From left, Marc Weksler, the Irving Sherwood Wright Professor of Geriatrics at the Weill Medical College; Joshua Lederberg, the Sackler Foundation Scholar and president emeritus of Rockefeller University; and Robert Braude, the Frances and John Loeb Librarian and assistant dean for information resources at the Medical College, pose following Lederberg's Oct. 27 lecture. Felicia Narvaez
While most Americans worry about what's going to happen to the world's computers when their internal clocks change over to Jan. 1, 2000, Dr. Joshua Lederberg's Y2K worry focuses on the possibility that some renegade terrorist group in a mil-lennialist religious fervor may have the desire -- and the means -- to launch its vision of the apocalypse by unleashing some kind of biological or chemical warfare agents on their enemies.
Lederberg shared this worry in his talk titled "Germs as Weapons: A Grim History," Oct. 27, during the Dean's Hour lecture at Weill Medical College of Cornell in Manhattan. The lecture was sponsored by the Heberden Society, headquartered at the Medical College, whose members are physicians with a special interest in the history of medicine.
A bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine in 1958 at age 33 (the youngest person to receive a Nobel in that category), Lederberg served as adviser to the U.S. delegation to the United Nations Committee on Disarmament in Geneva during the negotiation of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. Building on that experience, he has become a leading authority on biological and chemical weapons policy and a leading advocate of arms control in these areas. He is the Sackler Foundation Scholar and president emeritus of The Rockefeller University, whose campus is the southern neighbor of the Weill Medical College.
Until the modern era, Lederberg noted, human use of toxic weapons -- biological or chemical -- was sporadic, unorganized and often inadvertent. One instance of its impromptu use, however, set off the Great Plague of the 14th century, which killed a third of the population of Europe. A Mongol army besieging the Genoan trading outpost at Caffa in the Crimea (1346-1347) suffered an outbreak of the plague, apparently of natural cause. Using the plague-infected corpses of their comrades as biological weapons, the Mongols catapulted them over the walls of Caffa. This tactical strategy was a great success, said Lederberg. The Genoans, who were soon decimated by the plague, fled Caffa by sea -- but they took the plague with them, stopping in Naples long enough to establish the plague there, and then going on to Genoa. From Caffa, Naples and Genoa, the plague spread throughout Europe.
By 1899, the potential dangers of chemical and biological warfare were recognized by the leading nations of the world and led the European powers to agree to the principles of the Hague Convention -- which proscribed the use of "poisons" as weapons of war. By logical extension, Lederberg noted, biological agents (germs) also came to fall within the definition of "poisons."
World War I saw the first major violations of the Hague Convention when Germany initiated the use of chlorine gas against the Allies, Lederberg said. This led the British, French and American forces to retaliate in kind. After the war, in 1925, a new international agreement, the Geneva Protocol, was developed, which prohibited the use of chemical and biological agents in war. The U.S. Senate, however, refused to ratify this agreement. Significantly, France signed the agreement while making a critical reservation that limited the prohibition to "no first use" of chemical or biological weapons. "The French took a you-do-it-to-us and we'll-do-it-to-you attitude," Lederberg said. With this deterrent philosophy, later adopted by England and the United States, the Allied powers undertook the defensive development of stockpiles of chemical weapons.
While there was not much actual use of chemical or biological weapons on the battlefield in World War II, both sides were busy on the research-and-development front for both offensive and defensive purposes, said Lederberg. Not only was the development of new toxic agents kept secret, so was the development of defensive therapeutic agents, like DDT. In the United States, Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., became the center for research and development in chemical and biological weapons.
Following the war, the arena for chemical and biological warfare issues shifted to the Cold War, said Lederberg. Having captured a number of biological weapons experts in Germany, the Soviet Union carried on with further research and development, as did the United States.
During the Vietnam War, when the antiwar movement in the U.S. arose, microbiologists started to organize against chemical and biological weapons. There was a great fear among these scientists, Lederberg noted, of the unpredictable and uncontrollable factors associated with such weapons. For example, he discussed the hypothetical use of anthrax as an inhaled biological weapon. Since naturally occurring anthrax can't be transmitted from human to human, its use as a biological weapon would have to be on a very large scale to have any tactical effectiveness. However, such large-scale use could have the unintended and undesired consequence of stimulating the natural evolution of a new strain of the infectious agent that could be transmitted from one person to the next.
One of the most surprising developments of the Vietnam and Cold War era, said Lederberg, was the completely unexpected announcement by President Richard Nixon in 1969 that the United States would unilaterally dismantle its offensive biological weapons program.
"I remember thinking, 'if the U.S. does that, what incentive will the Soviets have to do the same?'" Lederberg said. However, as it turned out, the Soviets also soon endorsed, at least on paper, the principles announced by Nixon. Unfortunately, Lederberg noted, the Soviet Union later committed gross violations of the agreement.
In 1972, under the auspices of the United Nations, a new international "convention" was developed, which remains the current international law on the use of chemical and biological weapons. This convention, the one on which Lederberg served as an adviser, took effect in 1975.
Of course, no treaty comes with a guarantee against violations, said Lederberg. In 1979, he noted, there was an outbreak of pulmonary anthrax in Sverdlosk where, it was suspected, the Soviets had a military microbiological facility. For many years, the Soviets adamantly denied that the outbreak had anything to do with a biological weapons facility. It wasn't until after Perestroika, in 1989, that Russian leaders admitted the military's responsibility for the accidental anthrax outbreak.
Today, Lederberg said, America's worries about Russian involvement in biological weapons have more to do with anxiety about the weaknesses in civilian control of the government and military in Russia. Even so, the odds that any such weapons would be directed at the United States are practically zero, he said. If they are used, he asserted, it's more likely that they would be directed elsewhere, in some conflict closer to Russia's borders.
While Lederberg expressed some concern about threats from "petty dictators with their backs against the wall," what he fears more, he said, are renegade splinter groups trained by petty dictators, but no longer controlled by them. Countries such as Iraq and North Korea may rattle the sabers of biological warfare but, as nations with vested interests in the future, they have internalized constraints that force them to weigh the retaliatory consequences of engaging in such warfare.
Renegade millennialist groups, however, have no such internal constraints, he said, because "they actually want the world to end."
With that end in mind, how such groups may be planning to herald the new millennium understandably heads the list of Lederberg's Y2K concerns.
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