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The success of the Pacific trials was also a factor in Nixon's decision, for the trials had surprised everyone. The problem with bioweapons was not that they didn't work, it was that they worked too well. They were remarkably powerful. They were difficult to defend against. They were easy and cheap to make, and while they depended on weather for their effectiveness, they were a good or even superior alternative to nuclear weapons, especially for countries that could not afford nuclear weapons.

The meaning of the Pacific trials was not lost on the supreme leader of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev, or on his advisers. Brezhnev was reportedly furious at his scientific people for having fallen behind the Americans. The Soviets believed that Nixon was lying, that he never really canceled the American bioweapons program. They thought he had hidden it away. So Brezhnev did exactly what Nixon was trying to head off. He ordered a secret crash acceleration of the Soviet bioweapons program in response to a perceived threat from the United States.

In 1972, the United States signed the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on Their Destruction, commonly known as the Biological Weapons Convention. Soviet diplomats helped to write much of the language of the treaty, and the Soviet Union became one of three so-called depository states for the treaty; the other two were the United States and Great Britain. By making themselves depository states, the three nations offered themselves as an example to be followed. It was believed that the resources of the intelligence community and the vigilance and concern of the scientific community would serve to sound the alert to any violations of the treaty.

But that belief turned out to be only a belief in the years following the treaty. For there was no way to verify whether or not violations were taking place, and the truth is that much progress was made in the development and engineering of bioweapons in various places around the world. This was not noticed for a long time. It was an invisible history.

Part Three
Diagnosis

Monkey Room

THE CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL,
ATLANTA, GEORGIA
WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, APRIL 22, 199-

The weather in Atlanta had turned glorious, blue, sunny, and hot. The late April air was filled with a drifting scent of loblolly pines. Northeast of the city center, Clifton Road winds through hilly wooded neighborhoods and goes past the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control, a warren of buildings made of brick and concrete. Some of the C.D.C. buildings are new, but many are old and deteriorating and stained with age, offering visible evidence of years of neglect by Congress and the White House.

Building 6 is a stained brick monolith, almost without windows, that sits in the middle of the C.D.C. complex. It was once an animal-holding facility that stored populations of mice, rabbits, and monkeys used for medical research. The C.D.C. grew and became so short of space that eventually the animals were moved elsewhere, and the animal rooms were converted to offices. They are the least desirable offices at the C.D.C., and therefore they are occupied by the youngest people. Many of these people are in the C.D.C.'s Epidemic Intelligence Service — the E.I.S., everyone calls it. About seventy officers enroll in the E.I.S. every year. During a two-year fellowship, they investigate outbreaks of diseases all over the United States and, indeed, the world. The Epidemic Intelligence Service is a training program for people who want to go into public health as a career.

On the third floor of Building 6, inside a windowless former monkey room, Alice Austen, M.D., a twenty-nine-year-old E.I.S. officer, was on phone duty. She was taking calls, listening to people talk about their diseases.

'I got something bad,' a man was saying to her. He was calling from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. 'And I know where I got it, too. From a pizza.'

'What makes you think that?' she said.

'It was a ham and onion. My girlfriend got the disease, too.'

'What do you think you have?' she asked.

'I don't want to, like, get too specific. Let's just say I got a V.D.'

'Have you seen a doctor?' she asked.

'I'm installing Sheetrock for this guy, and he don't give us no medical,' the man said. 'That's why I have to call the C.D.C.' The man went on to describe how he had been eating a pizza at a local restaurant with his girlfriend when he'd found himself chewing on a piece of plastic. He'd pulled it out of his mouth and discovered it was a bandage strip stained with yellow pus. He was convinced that it had given both him and his girlfriend certain symptoms that he was reluctant to describe.

'You could not get a sexually transmitted disease from eating a bandage,' Austen said. 'You should go to an emergency room and get an exam, and your girlfriend, too. If it turns out you have gonorrhea, we recommend treatment with Cipro.'

