NEW YORK -- The United States blocked attempts by Iranian researchers to buy poison-producing strains of fungus from Canada and the Netherlands earlier this year, The New York Times said Sunday.
The efforts, revealed for the first time by Western intelligence officials, have sparked fears that Iran may be trying to develop a weapon from the toxins the fungus produces, the Times said.
According to the report, Bush Administration officials said the Iranian attempts highlight a new and complex problem in foreign affairs: the lack of any international efforts to limit the development of weapons made from organic compounds.
Though there are international agreements governing the spread of technology to create nuclear and chemical weapons, there are no such pacts limiting weapons developed from germs, microbes or toxins, in part because the substances and technology that would be used to make weapons could also be put to peaceful research ends.
The Iranians may have wanted to acquire the fungi to develop a defense against biological weapons, but the Bush Administration decided to intervene, asking the Canadians and Dutch to block the sale, because it did not want to take a chance that they intended to make offensive weapons, the Times said.
'There are enough bad vibes that we want to stand in the way of it. We're bending over backwards to be careful,' the Times quoted an administration official as saying.
The fungus the Iranian researchers sought to buy are found on wheat and grass, and produce mycotoxins, some of which harm humans and animals by inhibiting the ability of cells to synthesize proteins. They can cause death in sufficient concentrations.
Many scientists say mycotoxins are a strange choice for weapons because they are not highly lethal, and are more difficult to deploy than chemical weapons such as mustard gas, which has been used since World War I, and was reportedly used by Iraq in the eight-year Persian Gulf War against Iran.
An Iranian, identified as Mr. Moallem in the intelligence reports referred to in the Times' article, first contacted Dr. H. Bruno Scheifer, the director of the toxicology research center at the University of Saskatchewan about acquiring samples of the fungus in December 1988, the Times said.
Scheifer refused the Iranian's request after consulting with the Canadian government, the newspaper said.
There is a pharmacologist named A. Moallem who works in the poison unit at the Imam Reza Medical Center at Meshed Medical Sciences University in the Iranian city of Meshed, the Times said. Moallem, who is the author of a study on the effects of mustard gas, could not be reached by the Times for comment.
In January and February 1989, the Iranian Research Organization for Science and Technology contacted the Bureau for Fungus Cultures in the Netherlands, seeking to buy 11 types of fungus, including the two types that Moallem had sought from Scheifer, but the Dutch rejected the offer, the Times said.
Because of the reports that mustard gas had been used on Iranian soldiers in the war against Iraq, some scientists suggested that Iran might have wanted the toxins to experiment with ways to defend against them, the Times said.
