By Jonathan York
Daily Texan
November 22, 2002, Friday

A map on the wall of Scarbrough Building suite 607 shows the United States and Europe dotted with black pins. One pin rests on San Antonio. Another sticks into Galveston: This one is Edward Hammond's present concern.

"Galveston. They're building a BL 4 -- UT System is," Hammond said. "That's like the highest in biocontainment. They're handling the wild hemorrhagic fevers and stuff; things that are really frightening."

Indeed, the University of Texas Medical Branch's Biosafety Level 4 laboratory is rising quietly in Galveston. The 2,140-square-foot building, paid for largely by federal money, is expected to be finished in summer 2003, according to a UTMB press release. The same release observes that System scientists will be able to "safely study some of the most dangerous organisms on the planet."

That bothers Hammond. As leader of the Sunshine Project's U.S. operations, he has made a career of trying to stop such projects -- not research into deadly diseases, but "biodefense" research behind closed doors.

"A lot of [the research] is getting set to take place in very secretive facilities. And what that's going to do is to provoke a lot of other countries to do secret work on biological weapons," Hammond said. "As bizarre as it sounds, I think we are getting into a biodefense race, and everybody knows that the difference between 'biodefense' and 'bio offense' is very, very small."

Hammond is a stocky man whose beard is faintly silver. His cramped sixth-floor office in downtown Austin, the Sunshine Project's U.S. headquarters, seems to suit more clandestine operations: Governmental access passes decorate one wall. Shelves hold books on international policy. And defense department bio-weapons reports -- the big-game trophies of Hammond's Freedom of Information Act hunts -- lie, stacked, on the floor.

"That's what I've spent half my time doing last year," Hammond said, bending to pick through a large pile.

The Sunshine Project, which also has an office in Hamburg, Gemany, tries to stop the silent "biodefense race" that Ham-mond envisions. To that end, its three members speak at seminars, distribute information to Congress and publish U.S. documents online. As nonprofit activism concerning biological weapons traditionally has been a field for academics, Hammond said, his group is a novelty.

"All three of us have a background of working with more campaign-oriented nonprofits," Hammond said. "So we're ... a new kind of entity in some ways in this field, which is kind of fun, because we are able to say and do things that some people can't.

"On the other side, it's a little bit lonely, because there aren't a lot of people like us who are working in this area."

Hammond has grounds for believing that the United States' apparent march toward war will continually involve biological weapons. Besides the Bush administration's charges that Iraq collects "weapons of mass destruction," information on counterterrorism research -- for instance, laboratory provisions in the Homeland Security Act of 2002 -- speaks often of biological attacks.

This fall's hostage incident in a Moscow theater, in which several died after breathing a riot-control gas, brought more of the Sunshine Project's concerns into the open. Hammond has been intent on gathering information about the United States' development of non-lethal chemical weapons that police might use in such situations.

"Right now, it's not terribly encouraging, because what happened in Moscow brought all these weirdos out of the woodwork who say, 'Oh, that's a great idea, we should do more of this,'" Hammond said.