A Brief History of Biodefense Research in the 20th Century

It is difficult to say definitively when “biological warfare” began. From the sale of smallpox-laced blankets to Native Americans by European settlers to the Roman practice of “poisoning the well” by introducing pathogens to enemy water supplies, the fact stands that biological agents have been used aggressively for centuries. However, with the advent of modern science, the concept has taken on a new significance in an era when technology dominates warfare strategy. The possibility of mass-producing infectious pathogens has become a terrifying reality in the past century with the potential for man-made pandemics looming ever darker.

Unit 731

During WWII, the Japanese army maintained a covert biological warfare facility under the alias of “Water Purification Unit 731” in northeastern China^10,11. In this camp, around 1,000 prisoners of war were exposed to aerosolized B. anthracis spores and then examined postmortem to study the progression of the resulting anthrax disease¹⁰. Besides conducting bioweapons research on human subjects, Unit 731 was also responsible for stockpiling supplies of infectious agents¹⁰. For example, many of the plague outbreaks in China during WWII are thought to originate from Japanese bombings with this arsenal10. Following the war, Unit 731 was dismantled, but the research data generated from work on human subjects was sold to the US in exchange for more lenient war-crime punishments¹⁰.

Early US Bioweapons Research

During WWII, spurred by fears that Germany might develop biological agents to use with its bombs, the US developed a bioweapons research program at Fort Dietrick, Maryland in 1942 under the direction of the War Research Service (WRS)¹². This program was expanded during the Korean War, including a countermeasures program in the event that US troops were infected with enemy biological agents. From the 1940s-60s, many classified experiments were conducted in which nonpathogenic (harmless) bacteria were spread over cities or through transportation thoroughfares to test the rate of epidemic expansion¹². However, in 1969-70, President Nixon issued executive orders to terminate all of America’s biological warfare research, and pledged that the US would never use such weapons¹². Even though the offensive program was terminated, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) remained to develop countermeasures to protect US troops¹².

Gruinard Island

Fearing that Germany might begin using biological weapons in its attacks, Britain initiated a series of biodefense experiments on Gruinard Island, a small rocky islet off the coast of Scotland¹³. In a series of tests from 1942-43, sheep were exposed to B. anthracis spores and autopsied to determine the virulence of the disease¹³. In 1942, an anthrax-infected sheep carcass washed up on the mainland where a dog subsequently consumed it and passed the bacterial infection to 24 other animals before the outbreak was contained^13,14. British officials claimed the body had not originated on the island but paid compensation nonetheless¹⁴. After the war, the island was deserted, but full decontamination procedures did not begin until the 70s and 80s (at least in part because more was known then about how to carry out sterilization procedures that would effectively kill the resilient spores)¹⁵. Only in 1987, after extensive chemical treatment reaching into the bedrock of the island, was Gruinard officially declared clear of anthrax spores¹⁴.

The Sverdlovsk Incident

In 1979, a B. anthracis strain from a Russian bioweapons research facility at Sverdlovsk (now Ekaterinberg) led to one of the most deadly outbreaks ever, killing 68 people^16,17. Because the Russian program had been secret (in violation of the 1972 Biological Warfare Convention), the USSR tried to conceal the outbreak and quarantined the area extensively, claiming that the disease had spread from infected cattle meat and not from a mishap in bioweapons research¹⁶. It was not until 1991, with the fall of the USSR, that the full details of the incident became clear from an investigation launched by Boris Yeltsin¹⁶. These findings were further buoyed by information from a Russian scientific defector who confirmed that the Sverdlovsk facility was involved in industrial production of B. anthracis¹⁶.

Today

The latest fears of bioterrorism emerged after 9/11 when several B. anthracislaced envelopes turned up in the US. Abroad, Iraq has been suspected of carrying out bioweapons research, growing B. anthracis spores in large quantities for military use^18,19. In response to such concerns, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has shifted its budget to fund more biodefense research²⁰. This has led to much controversy over dualuse research, those projects that have both civilian and military applications; one example is the artificial synthesis of a Polio virus by researchers at State University of New York (SUNY) Stony Brook, reported in 2002 in the journal Science⁵.