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In an interview with SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN in May,
Col. David L. Huxsoll, the genial commander of the U.S. Army Medical
Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Md.,
recalled how NBC News once introduced a broadcast on biological
weapons. First a cobra, hood extended, flashed on the screen. "Then
the cobra disappears," Huxsoll said ruefully, "and there's Dave
Huxsoll."
Until recently Huxsoll could afford to be sanguine about this kind of
treatment. Although the Pentagon's research into biological
weapons--which include microorganisms, toxins and, yes, snake
venoms--has never been terribly popular, since 1980 the program has
enjoyed support where it matters most: in the Administration. During
the Reagan years the annual budget for biological-defense research (so
named to underscore its compliance with the 1972 Biological Weapons
Convention, which prohibits developing weapons) has leaped from about
$15 million to more than $90 million. Administration officials
justified the buildup by claiming that the Soviet Union and its
surrogates had illegally stockpiled biological weapons and even used
them--in the form of a lethal "yellow rain"--in Afghanistan and
Southeast Asia.
Now, however, Huxsoll and other biological-defense officials face an
up-coming change in administration and greatly intensified opposition.
Long-standing critics are still pressing the attack. Biotechnology
gadfly Jeremy Rifkin, who has sued to halt the research on the grounds
that it is unsafe, is organizing protests in communities where the
research is done. Matthew S. Meselson of Harvard University, who
helped to discredit the Administration's case for yellow rain (it
turned out to be bee excrement), has been chipping away at the so
called Sverdlovsk incident: an outbreak of anthrax in central Russia
that occurred in 1979. U.S. officials have charged that the outbreak
resulted from an accident at a military plant that was mass-producing
the anthrax bacterium. In April, Meselson invited three Soviet
physicians to the U.S. to present epidemiological data demonstrating
that the outbreak had a natural origin. Military officials such as
Huxsoll were not impressed, but many other physicians and
epidemiologists found the data credible.
A fresh group of critics has also jumped into the fray. In May the
Senate Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management released a
report accusing the biological-defense program of "lax safety
enforcement." Supervision of the 100 or so contractors in industry and
academia doing research is particularly poor, according to the report.
In a new book called Gene Wars, journalist Charles Piller and Keith R.
Yamamoto, a molecular biologist at the University of California at San
Francisco, assert that biological-defense researchers publish
seldom--and then usually in second-rate journals--compared with
investigators funded by civilian organizations such as the National
Institutes of Health. Either the workers are incompetent, Piller and
Yamamoto conclude, or they are concealing the nature of their work in
violation of the Pentagon's declared policy of openness.
The fiercest criticism focuses on the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving
Ground in Utah, a stretch of mountains and desert larger than Rhode
Island. In 1984 the Army announced it intended to build a containment
laboratory at Dugway to determine how well gas masks, sensors and
other equipment respond to airborne pathogens and toxins. Arms-control
experts have deplored the plan as a provocative act, maintaining that
the laboratory could help to develop and test weapons. Recently two
staunchly prodefense leaders in Utah, Governor Norman H. Bangerter and
Senator Orrin G. Hatch (both are Republicans), stunned the Pentagon by
opposing the laboratory as unsafe.
Part of the problem for Army officials is Dugway's checkered past.
Before President Richard M. Nixon banned offensive biological research
in 1969, the Army tested anthrax and other lethal agents outdoors at
Dugway; areas of the base are still contaminated. (The Army continues
to conduct field tests with nonpathogenic microorganisms called
simulants.) In 1968 an Army plane flying just north of the base, over
ranchland known appropriately as Skull Valley, leaked nerve gas that
killed roughly 6,000 sheep. As a result of such incidents, says
Kenneth L. Alkema, director of environmental health in Utah, "the
trust level is not too high over what the Army says it is going to
do."
I. Gary Resnick, who supervises biological research at Dugway, seems
genuinely puzzled by the uproar. He points out that the director of
safety for the NIH has approved the proposed laboratory's design and
that similar laboratories for studying lethal pathogens are operating
at the NIH, at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta and at Fort
Detrick. (Although it is commonly maintained that the Dugway facility
would be used to test the virulence of exotic new diseases and toxins,
actually this work is already done at Fort Detrick, under Huxsoll's
command.) Resnick suggests, somewhat wistfully, that these
laboratories are "plums" for their communities and that the Dugway
facility would also be a plum for Utah. "There is a ground swell in
Utah that is misunderstanding this lab," he says.
Col. Wyett H. Colclasure II, director of testing at Dugway, notes that
the Pentagon is considering other locations for the laboratory,
including atolls in the South Pacific. Yet he warns that for economic
and other reasons the Army may build the laboratory at Dugway in spite
of the local opposition. "It is not our task here to take a
public-opinion poll and ask do you think we ought to do this," he
says.
Notwithstanding, in the past few months military officials have
mounted a vigorous public relations campaign--issuing reports,
testifying before Congress and meeting with journalists to justify
both the Dugway laboratory and the entire biological-defense program.
Perhaps because relations between the superpowers are warming and
because several of the most hawkish denizens of the Pentagon have
recently departed, the program is being justified in a subtly
different manner than in years past, according to Ivo J. Spalatin, a
member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee staff. A few officials
still resort to what Spalatin calls "scare tactics." In May, for
example, Thomas J. Welch, a deputy assistant secretary of defense,
testified that 10 countries have or are suspected of having biological
weapons, up from four in 1972. (The identity of the nations, with the
exception of the U.S.S.R., is classified.)
But others steer away from these military issues, dwelling on the
safety and openness of the program and its benefits not only for
American soldiers but also for civilians around the world. Huxsoll,
for instance, likes to talk about how research done at Fort Detrick
has helped the Chinese to combat hemorrhagic fever and the Malaysians
to treat snakebite. "What we do here is no different from what is done
at Merck and Company, or NIH or CDC," he says.
Then why can't the research be done by a civilian agency, thus
eliminating the distrust that has always shadowed the military
program? "I don't think the NIH or CDC can appreciate military needs,"
Huxsoll replies quickly. Yet some legislators are now quietly
examining this option, according to Spalatin. "We don't know how
realistic or responsible that alternative is yet," he says, "but we
are in the process of examining it."
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