Abstract
If history is any guide, states will again call on scientists to develop biological weapons–and there's little to prevent them from succeeding.
In the name of national security, the United States has recently promoted voluntary measures to curb the development of state biological weapons programs. One of these measures is the adoption of biosecurity codes of conduct. While of potential value, such codes are no substitute for effective national and international legal measures that promote openness and criminalize violations, such as the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC). Behavioral guidelines such as codes of conduct also raise fundamental questions about the impact of individual conscience versus the impact of social context on scientists' moral choices.
Although they may feel autonomous in their work, most contemporary microbiologists remain susceptible to larger institutional and political pressures. Whether in academic medical centers, pharmaceutical companies, or government facilities, they work in corporate settings where norms, professional responsibilities, and missions are bureaucratically defined. In addition to those pressures, these scientific environments react significantly to national norms concerning transparency and public accountability. Their common characteristic is a reliance on scientific methods and beliefs, which may have no moral component.
The capacity of scientists to set aside moral scruples is abundantly illustrated in the history of biological weapons in the last century, when thousands of microbiologists were employed in secret state programs that defied international norms and laws protecting civilians in war. One major power after another–France, Imperial Japan, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union–pursued biological weapons for strategic use. Very few of these government-employed scientists ever recanted their dedication to helping infect masses of civilians with anthrax, tularemia, plague, smallpox, and other diseases. Except for micro-biologist Theodor Rosebury, who left the U.S. program in 1945 and in 1949 published his classic book, Peace or Pestilence, few became open critics.
How does one reconcile belief in the integrity of biomedical scientists, who have saved lives and prevented suffering, with this dark, often suppressed history? One explanation lies in the power of the closed scientific enclave in weapons research to resolve otherwise conflicting values. In past state biological weapons programs, scientists worked in communities isolated from the wider world and sheltered from criticism or controversy. In times of war, they identified themselves as loyal patriots, and in times of peace, they identified themselves as dedicated government employees.
The capacity of scientists to set aside moral scruples is abundantly illustrated in the history of biological weapons in the last century, when thousands of microbiologists were employed in secret state programs.
The 1934-45 Japanese bioweapons program in occupied Manchuria created an extreme version of the secret scientific enclave. Within Unit 731, its main center near Harbin, well-educated microbiologists lived comfortably in close proximity to their laboratories and to prisons that were a continual source of captive Chinese research subjects. During World War II, these scientists orchestrated the only modern mass use of germ weapons in war, causing tens of thousands of deaths in dozens of Chinese villages and towns. Decades later, in public confessions, some of these biologists described their blind loyalty to Emperor Hirohito, which allowed them “no feeling of apology or of doing anything bad,” even when performing human vivisection.
Although other state programs stopped short of war crimes, their scientists had to rationalize their commitment to the goal of mass germ attacks. In the 1920s, the French military invoked suspicions of German intent to conduct germ warfare to justify its own secret biological warfare research. During World War II, biologists who led the British program were dedicated to a total war doctrine that made it essential to target enemy civilian populations in industrial and urban areas. This same doctrine spurred the U.S. development of biological and nuclear weapons during and after the war, and also shaped the Soviet program as it grew to mammoth size in the final decades of the Cold War. Biological weapons scientists in secret scientific enclaves sometimes cog-nitively divorced their scientific objectives from the broader military mission of mass killing. One example comes from the memoirs of a former Soviet program mi-crobiologist, Igor Domarovskij, who worked in the closed city of Obo-lensk. When his development of a more virulent strain of tularemia was disrupted by bureaucratic wrangling, he blamed bad management and complained bitterly that his “[scientific] efforts went for nothing.”
The twenty-first century thus far appears to offer fewer incentives or opportunities than the last for covert, malevolent exploitation of the life sciences. Nonetheless, the rapid pace of biotechnological advances can inspire destructive visions that might be pursued in new versions of the secret weapons enclave. We can only guess how the unstoppable international transfer of biotechnology will interact with the dynamics of economic and political change. Meanwhile, the United States has launched an unprecedented, largely unregulated biodefense campaign, with an investment of more than $44 billion since 2001. The National Institutes of Health and the Defense Department have funded most of the $23 billion for research and development, including the building of new high-containment laboratories. Again, in the name of national security, a new generation of scientists and technicians is being recruited to study defenses against a broad range of disease agents and toxins that might be candidates for biological weapons. As in the past, the participation of capable experts is as essential to any programmatic degradation of the life sciences as it is to their protection.
In 2005, the InterAcademy Panel on International Issues, a global network of science academies, recommended that, as part of a code of conduct, biomedical scientists should educate themselves and others about international laws against biological weapons. Admittedly, the institutional rewards for such political awareness and action, compared with those for scientific discovery, are practically zero, and the goal of openness can run counter to national security objectives. Yet such engagement is crucial. Biomedical scientists are best situated to guard the humanitarian goals of their enterprise, or risk the imposition of other values.
In the 1980s, after German biologist Benno Miiller-Hill wrote about Nazi scientists, he was criticized for not characterizing the infamous death camp physician Josef Mengele as a “monster.” Miiller-Hill's reply was, “I said that Mengele learned nothing but science from his teachers and that his teachers never dared to think about reality. I said that science without justice and equal rights led to Auschwitz.”
Voluntary measures to safeguard the biological sciences mean little without legal restraints, such as national laws implementing the BWC, that during the last several decades have reinforced the norms against biological weapons. These restraints are by no means as strong or as comprehensive as they should be. Many nations have failed to implement the domestic measures required by the BWC. Key states, among them Egypt, Israel, and Syria, have yet to join the treaty. No international treaty has been promulgated to criminalize individual violations of the BWC or the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which prohibits the use of biological and chemical weapons. Nor is it certain that the International Criminal Court or any other legal forum could appropriately prosecute alleged offenders from nations unable or unwilling to do so themselves.
DULY noted
Having initiated an enormous biodefense research program, the United States should take the lead in establishing national oversight regulations that are protective of laboratory workers, local communities, and the environment; serve as models for other nations with biodefense projects; and give unambiguous reassurance that the world's largest military power is not secretly reconsidering the advantages of biological weapons.
A risk-reduction framework is already in place. Under Article VII of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), each state party is required to establish a National Authority as a liaison to the OPCW (Organization for the Prevention of Chemical Weapons) in The Hague and to other states parties concerning domestic initiatives. To confront the expanding range of potential dual-use projects and facilities, an adjunct BWC commission could be added to each CWC National Authority to systematically review national oversight and compliance procedures that might eventually be adopted by states parties. At present, the OPCW has the mandate, the expertise, and the resources to aggressively promote arms control for chemical weapons, while the 1972 BWC, the legal cornerstone of defense against the threat of biological weapons, remains outdated by Cold War limitations on international cooperation that are now both meaningless and dangerous.
In other vital policy areas, the Bush administration's retreat from international leadership and its reliance on unilateralism and secrecy have been recognized as faulty and even disastrous approaches to world politics. The time is right for American and other biomedical scientists to use their authority to criticize these same approaches to the problem of biological weapons.
Supplementary Material
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction
Supplementary Material
Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling, and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction