US Biological Warfare program

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PENTAGON BIOWARFARE RESEARCH CONDUCTED IN UNIVERSITY LABORATORIES

         Overshadowed by Star Wars and overlooked by the media, the push
    toward biowarfare has been one of the Reagan administration's best
    kept secrets. The research budget for infectious diseases and toxins
    has increased tenfold since fiscal '81 and most of the '86 budget of
    $42 million went to 24 U.S. university campuses where the world's most
    deadly organisms are being cultured in campus labs.

         The amount of military money available for biotechnology research
    is a powerful attraction for scientists whose civilian funding
    resources dried up. Scientists formerly working on widespread killers
    like cancer now use their talents developing strains of such rare
    pathogens as anthrax, dengue, Rift Valley fever, Japanes encephalitis,
    tularemia, shigella, botulin, Q fever, and mycotoxins.

         Many members of the academic community find the trend alarming,
    but when MIT's biology department voted to refuse Pentagon funds for
    biotech research, the administration forced it to reverse its
    decision. And, in 1987, the University of Wisconsin hired Philip
    Sobocinski, a retired Army colonel, to help professors tailor their
    research to attract Pentagon-funded biowarfare research to the school.
    Richard Jannaccio, a former science writer at UW, was dismissed from
    his job on August 25, 1987, the day after the student newspaper, THE
    DAILY CARDINAL, published his story disclosing the details of Colonel
    Sobicinski's mission at the University.

         Since the U.S. is a signatory to the 1972 Biological and Toxic
    Weapons Convention which bans "development, production, stockpiling
    and use of microbes or their poisonous products except in amounts
    necessary for protective and peaceful research," the university-based
    work is being pursued under the guise of defensive projects aimed at
    developing vaccines and protective gear. Scientists who oppose the
    program insist that germ-warfare defense is clearly impractical; every
    person would have to be vaccinated for every known harmful biological
    agent.  Since vaccinating the entire population would be virtually
    impossible, the only application of a defensive development is in
    conjunction with offensive use. Troops could be effectively vaccinated
    for a single agent prior to launching an attack with that agent.
    Colonel David Huxsoll, commander of the U.S. Army Medical Research
    Institute of Infectious Diseases admits that offensive research is
    indistinguishable from defensive research even for those doing it.

         Each of the sources for this synopsis raised ethical questions
    about the perversion of academia by military money and about the U.S.
    engaging in a biological arms race that could rival the nuclear
    threat, yet none mentioned the safety or the security of the labs
    involved.  The failure to investigate this aspect of the issue is a
    striking omission.  Release of pathogens, either by accident or
    design, would prove tragic at any of the following schools:  Brigham
    Young, California Institute of Technology, Colorado State University,
    Emory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Iowa University, M.I.T.,
    Purdue, State University of N.Y. at Albany, Texas A&M, and the
    Universities of California, California at Davis, Cincinnati,
    Connecticut, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland,
    Massachusetts, Minnesota, North Carolina, and Utah.

         SOURCES: ISTHMUS, 10/9/87, "Biowarfare and the UW,"  by Richard
    Jannaccio, pp 1, 9, 10; THE PROGRESSIVE, 11/16/87, "Poisons from the
    Pentagon," by Seth Shulman, pp 16-20; WALL STREET JOURNAL, 9/17/86,
    "Military Science," by Bill Richards and Tim Carrington, pp 1, 23.

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