New York Times Book Review January 23, 2000 Death Factories A history of germ warfare and America's involvement in it. By TIMOTHY NAFTALI THE BIOLOGY OF DOOM: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project. By Ed Regis. 259 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company. $25. The impure salts that turned Dr. Henry Jekyll into Mr. Edward Hyde did not prescribe themselves. In Robert Louis Stevenson's famous story, it is the scientist and not science that is the villain. ''Man is not truly one,'' the doomed Jekyll lamented, ''but truly two.'' Real-life Dr. Jekylls lurk in the background of Ed Regis' ''Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project.'' The science behind biological warfare is the evil flip side of the search for vaccines and cures. Military use of pathogens is as old as human conflict. But it is in the 20th century that biological warfare became an industry. For once the Nazis are not primarily to blame. It was imperial Japan that inspired the modern biological arms race. In 1938, Japanese scientists began moving into Ping Fan, a walled city 20 miles south of Harbin in occupied China. Within two years, the Anti-Epidemic Water Supply and Purification Bureau, or Unit 731, employed 3,000 people at scores of laboratories. At Ping Fan, Japanese scientists pioneered the mass production of pathogens and worked on delivery mechanisms. By October 1940, Japanese planes dropped a mixture of grains and fleas over Chinese towns, causing two major outbreaks of bubonic plague south of Shanghai. The British, concerned that whatever Tokyo could do Berlin could do better, were the first to try to set up a biological warfare program of their own. In December 1941 they acquired Gruinard Island in the Scottish highlands and over the next few years dropped bombs filled with anthrax spores over the heads of oblivious sheep, who then died as expected. As in many other areas of modern national defense -- intelligence gathering, commando operations -- the Americans started behind the British, learned from them and because of huge national resources ultimately surpassed them. But it was the cold war, and fears of Soviet biological weapons, not World War II, that gave rise to an American biological arsenal. And once again the Japanese played a significant role. There were rumors that the scientists at Ping Fan had experimented on human beings, and in 1947 the Soviets exerted pressure on the United States to put them on trial. Maj. Gen. Shiro Ishii, whom American intelligence had found living under an assumed name in Japan, finally admitted his crimes. In all, Unit 731 killed about 850 ''patients.'' ''The human subjects,'' one American study later concluded ''were used in exactly the same manner as other experimental animals.'' The Japanese discovered, for instance, that if you put 10 people in a room infested with 20 plague-bearing fleas per square meter, 4 would die of plague. Anthrax had a better mortality rate (80 percent to 90 percent, Ishii said) but the plague diffused better. The most frightening agent the Japanese tested was Songo fever, like Ebola, the star of ''The Hot Zone,'' a hemorrhagic fever. ''The Biology of Doom'' is thought-provoking in spite of itself. Regis' goal seems to be to disprove Soviet and Chinese claims that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War. In this he succeeds. As this institutional history shows, the United States acquired an operational biological weapons capacity only after the end of the Korean War. The United States Air Force included a biological warfare annex to its plans for general war as early as 1950; but until 1954, it did not have the refrigeration capability, let alone enough of any kind of bug, to perform this feat anywhere. The Army, meanwhile, completed its first biological production plant only in December 1953. Nor has any researcher yet found tactical plans for biological warfare in the Far East in the 1950's. In fact, Regis says, there is no evidence of any American military use of biological weapons in the cold war; work to perfect them continued until late 1969, when President Richard Nixon ordered a halt. Regis, the author of four previous books, including ''Who Got Einstein's Office?,'' understands the critical difference between plans and operations. But in focusing on what the United States did not do in battle, he misses the larger implications of his story. Shiro Ishii and his associates received immunity from prosecution in return for giving the United States Army 15,000 slides of specimens from more than 500 human cases of diseases caused by biological agents, and in the 1950's and 60's, the government sponsored covert tests, using the apparently harmless microbes Serratia marcescens (SM) and Bacillus globigii (BG), to simulate the spread of deadly anthrax over large populations. In April 1950, two Navy ships -- without, it seems, the knowledge of Congress -- sprayed the residents of the Virginia coastal communities of Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News with BG. Later that year, 800,000 people around San Francisco Bay were exposed to clouds of these microbes. Regis found evidence of 200 similar tests all over the country. In the most bizarre, in June 1966, soldiers in plain clothes dropped light bulbs filled with BG on New York City subway tracks, and the trains pulled the cloud of biological agents throughout the subway system. Then men with suitcase samplers strolled among unsuspecting New York subway riders to test the amount of spread. Arguably, these were defensive operations to determine the vulnerability of American cities to attack. Regis also describes how human beings were also used to test offensive agents. Between 1955 and 1969, 2,200 Seventh-day Adventists in the American military volunteered to be infected with scores of diseases from equine encephalitis to Rocky Mountain spotted fever. ''The type of voluntary service which is being offered to our boys,'' the Army sponsors wrote, ''offers an excellent opportunity for these young men to render a service which will be of value not only to military medicine but to public health generally.'' It is customary to blame governments for these industries of death. But one also has to wonder about the individual scientists. A compelling book, for which Regis did the research, would have examined the morality and motivations of the men behind biological weapons. Henry Jekyll blamed self-indulgence for the shipwreck of his life. What prompted these American scientists to feed the Hydes of their souls? ______________________________________________________________ Timothy Naftali is director of the Presidential Recordings Project at the University of Virginia's Miller Center of Public Affairs. He is working on a history of American counterespionage during World War II and the cold war.
