The harm-heal line

In late 1930s, a large lab in northern China, under Japanese occupation, was forging ahead with a new type of weapon. It was nicknamed Unit 731. Led by General Shiro Ishii, a microbiologist by training, the goal of the lab was to not just produce but also test biological weapons on the Chinese population. Over the course of the lab's operation, plague-infested flea bags were dropped in Ningbo and Quzhou in Zhejian province. Marshes, wells and waterways were poisoned with biological weapons including anthrax. Estimates suggest that by the end of WWII, more than two hundred thousand Chinese civilians were killed through testing of biological weapons and subsequent epidemics of plague, cholera and anthrax. These numbers are similar to the deaths caused in Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the atomic bombs dropped by the US.

The development of the biological weapons was not an accident. It was a deliberate, well-funded and organised effort by the Japanese Imperial army. The idea to use bacteria as a weapon was first articulated by a French chemist, Auguste Trillat, in the 1920s, but the European programme never really took off. General Shiro, who visited Europe during the interwar years, was impressed by the new weapons technology of Europe and brought some of these ideas back to Japan, and was eventually able to convince the military and political leadership in investment, development and testing.

During and after the war, the US and the UK developed major biological weapons programnes. The US programme continued for nearly three decades, during which it conducted extensive tests both in the US and in the Marshall Islands. The UK experiments done with Anthrax toxin in the Gruinard Island (near Scotland) in 1942 were so intense that the whole Island was contaminated for four decades. Even an attempt to set the whole island on fire did not clean the environment. It was not until 1990 that the Island was finally certified as Anthrax-free.

In 1969, President Nixon ended the US biological weapons programme and announced that US would destroy its existing stockpiles of biological weapons. This announcement led to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention that banned developing, storing or stockpiling biological weapons. The Soviets, however, continued their programme well into the 1970s. An accident in a Soviet facility in 1979 at Sverdlovsk led to the release of anthrax toxins that killed dozens of people. Despite years of strong evidence of the USSR building biological weapons, it was not until 1992 that Russian President Boris Yeltsin acknowledged that the accident happened at a biological weapons production facility run by the Soviet military.

It is important to remember that the goal of biological weapons was to fundamentally attack the civilian population, and do so in a brutal way. It was to overwhelm the public health system, harm those who probably were the least healthy, and create misery over large swaths of land and for an extended time period. Researchers working for biological weapons programme called it "public health in reverse". But it is also important to know that the whole enterprise of biological weapons actually rested on extraordinary science of germs, microbes and pathogens. The development of germ theory in late nineteenth century, and discoveries of early twentieth century provided the foundations of developing biological weapons. Yet, it was the same science that saved millions through a better understanding of modes of infection, development of superior therapies and epidemic control. Most scientists and researchers who worked on biological weapons programmes were not naïve. They knew what it would do to unarmed, unsuspecting and vulnerable populations. Some of them even wrote about it in 'best-selling books' after they left the programme.

Today, in the midst of global conflicts and an extraordinary pace in development of new tools, and a mad rush for acquiring newest tools of destruction, we should ask ourselves the question of weaponisation of science and technology once again. The line between harming and healing is not very difficult to cross when all we think about is 'us vs them'. But once we cross that line, we may find that the road back to healing has all but disappeared.