books and arts The science of life and death A look at the development of biological weapons and the threat they carry.

Biological Weapons: From the up to the BTWC. Guillemin also covers the An extensive table compares this with a series Invention of State-Sponsored gruesome Japanese bioweapons programme of later assessments through to 2001. Again Programs to Contemporary and the use of these weapons in . and again she stresses that scientists and Bioterrorism And she discusses the Soviet programme in others “who believed in the future of biologi- by Jeanne Guillemin the later years of the , including cal weapons saw their potential for fulfilling Columbia University Press: 2004. 256 pp. the ‘yellow rain’ accusations of biological the goals of total war, that is, for the mass $27.95, £18.50 weapons being used in Asia,and the acciden- killing or debilitation of enemy civilians”. Malcolm Dando tal release of anthrax at Sverdlovsk in the Chapter 2, on Britain’s bioweapons . She also considers the lesser, programme, should be required reading for In 2005, parties to the Biological and Toxin and more recent, South African and Iraqi anyone who doubts this point. Particularly Weapons Convention (BTWC) will consider programmes, and current concerns and revealing are the views and actions of Fred- the “content, promulgation and adoption responses to bioterrorism threats. erick Banting, the discoverer of insulin, in of codes of conduct for scientists”. The Guillemin argues,quite reasonably,that a support of the development of biological , following a report by the variety of restraints — notably custom and weapons early in the Second World War. National Academies, Biotechnology Research law, technological problems, a lack of mili- Before the BTWC, scientists at least had in an Age of Terrorism, has already estab- tary interest, government and public opin- the excuse that they were doing nothing lished a National Science Advisory Board ion, and fears of retaliation — have luckily illegal in developing biological weapons, but for Biosecurity, charged with increasing the prevented the widespread use of biological that doesn’t apply to participants in the huge controls on biological research to prevent weapons over the past century. She also Soviet programme after 1975. Guillemin its misuse. There is an urgent need for an puts forward a credible argument that a devotes a chapter to this,including the illegal informed debate among life scientists to wide range of integrated policies, including Biopreparat expansion, but because the evi- ensure that any such controls effectively stronger international controls to pre-empt dence available today is fragmentary, there prevent misuse but interfere as little as proliferation, will be required to prevent the is an uneasy sense that there is much more possible with peaceful civil research and future development of biological weapons. to be discovered. development. The problem for many life Scientists will be interested to note,however, The book is largely concerned with the scientists is that they are not conversant with that their fellows have been among the fac- history of biological weapons developments, the issues surrounding biological weapons, tors promoting the development of bio- but the final three chapters are of particular biowarfare, bioterrorism and associated logical warfare in the past. In discussing interest because they discuss the implica- topics, despite almost a century of biology potential agents, for example, Guillemin tions of that history for today. How should and medicine being used in offensive refers to a study by the eminent US scientists we best assess and respond to the problem bioweapons programmes. Theodor Rosebury and Elvin Kabat which,in of bioweapons proliferation and the threat In Biological Weapons,Jeanne Guillemin 1942, assessed the advantages and disadvan- of bioterrorism? aims to provide a historical context to our tages of some 70 agents for use as weapons. For whose who believe that everything present concerns. Her book, she says, “is about the twentieth-century incorporation AP of biological weapons into the arsenals of industrial states and its implications for present times, when new technologies and persistent political animosities may allow even more ominous threats than in the past”. Guillemin divides her history into three periods:a phase covering the initial scientific understanding of infectious agents until the BTWC came into force in 1975; a second phase after the BTWC prohibited offensive bioweapons programmes, but when some nations, notably the Soviet Union, persisted illegally; and the current phase of grave concerns about bioterrorism and massive investment in biodefence. This is a difficult story to tell straightfor- wardly, as Guillemin acknowledges, because much of the archival material is still unavail- able to scholars, and there has been “an unusual degree of and even ”.The book’s chapters never- theless cover the essential elements of the story. There is discussion of the United States’weapons programme during and after the Second World War, and the US rejection At risk: despite decades of discussion about controlling biological weapons, the threat is still with us. of biological and toxin weapons in the run-

