hazardous errors and near accidents. At public hearings, citizens were told they could obtain these only through the Freedom of Information Act. Officials also refused to discuss their plans for the laboratory and its animals in case of an emergency at the nearby Millstone nuclear reactor – a facility which itself has a notorious safety and cover-up record.

Is Plum Island a quasi-military installation? Sailors who stray too close return with that impression. At hearings, officials treated such concerns as childish myths and said the upgrade to BSL-4 was simply to prepare for naturally emerging zoonotic diseases. Yet the Laboratory’s new Director, Colonel David L. Huxsoll, is the former commander of the Army’s top biological warfare laboratory at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. In the 1980s, Colonel Huxsoll was a leading figure in the Reagan Administration’s drive to apply genetic technologies to biological “defense.” He dismissed concerns that the Army’s program might violate the Biological Weapons Convention of 1975. “We might have enough to kill you,” he told author Charles Piller, “But that’s not a weapon.” Huxsoll thus argued that quantity alone distinguishes legitimate defensive research from prohibited offensive development. (Ed. Note: Huxsoll’s remarks are quoted in Charles Piller and Keith Yamomoto, Gene Wars. New York: Morrow, 1988.)

But with fast breeding germs, quantitative limits alone are far less important than qualitative ones. The Council for Responsible Genetics has argued in the past that genetic engineering of new strains of disease is at least ambiguously offensive. Indeed logic makes offense its most likely use, since its defensive value is questionable. Even if terrorists or “rogue” states were developing genetically engineered diseases, these would be unlikely to match our new, genetically engineered strain. Thus germ and vaccine development makes more sense as a sword and shield pair: the potential attacker vaccinates its own troops or population against the strain of disease it is then free to use offensively. Other nations, seeing such a program of ours, will feel free to embark on their own program.

Even if there were no military dimension to Plum Island, it would be a hazardous facility putting the civilian population at risk in an effort to protect US agribusiness from risks of its own making. It is true that livestock are getting sicker. But this increase in disease may well stem from crowded feedlots, genetically uniform animal populations, antibiotics misused to promote growth, and increased exposure to disease through globalization. The USDA promotes all of these practices. It cannot credibly ask the public to accept the risks while corporations reap the profits.

The Congressional battle over Plum Island – which will be in the next USDA budget request – will give both citizens and activists a chance to air issues of safety and secrecy in American agriculture and germ warfare.

David Keppel, a writer and activist, has been a Connecticut neighbor of Plum Island. He is writing a book on creative uncertainty as a principle of living things. He has just moved to Bloomington, Indiana