Controversy
The number of building "257" is a metonym for the entire site in 2004 when Michael Carroll, an attorney, published Lab 257: The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Plum Island Germ Laboratory. Many of the assertions and accusations made in the book are counter to the government's position and have been criticized and challenged. The review in Army Chemical Review concluded "Lab 257 would be cautiously valuable to someone writing a history of Plum Island, but is otherwise an example of fringe literature with a portrayal of almost every form of novelist style. " The book advances the idea that Lyme disease originated at Plum Island and conjectures several means by which animal diseases could have left the island. David Weld, the executive director of the American Lyme Disease Foundation, generically opined that "I personally just don't think that has any merit" yet refused to be specific or comment on the number of birds that come into contact with the island and fly back and forth between the mainland, possibly carrying infected ticks.
On July 12, 2008, a creature dubbed the Montauk Monster washed ashore at Ditch Plains Beach near the business district of Montauk, New York. The creature, a quadruped of indeterminate size, was dead when discovered, and was assumed by some to have come from Plum Island due to the currents and proximity to the mainland. Palaeozoologist Darren Naish studied the photograph and concluded from visible dentition and the front paws that the creature may have been a raccoon. This was also the opinion of Larry Penny, the East Hampton Natural Resources Director, though others claim that this is unlikely and interpret the fleshless part of the upper jaw, visible in the photo, as a beak, implying that the creature was a kind of hybrid monster.
The testing facility at Plum Island is the subject of a novel, The Poison Plum, by author Les Roberts.
The center was also mentioned in the movie Silence of the Lambs by FBI agents who offer Dr. Hannibal Lecter a transfer to it in exchange for his help locating a serial killer. Lecter reads over a report on the location, sarcastically saying, "Plum Island Animal Disease Research Center...sounds charming", then, rejecting the offer, Lecter refers to Plum Island as "Anthrax Island."
When Pakistani neuroscientist Aafia Siddiqui, a suspected al-Qaeda member, was arrested in Afghanistan in July 2008, she had in her handbag handwritten notes referring to a "mass casualty attack" that listed various U.S. locations, including the Plum Island Animal Disease Center. In February 2010, she was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon and attempting to kill U.S. soldiers and FBI agents who were seeking to interrogate her.
Read more about this topic: Plum Island Animal Disease Center
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“And therefore, as when there is a controversy in an account, the parties must by their own accord, set up for right Reason, the Reason of some Arbitrator, or Judge, to whose sentence, they will both stand, or their controversy must either come to blows, or be undecided, for want of a right Reason constituted by Nature; so is it also in all debates of what kind soever.”
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