The man wanted to talk, and Austen couldn't get him off the phone. She was a slender woman of medium height, with wavy auburn hair, a fine-boned face, and a pointed chin. She was a medical pathologist by training — her specialty was death. Her eyes were gray-blue and thoughtful, and seemed to absorb the light, considering the world in a careful way. Her hands were slender but very strong. She used her hands to probe among organs, bone, and skin. She wore no rings on her fingers, and her fingernails were cut short, so as not to break surgical gloves. It was Wednesday, uniform day at the C.D.C., and Austen was wearing a Public Health Service uniform — pants and a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with the gold oak leaf of a lieutenant commander on the right shoulder. It looked like a Navy uniform. The U.S. Public Health Service is an unarmed branch of the U.S. military.

One would not describe Alice Austen as a lonely person, or a person incapable of love, for she had many friends, and she had had her lovers, including a man who had wanted to marry her, but there always seemed to be a distance between her and the world. Like many pathologists, she was a loner by temperament, independent minded, curious about how things worked. She was the daughter of a retired chief of police in the town of Ashland, New Hampshire.

'We got a lawyer. We're gonna sue over that pizza,' the man was saying.

'The bandage would have been sterilized by heat in the oven. It couldn't hurt you,' Austen explained.

'Yeah, but what if the pus didn't get cooked?'

'Those ovens are pretty hot. I think the pus was probably cooked,' she answered.

An older man walked into Austen's office. He raised an eyebrow. 'Since when has the C.D.C. been advising people on how to cook pus?'

She pushed the mute button. 'Be done in a minute.'

'A minute? The C.D.C. advises people to cook pus for a minimum of five minutes. Tell the guy to use a meat thermometer. The pus is done when it says "pork."'

Austen smiled.

The man sat down at an empty desk. He was holding a file folder, slapping it against his hand restlessly. His name was Walter Mellis. He was a public-health doctor in his late fifties, and he had worked at the C.D.C. for most of his career.

Meanwhile, on the phone: 'I got the pizza in my freezer. You folks want to check it out in your hot zone?'

When she hung up she said, 'Wow.'

'You burned up a lot of time with that guy,' Mellis remarked.

Austen did not know Walter Mellis very well, but she knew that something was up. He wanted something from her.

'Anyway,' he went on. 'I'm looking for someone to observe at an autopsy. You're the only E.I.S. officer trained in pathology.'

'I'm pretty busy writing up my last outbreak,' she said.

'I just had a call from Lex Nathanson, the medical examiner of New York,' he went on, seeming to ignore her. 'They've had two cases of something pretty unusual. He asked me if we had anyone to send up there to help him out. Quietly.'

'Why don't they use the city health department?'

'I don't know why.' He looked a little annoyed. 'I know Lex from way back, so he called me.'

Walter Mellis had a pot belly, gray frizzy hair, and a mustache. He refused to wear his Public Health Service uniform on Wednesdays, and today he had on a shirt the color of mud, with frayed cuffs. She found herself imagining Mellis as a younger man, grooving at a Peter, Paul, and Mary concert, believing the world was about to change. Now he was getting close to retirement. He had become an aging federal official, stuck at the same government pay scale forever, while the world had changed far more than his generation had expected.

'This could be something good,' he said. 'You never know. It could be a John Snow case.'

Dr John Snow was one of the first great disease detectives, a founder of the science of modern epidemiology. He was a physician in London in 1853 when there was an outbreak of cholera. Snow found a cluster of cases. He began interviewing the victims and their families, carefully tracing their activities during the days just before they became sick. He discovered that the sick people had been using the same public water pump on Broad Street. The paths of the victims crossed at the water pump. Something in the water from that pump was causing the disease. Snow did not know what substance in the water was making people sick, because the microorganism that causes cholera had not been discovered, but he removed the handle from the water pump. It stopped the outbreak. He did not need to know what was in the water. This is the classic story of epidemiology.

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