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the immune system's attention away to antigens unrelated to anthrax. Fort Detrick's new, souped-up single protein vaccine, like the old one, did nothing to induce an immune response to the organism itself, which could still feed, secrete toxins and multiply inside a vaccinated host. There was also one more flaw in this design: oils are potentially toxic, and the Fort Detrick team knew it. In Bruce Ivins! frequently cited paper on the Army's pursuit of an improved human anthrax vaccine, he noted that oil adjuvants "can provoke toxic, allergic, ulcerative, or lethal reactions." This should have prevented him from committing Fort Detrick to an oil-boosted anthrax vaccine in the first place, but for reasons that Ivins has never publicly disclosed, it did not deter him. Neither he nor anyone else who worked on this vaccine at Fort Detrick has published an explanation for why they did this. Round Two Anyone even remotely familiar with oil additives for vaccines could have told you that they were a big problem. For reasons science has yet to fully explain, oils and other fatty substances found in the body, like cholesterol and phosopholipids, are potent stimulants to the immune system. Try as they might, scientists trying to harness this property have yet to come up with an oil adjuvant safe enough to use in humans. Since the 1930's, the gold standard has been the aforementioned Freund's Complete Adjuvant—an elixir banned from human use because of its toxicity. When Freund's Incomplete Adjuvant, a vaccine additive made chiefly from mineral oil, proved too risky as well, scientists tried changing the oil. In the early 1970s, scientists at UCLA Medical Center, including one of the most respected rheumatologists in the country at the time, Carl M. Pearson, started looking for a less toxic alternative to Freund's. They ran a series of experiments with a variety of edible oils on the assumption that because they were "metabolizable" the body could process them safely. In other words, if you could ingest them, you could inject them. Intuitively, this premise seems somewhat dubious: your body could metabolize a cheeseburger, for instance, but you couldn't liquefy it in a blender and inject the resulting slurry, and then expect to feel well in the morning. Pearson's associates, Michael Whitehouse and Frances W. Beck, injected more than dozen of these metabolizable oils into rats, including castor oil, coconut oil, olive oil, sesame seed oil, cottonseed oil, corn oil, wheat germ oil, safflower oil, cod liver oil, oleomargarine, and the commercial lubricating oil, silicone. When these were mixed with heat-killed Mycobacteria tuberculosis, the UCLA group got results it didn't expect. All of the oils were toxic; they all induced arthritis in rats with varying degrees of severity. The data changed Whitehouse's views on the safety of metabolizable oils. "To summarize very simply, I think most oils are dangerous," he now says. Based on their ability to cause arthritis, the researchers assigned the oils “arthritis scores," ranging from (+), which was moderately toxic, to (++++), which was guaranteed to cripple. Of all the metabolizable oils tested by Pearson's group, two were better than all the others at causing arthritis: squalene and squalane, the same emulsifying oils that Bruce Ivins used in his single shot anthrax vaccines. Squalene and squalane scored (++) and (+++-++) respectively. Between these two oils, squalene is the one you could definitely eat. Olive oil contains squalene; in theory, you