And at the NRL, Cy Tamanaha has had similar success detecting ricin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B and other potential bioweapons.
Mr Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at the army's medical research institute, apparently committed suicide in late July.
The American Society of Microbiology, which published the mousepox paper, has introduced a policy of challenging the authors of provocative papers to consider their wider implications.Plenty of scientists have squared work on bioweapons with their consciences in the past, and 9,000 of them used to work in the Soviet biological weapons programme.
So far, none of the regimes thought to possess them is known to have passed on bioweapons to a terrorist group, though no one really knows.When the UN weapons inspectors were thrown out of Iraq in 1998, they had already destroyed thousands of litres of anthrax and other germ agents; but a whopping 17 tonnes of imported medium for growing germs were still unaccounted for.
But widespread panic may make firm orders necessary.Out of rogue handsThe other vital tactic is to stop terrorists getting hold of the germs to make bioweapons.
The same approach might even provide an antidote in the case of a biological attack, because bioweapons are also likely to rely on superantigens.Appropriate drugs could, Dr Madrenas speculates, mean that S. aureus ultimately becomes a harmless inhabitant of people's bodies.
Among other things, Britain and America have alleged that Iraq has developed mobile bioweapons laboratories: corroboration would be useful.
From 1992 to 1994 Meselson investigated the 1979 anthrax leak in Sverdlovsk, Russia, eventually determining that the leak had come from a nearby bioweapons facility.
There have been angry calls for Fouchier's virus to be destroyed, for it to be transferred to a military-level bioweapons facility, and for research to be stopped entirely.
