Death in Convenient Bottles

Two Columbia bacteriologists got to thinking about a very nasty subject: bacterial warfare. They decided that the U.S. Government ought to know what they were thinking, so they wrote it all down in a 40,000-word paper. That was early in 1942; the authors were subsequently hired by the Government's ultra-secret biological warfare section. Even though it was written without access to Washington's secret information, the paper looked like much too thorough an estimate of the possibilities of bacterial warfare for general circulation in wartime.

This week, five years later, the paper is being published (with no comment from the Government) in the Journal of Immunology. Drs. Theodor Rosebury and Elvin Kabat originally wrote it to scare Washington officials; now, they say, they are publishing it to scare the public. Set down with a kind of desperate, scientific calm, the report would make as pleasantly alarming reading as any outrageous fictional chiller--except for the fact that it might all come true.

The authors go to some length listing, with reasons, the diseases which are not practical for bacterial warfare. Among these are leprosy (too long an incubation period); smallpox (too many people are vaccinated); tuberculosis (too hard to spread and it kills too slowly); bubonic plague (among other reasons, the flea which carries it is too perishable). Gas gangrene bacteria are ruled out: too hard to get them into wounds (Rosebury & Kabat muse that they might be put in the fuses of fragmentation bombs).

Handy Package. Much more suitable for warfare,, the bacteriologists think, are the bacteria of various relatively obscure diseases: botulism, Weil's disease, anthrax, pneumonic plague. Botulinus toxin, for example, is by far the most potent of gastrointestinal poisons: it kills, within a few days, 60 to 70% of the people it infects. Rosebury & Kabat think that by aerial dissemination to enemy water supplies, whole populations could be infected before protective measures could be taken.

Pulmonary anthrax, almost invariably fatal to man, might be effective--but it can get a foothold only on mucous membranes already raw with irritation. Rosebury & Kabat have a suggestion: mix up the anthrax spores with mustard gas.

Did any reader still remain unhorrified? With dry, deadpan irony, Rosebury & Kabat--who know as well as anyone, and better than most, that there are "portentous moral issues involved"--even suggest a design for a convenient-size bottle of death: "Culture preparations of bacteria or viruses . . . might be dispensed, either in liquid suspension or in dry form, in thin-walled glass ampules. . . . To insure the breaking on contact with water, a gas-generating element like those used in fire extinguishers might be included."

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