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91   Congress Should Examine
     Biological Warfare Tests
     The Washington Post  Saturday, March 30, 1968

     The ethics of biological experimentation has become a subject of
legislative interest in the last few months.  This concern started
from the publicity  given to important advances like heart 
transplantation.  It may now have a much more pointed application to 
experiments laden with global hazards, conducted in great secrecy, and 
outside the reach of any tradition of medical ethics.  The news that 
provokes this observation comes from Skull Valley, Utah, near the Dugway
Proving Grounds of the Army Material Command.

     A few thousand sheep have died, suddenly and mysteriously.  At
this writing, the Army is still investigating the incident; earlier news
reports quoted some military spokesmen as quick to deny the 
possibility that some experiments at Dugway had misfired.

     An independent investigation is clearly out of the question in
such a security-sensitive area.  Under these circumstances, it is
difficult to see how a credible account can be obtained, whatever
the facts.

     If the incident had no ramifications beyond the accidental
release of a potent chemical weapon; if the hazard were limited 
under any circumstances to a few thousand people, it might be put down
to the fortunes of war.  The incidental risks would not be fundamentally
different from those of high explosive munitions, casually
transported on a large scale.

     Sadly, one of the insanities of the chase after military security
is a world wide competition in research and development on biological
warfare.  Because the Russians or the Chinese might be investigating
exotic bacteria and viruses, the argument goes, we must do the same
in self-defense.  And of course the Russians and the Chinese have
exactly the same reaction to our own secret programs.

     These activities are aimed at practicing the large-scale 
deployment of the most contagious enemies of man that he can discover or
invent.  Our personal security must then depend on the depth of the
technical competence of the men responsible for the research.  This
is impossible to judge from outside the secrecy barrier.  However, it
is almost certain that the technicians willing to work in this area
are self-selected for peculiar nonchalance about it. Who else would?
Without other objective surveillance, we have to be unforgivingly
harsh in our judgment of mistakes and leaks that do come to public
notice.  

     Is anyone competent enough to play with these matches, which are
designed to ignite "controlled pestilence"?  According to a paper in 
the December 8, 1967, issue of Science magazine, the American Public
Health Association has  a file of 2700 cases of virus infections 
contracted by workers in medical laboratories.  These included 107
fatalities.  This file is probably not complete; we have no way of
knowing the completeness with which such cases are reported from 
military research laboratories.  I do know that one of my late 
colleagues in microbial genetics died of a plague infection contracted  
in the British laboratories at Porton.  And he died in town.  

     In the midst of the global race, it would be futile to demand a
unilateral abnegation of research on biological weapons.  A Congress
interested in biological ethics should, however, make insistent 
demands for efforts, which do not now exist, to find formulas for 
international control of species-suicidal research.  For his own 
personal security, every Congressman should also seek his own assurance
--less readily available to the common citizen--that the internal 
surveillance of experiments with contagious weapons is prudent enough to
suit him and his family.

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