NATURE | VOL 432 | 11 NOVEMBER 2004 | www..com/nature 149 © 2004 Nature Publishing Group books and arts changed after the terrorist attacks of 11 Sep- the story of his experiences at the SPL tember 2001,and that only then did we realize hands of both the Nazis and their the possibility of terrorists using weapons of Hungarian epigones, the Arrow mass destruction, Chapter 8 will be enlight- Cross,never previously related,is ening reading. It details the escalation of well worth the telling. high-level US concerns over this issue in the Hargittai’s encounter with the 1990s and the ever-increasing budgets allo- chemist Gertrude Elion led him cated to deal with it. The al-Qaeda attacks to describe another illustrious and the subsequent anthrax postal attacks Jewish woman, the Hungarian “intensified Clinton-era policies already in mathematician Vera Sós,who was place” for national security and defence also persecuted, and her friend, against bioweapons, says Guillemin. What Paul Erdös, who got away. Other did change, of course, was the scale of the Hungarian scientists whose early budgets — including those for biodefence. lives were marked by harrowing Given that the Bush administration has experiences were George Olah rejected the decade-long effort to strengthen and two who settled in Sweden. the BTWC with a verification protocol, and One was Hargittai’s friend and that some US biodefence projects could be patron,the biochemist Lars (pre- perceived by others as crossing the boundary viously László) Ernster; the other between defence and offence, the vastly was George Klein, the distin- increased US budgets for technological guished tumour biologist, who solutions provoke some awkward questions. arrived fatherless in Sweden. The book does not dodge them. Guillemin Roald Hoffman, the focus of notes, for example, that Project Bioshield, another of Hargittai’s chapters, “a biomedical equivalent of Reagan’s Star was born in Poland,not Hungary, Wars” defence programme, promised “uni- but the story of his survival as a versal protection from biological weapons” Jewish child in occupied Europe but was faced with the uncertainty of the is one of the most remarkable. threat, the technology, and the organization Leo Szilard led the Hungarian invasion of the scientific world. He made his way to the United of national vaccinations or other campaigns. States with no money and after a Such budgets necessarily draw more and impression that they have, or the scientific late start emerged as one of the outstanding more of the biological community into world, at least. chemists of our times. biosecurity, placing them under the Hargittai is a professor in Budapest who Many remarkable characters flit through restraints on openness and the free exchange works on symmetry in chemical reactions. these pages. Hargittai finds the human side of information that this work involves. He has written some 25 books,many of them of another Hungarian Jew, the abrasive and Not surprisingly, this sane and sensible devoted to conversations with prominent much disparaged Edward Teller,and discusses book ends by arguing for a more balanced scientists. In his latest book, Our Lives,each the political influence of Arthur Koestler. approach in which the United States joins of the 19 chapters is centred on a Nobel Hargittai has interesting things to say on again with its international allies to redevel- laureate he has met. Interspersed with the science in the Soviet Union,which he experi- op a multifaceted, integrated set of policies stories of their lives and work are his own enced at first hand as a graduate student in against the malign misuse of life sciences. ■ reflections and reminiscences of an eventful Moscow, where he became acquainted with Malcolm Dando is in the Department of Peace life spent with a wide range of friends and several distinguished chemists. He recounts Studies, University of Bradford, Richmond Road, acquaintances. Hargittai was a child during the remarkable episode of the denunciation Bradford BD7 1DP, UK. He is co-editor, with the tragic years of the Second World War on ideological grounds of Linus Pauling’s M. L. Wheelis and L. Rozsa, of the forthcoming in Hungary, and his family, being Jewish, theory of resonance. He also seeks to right book Deadly Cultures: Bioweapons from 1945 suffered persecution and endured life in a the injustice done to his compatriot Árpád to the Present (Harvard University Press). ghetto and a labour camp. His father was Furka, who received too little credit for his conscripted and was killed on the Russian central contribution to the conception of front.From these circumstances arises one of combinatorial chemistry. In 1967, Hargittai the themes that permeate the book:several of married the chemist Magdolna Vámhidy, his chosen Nobel laureates also never knew who became his co-author on several books. The view from their fathers,or lost them in early childhood. Many more scientists appear in Our Lives. This, Hargittai believes, may have been a Hargittai’s aim is to blend the achievements Budapest formative factor in their lives. of modern science with his own life in this Our Lives: Encounters of a Another recurring theme of the book is turbulent period, taking in his family, the Scientist the experiences of Hungarian Jews during special place of Jewish and Hungarian sci- by István Hargittai the war and in its aftermath. Hargittai and entists and thinkers in twentieth-century Akadémiai Kiadó: 2004. 264 pp. €30 his mother were saved from deportation to history,anti-Semitism and the terror of Nazi Henryk Eisenberg Auschwitz by a deal that rescued many Hun- persecution. This is not an easy task in such garian Jews at the eleventh hour. They were a short book, and the components are some- When asked whether he believed in given shelter until Hungary’s leader, Miklós times difficult to disentangle. But the stories extraterrestrial beings, physicist Leo Szilard Horthy,belatedly changed sides. Hargittai’s he tells have a great deal to offer to anyone replied that they were already in our midst: brother and other members of the family interested in the broader aspects of science they were called Hungarians, and he was one. were less fortunate, and their sufferings are in our time. ■ The implication was that they had coloni- movingly described. One of Hargittai’s Jew- Henryk Eisenberg is in the Department of zed our planet. Readers of István Hargittai’s ish friends who was deported to Auschwitz Structural Biology, Weizmann Institute of Science, Our Lives will certainly be left with the and survived was the chemist László Kiss; Rehovot 76100, Israel.

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