Brandeis officials met with members of the Waltham City Council last month to discuss actions the University has taken regarding the storage and accurate cataloguing of hazardous materials on campus, the Daily News Tribune reported.Last December, the University closed the Kalman science building for a week, when Brandeis administrators became worried the building had been contaminated with anthrax, even though researchers insisted proper percautions were followed. There was no anthrax contamination, but an Environmental Protection Agency team looking at the University did discover $175,000 in hazardous materials of which the University was previously unaware.

The City of Waltham is currently attempting to ascertain whether Brandeis has catalogued and safely stored its hazardous materials. Questions regarding hazardous materials have been raised since last fall, when Brandeis learned Researcher Daniel Perlman and others were experimenting with anthrax without the University's knowledge.

Perlman was experimenting with the hazardous substance to create a tool to better detect anthrax contamination. The researchers are currently seeking a patent for their findings. Perlman and another Brandeis researcher, Inga Mahler were interviewed by the FBI, because of their experiments, the Los Angeles Times reported. The pair were exonerated of any wrongdoing.