Schizodoxe

Susan Lambert’s film tells us above all about the science behind biological warfare. It starts with the British anthrax trials in the Second World War, very briefly, and without much discussion of the research at Porton Down and its origins. The story moves on swiftly to the laboratories of the US biological weapons programme at Fort Detrick during the Cold War. The film makers introduce us to Bill Patrick, a veteran of the programme, who reminisces about how impressed the researchers were with the research opportunities they encountered in the facility (‘…it was fascinating work, really fascinating work…’), allowing and encouraging them to pursue research on germs and diseases which could not be handled safely in conventional university laboratories. Patrick remembers Fort Detrick as an ideal research and development facility. We learn about the controversy unfolding during the Korean War, when the Soviet government accused the Americans of using biological weapons. This controversy, rather than slowing it down, led to an intensification of the US programme. When penicillin and other antibiotic agents threatened the effectiveness of bacterial weapons, the use of myxomatosis to kill scores of rabbits in Australia (‘an experiment in the mass extermination of mammals’) pointed the researchers to the possible use of viruses as weapons. We also hear about the testing of biological agents in the Utah desert and see newsreel footage of happy ‘human guinea pigs’ playing piano in a Fort Detrick common room: conscientious objectors, pacifists and Seventh Day Adventists, for whom Bill Patrick expresses his highest regard. According to the veteran researcher, these experiments yielded ‘very, very important findings’ which could not have been produced otherwise. We do not hear what the volunteers thought about their role – none seem to have been interviewed for the film.

An important source of fears over weapons of mass destruction is that they are based on applications of cutting edge science. The effects of chemical weapons have a central place in the collective memory of World War I, and they were contributions of the world’s leading chemists to their nations’ causes. The atom bomb was developed by a colony of the world’s best physicists in the New Mexico desert, who believed that they were helping to defend fascism. In many people’s eyes, what makes biological weapons especially perfidious is that they seem to pervert the aims of medicine, for they are based on medical knowledge that is used to kill rather than cure. However, one of the implicit messages of this film is that those researchers interviewed in its making all appear to be perfectly nice people, somewhat proud of what they have achieved. Alibek today is the vice president of a biotechnology firm in the US and Popov seems delighted that these days he is developing vaccines rather than killer viruses. We can be almost certain, though, that under the right circumstances similarly nice people are going to be as impressed as Patrick was by the ideal facilities at Fort Detrick or Alibek and Popov by the opportunities granted to them at Biopreparat. And they will focus their creative energies on the design of new, ever more efficient weapons.

Source : Institute of Historical Research.