In the Name of Science 1 THE CHEMICAL REVOLUTION: BRINGING BAD THINGS TO LIFE N athan Schnurman, a seventeen-year-old sailor recruited to test U.S. Navy summer clothing in exchange for a three-day pass, never thought he would be gasping for air inside a gas chamber instead. The instructions he received were simple, and he didn't think much of it at the time when he was ordered to put on a mask and some special clothing. During the experiment, the mustard gas and lewisite he was exposed to seeped through his mask, making him first nauseous and then violently ill. He demanded to be released, but was refused because the scientists conducting the experiment told him that it was not yet completed. Shortly after his second demand, he passed out. When he regained consciousness, he found himself lying outside the gas chamber and thinking how lucky he was to be alive.
"I called to the corpsman via an intercom and informed him of my condition and what was happening, and requested I be released from the chamber, now," Schnurman testified before a judiciary committee. "The reply was 'no,' as they had not completed the experiment. I became very nauseous. Again I requested to be released from the chamber. Again permission was denied. Within seconds, I passed out in the chamber. What happened after that, I don't know. I may only assume that when I was removed from the chamber, I was presumed dead.
" Another serviceman, Lloyd B. Gamble, had dedicated more than seven years of his life to the U.S. Air Force. When he volunteered for a special program to test new military protective gear, he was offered various incentives, including a liberal leave policy, family visitations, superior living and recreational facilities, and letters of commendation to be made part of his permanent record. During the first three weeks of testing. Gamble was given two or three water-sized glasses of a liquid to drink. He soon developed erratic behavior and even attempted suicide, but what he didn't learn until eighteen years later was that what he'd received as a human subject was LSD.
Even after he found out, the Department of Defense (DOD) denied that he'd participated in the experiments, although an official publicity photo shows him as one of the servicemen volunteering for a "special program that was in the highest national security interest." Both Schnurman and Gamble were victims of a massive organized program that used both the military and civilians to carry out human experiments involving chemicals and chemical agents. All participants had been sworn to secrecy, like eighteen-year old Rudolph Mills, who discovered forty-six years after his own gas chamber experiments that four thousand other servicemen were essentially human guinea pigs for the Chemical Warfare Service (CWS). Though his health began to deteriorate while still in the navy, Mills did not learn that his lifelong physical health problems were likely related to mustard gas exposure until more than forty years later. According to a September 28, 1994 General Accounting Office report, the DOD and other national security agencies used hundreds of thousands of human subjects in tests and experiments involving hazardous and often deadly substances. This kind of duplicity doesn't begin or end with the military, however. For decades, scientists working for corporations have been hiding research results, relying on flawed or fraudulent studies, or disregarding the health effects of chemical products in order to ensure a steady stream of profits. Because even a small change in data can often have a major effect on the findings of a study, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether or not researchers have acted ethically.
Take the case of two scientists who had published a mortality study comparing cancer rates of workers exposed to a hazardous substance with those who were not and then later placed four exposed workers in the unexposed group. This simple switch increased the death rate in the control group while significantly decreasing the death rate in the exposed group. While the researchers contended that the reclassification was done in good faith, the incident triggered a dispute within the FDA as to whether an ethics investigation should or should not have been conducted. In some cases, there was widespread use of toxic chemicals on humans simply because no one knew how dangerous the chemicals were. After DDT (the potent insecticide that replaced lead arsenate) was developed, the U.S. government dusted millions of soldiers to prevent malaria and typhus. This miracle chemical that killed hundreds of different pest species was made famous in a 1948 Life Magazine photograph of a teenaged girl eating a hot dog surrounded by a cloud of DDT.
What DuPont scientists did not realize until decades later was the extent to which their altered molecules and synthetic chemicals would accumulate in the environment and continue to show up in the blood of virtually every American twenty-five years after its ban. By just taking a look at the world around us, we quickly realize the impact chemicals have had on virtually every aspect of our lives. We're literally surrounded by a sea of organic and inorganic compounds. Our bodies are composed of thousands of chemicals, each made from billions of molecules that react with one another and assemble into complex forms to make life possible. We eat chemicals, drink chemicals, breathe chemicals, put chemicals on and in our bodies, and take chemicals whenever we're sick. From the moment we're born to the day we die, we are so dependent on chemicals that we wouldn't know what to do without them. Over the last hundred years, that dependence has become an addiction. Natural recipes handed down for centuries have been replaced by products promising everything from clean kitchen counters to cancer cures.
Along comes the chemical industry, and we now have more than fifty thousand synthetic compounds-many of them unregulated, some of them miracles of humanity, and others more deadly than anything nature could come up with. If we've learned anything from history, it's that natural products can often be deadly. When man gets into the act, they can become even deadlier. Chemical Warfare Agents In 1978 London, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian exile, stood patiently on a street corner and watched the stop-and-go of traffic while awaiting the next bus. The sky was overcast, and the steady stream of commuters made him less likely to think that anything out of the ordinary was about to take place. Perhaps he was thinking of his family back home or about what he had to do that day. But as he looked at the passing cars, he suddenly felt dizzy, lost consciousness, and collapsed. Within a few days he stopped breathing and died.
His mysterious death remained a mystery until the autopsy was done, when investigators discovered a tiny pellet beneath his skin containing ricin, a chemical six thousand times more toxic than cyanide. The Bulgarian, they eventually learned, was a former agent murdered by the communist Bulgarian government with an umbrella gun supplied by the KGB and fired unnoticed in a crowd of passersby who never suspected that chemical warfare had been waged so easily. The use of natural chemicals has been reported for more than two millennia. As far back as 600 B.C., when the Athenians poisoned with helleborus root a river used by its enemy as drinking water, chemicals have been used as a means of waging war. In 200 B.C.
, Carthage defeated one of its enemies in a battle by leaving behind casks of wine tainted with mandragora, a root that produces a narcotic-like sleep. After enemy soldiers drank the wine, the Carthaginians returned and killed them. In one of the more bizarre examples, Hannibal, in a naval battle against Eumenes II of Pergamum, lobbed venomous snakes onto the decks of enemy ships to defeat the Pergamum sailors. In addition, as we know from historical records, arrows tipped with poison chemicals have been used for nearly as long as there have been bows to shoot them. Limiting the use of chemicals as weapons was suggested as far back as 1675, when a French-German agreement was signed in Strasbourg prohibiting the use of poison bullets. But within two centuries, large-scale development of chemical weapons had begun. In 1874, to stem the fear of chemical warfare, the Brussels Convention was adapted prohibiting the use of poison weapons. Twenty-five years later, an international peace conference held in The Hague led to a worldwide agreement outlawing the use of projectiles filled with poison gases.
These agreements, it was hoped, would put an end to the development of weapons thought too horrible to be used against human beings. It didn't. Modern chemical warfare actually started in the nineteenth century with incendiary arsenic bombs that sent plumes of poison smoke across enemy battle lines. Soldiers exposed to the smoke died a grisly death. Muscle spasms and severe vomiting were followed by cardiovascular collapse and death within a few hours of inhalation. The twentieth century proved no less civilized. After rumors of a new and deadly weapon invented by the Germans early during the First World War, the German Army bombed British forces in Neuve-Chapelle with dianisidine chlorsulfonate. A few months later, they attacked Russian forces with xylyl bromide.
Both incidents were merely learning experiences and a prelude to what was to be the first large-scale chemical attack on April 22, 1915. That day, two hours before sunset, the Germans covered thems.