Dr. Ira Baldwin: Biological Weapons Pioneer

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The men carrying their briefcases through Washington, D.C.’s National Airport one day in 1965 appeared to be ordinary travelers. They weren’t. Unnoticed by the other people in the airport, these men were surreptitiously spraying bacteria into the air. On another occasion, in New York City, a group smashed lightbulbs filled with bacteria on subway tracks. Even the Pentagon’s air-conditioning system eventually became a target for similar acts.

The men carrying out these missions weren’t terrorists. They were government personnel conducting secret tests to determine the potential effectiveness of aerially dispersed pathogens by disseminating biological agents they presumed were harmless. Members of the Special Operations Division from the Fort Detrick, Md., biological weapons program conducted more than 200 such tests from 1943 until the mid-1960s. When those experiments became public knowledge in 1977, citizens were outraged that their government had exposed them to live organisms without their consent or knowledge.

One of the principals behind the tests was Dr. Ira L. Baldwin, the man who headed the scientific side of the country’s biological warfare program during World War II. Baldwin seemed like an unlikely germ czar. A plant bacteriologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, he had written papers on such topics as ‘The Root Nodule Bacteria of the Leguminosae, a pioneering work on how to use bacteria to increase agricultural productivity.

In 1942, Baldwin, then 47 and the chairman of the university’s bacteriology department, received a call from Colonel William Kabrich, chief of the technical division of the U.S. Army’s Chemical Warfare Service, inviting him to a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. The colonel gave no specifics beforehand, but just said that it involved a matter of national importance.

Baldwin arrived at the meeting to find a group of bacteriologists, most of them experts in medical bacteriology, unlike himself. Kabrich asked the scientists a question: How could you produce tons of live pathogenic microorganisms and maintain their virulence, but not risk the safety of the producers or the surrounding community?

The discussion went around the room. The medical biologists were generally skeptical: Either you couldn’t produce the microorganisms in large amounts, or you couldn’t culture them safely. Baldwin, experienced at working with fermentation in breweries, disagreed. If you can do it in a test tube, you can do it with a 10,000-gallon tank, with equal safety and perhaps more, he later recalled saying. All you have to do is make the same conditions in a 10,000-gallon tank that you make in a test tube. Ten days later, Baldwin was back in Wisconsin when Kabrich called him again, this time with a request that he lead the country’s scientific effort to find ways to develop, and defend against, biological warfare agents.

Baldwin was the grandson of a Methodist minister, and as a youth he had filled in as preacher at small country churches. Now the colonel was asking him to produce microbes that could kill great numbers of human beings. He made his decision within a day. I think there is no question that the idea of using biological agents to kill people represented a complete shift of thinking, he later said in an interview. But it only took me about 24 hours to think my way through it. After all, the immorality of war is war itself. You start out with the idea in war of killing people, and that to me is the immoral part of it. It doesn’t make much difference how you kill them.

Biological warfare is the use of living organisms such as bacteria, viruses or toxins to wage war. Sometimes called the poor man’s nuclear weapon, biological agents are relatively easy and inexpensive to produce, yet have potentially devastating results. Among them are anthrax, typhus, cholera and dysentery. Another biological agent is botulinum toxin, described as the most lethal substance in the world. In theory, a single gram of botulinum could kill one million people. The Geneva Convention outlawed the use of biological warfare in 1925, but did not prohibit nations from continuing the production of biological agents. President Richard Nixon ordered the dismantling of the United States’ offensive biowarfare programs in 1969, but other nations continued theirs. Of greatest concern today are the threats posed by terrorists or by rogue countries such as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. (Much of the raw material for Iraq’s biological agents came from American companies — at that time the United States was backing Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war.) Iraq has been especially interested in botulinum toxin. After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, United Nations inspectors reported that they could not account for approximately 3 times the amount needed to kill the entire current human population by inhalation, according to a report by the Journal of the American Medical Association. Biological warfare has proved to be a genie that is very difficult to put back into the bottle.

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Tags: American History, Historical Figures, Military Technology, People, Weaponry