Planned Pestilence

Man-made pestilence still walks in the darkness of military secrecy. But in the current Journal of the American Pharmaceutical Association, George W. Merck, president of Merck & Co., tells a little bit about U.S. experiments for possible biological warfare.

Early in the war U.S. authorities suspected that the enemy might be assembling task forces of death-dealing microorganisms. Against this possibility, however remote, defensive measures were needed. Since no one knew how the germ attack might be launched, the only thing to do was to study all the possible offensive methods and develop defenses against them.

U.S. physiologists and bacteriologists assembled in secret laboratories under the Chemical Warfare Service. With them worked 3,800 Army & Navy men. In gleaming glassware grew the world's most vicious germs. A flask of cloudy liquid or a blob of nutrient jelly might contain the makings of a pandemic.

"Biological warfare," writes Merck with detachment, "may be defined as the use of bacteria, fungi, viruses, rickettsias (e.g., typhus fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever), and toxic agents derived from living organisms. . . to produce death or disease in men, animals or plants." Under this broad directive, the scientists went to work.

They bred large masses of disease germs, learned how to make them as virulent as possible and keep them so. They tested each strain for hardiness and longevity. They determined the exact number needed to start an infection and studied "all possible means of dissemination and routes of entrance into the susceptible individual."

Germ Clouds. Of particular interest were "airborne disease-producing agents," which need no insects or drinking water to carry them to their victims. The scientists developed "precise methods" of producing "clouds" of such microorganisms.

Another triumph: production and isolation in pure crystalline form of the most deadly biological poison known to man, the toxin secreted by Clostridium botulinum, type A, bacteria which sometimes grow in home-canned vegetables.

Animals and plants upon which man depends were not neglected. Diseases of cattle, even of chickens, were explored. The scientists cultured the smuts, rusts and blights that strike down the farmer's crops. They studied more than 1,000 crop-killing chemicals. Some of them, sprayed from the air "in infinitesimal dilution," allowed the crops to grow for a while, apparently healthy, but they yielded no harvest. In biological war, slow hunger would mop up the field behind quick death by pestilence.

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