“If I see a stainless steel particle in the garbage that comes with the sample, then that tells me something about the kind of containers it was processed in. It's not just about the main organism used in an attack - it's about all the other stuff that comes with it. If you look through that stuff you can find a lot of clues that can lead you back to the attacker.”
“We drag our beam back and forth like someone would drag their finger over braille writing. Then we feed that into a computer and it pulls out what's in the sample just like pulling a needle out of a haystack.”
“The idea is not to be caught off-guard. We want to have tools set in place so if we have an incident we can quickly find the people that did this, apprehend them and prosecute them.”
