It was crime news with a twist of the bizarre. In July, a fired employee of the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory allegedly destroyed more than 4,000 protein crystal samples at the lab, sneaking back in to cure her feelings of "bad karma," according to an FBI agent's affidavit. And after her arrest and release on bond, Silvya Oommachen went missing. A no-bail arrest warrant was issued, and she was assumed to be a fugitive.
SLAC is operated by Stanford for the U.S. Department of Energy. The destroyed samples were being used in research by the Joint Center for Structural Genomics at SLAC, where Oommachen had worked, and had an estimated value of $500,000. As of late summer, the samples gradually were being remade during the course of other work. Stanford sat down with lab director Persis Drell and Alexander Merola, the chief operating officer, to discuss the aftermath. Here are excerpts from Drell's comments.
On the nature of security at SLAC: "We are an open science lab. We do no classified research. All of our findings are published in the literature, so we're not trying to hide anything here. We're not trying to protect national secrets. We're not trying to protect technology, so that nobody else will take our market share. We're just the opposite. We invite collaborators and competitors in, and they do it with us."
"On the other hand, we have valuable things here. They can be valuable in a market sense. And we have hazardous things here. We operate accelerators, big science. We control those hazards, but we don't want people wandering around without training, because if they got curious and they went places where they shouldn't, they could get hurt. So when we think safety and security, that's what's on our mind."
On the contrast between SLAC and research sites that use armed guards or visitor escorts: "This event really was an anomaly. We actually just got statistics this morning—there's a small number of thefts every year. Compared to main campus, it's idyllic up here, just because we're sort of off the beaten track."
"But, as always when an incident like that happens, you look at it, you do a root cause analysis. Where were the vulnerabilities? How do we improve things without turning the site into something it's not? Armed guards . . . we definitely don't want to go there."
On the reaction of the Department of Energy: "I was in Washington [when] the woman was arrested. I talked to quite a few people in the Department of Energy, and I found them quite supportive and understanding—very pleased that we had brought it to conclusion so quickly. And that of course was done with the help of the federal government because it was the FBI counterintelligence guys who solved the case."
"I talked to people in the Department of Energy who are responsible for oversight, safety and security. They had real experts, because there are labs for whom security is a huge issue because of nuclear secrets. And they prioritize and list various threats and how to deal with them. Certainly, the knowledgeable insider is one of the hardest to defend against. They obviously encouraged us to do what we felt was needed, but they are not coming in to beat us up."
On the lingering impact: "I've been in science for 30 years and I had never heard of something like this, and it was clear from the beginning that it was vandalism, that it was malicious intent and that it was somebody very knowledgeable. That is extremely threatening to the laboratory. I was very worried. I remain worried about some of the employees affected by this because it is a really upsetting thing to have happen—particularly when we live in a culture of openness; to have this magnitude of a breach of trust from somebody you've worked side by side with."
"We certainly have put additional security measures in a temporary way in place, and we're looking at longer-term solutions. But I will never be able to guarantee it won't happen again. I believe we have a realistic assessment of the threat, and our response is appropriately balanced."
