Biological Warfare: From History to Current Affairs Friedrich Frischknecht, Department of Infectious Diseases, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany Based in part on the previous version of this eLS article ‘Biological Warfare: History and Current Developments’ (2005) by Joshua Lederberg. Biological warfare or terrorism is the deliberate dis- tribution of biological agents in order to inflict harm on humans or animals or to damage plants. The biological agent used often causes an infectious disease. Through- out history there are examples of armies spreading dis- eases or using the natural presence of diseases to their own advantage. The most hideous example of biological warfare was the attacks of the Imperial Japanese army on Chinese civilians during the Second World War. Today, with little interstate conflict, organised or individual terrorism is feared to use disease-causing agents to cause havoc. Defending ourselves against this threat will call on new types of technological ingenuity combining rapid detection of the causing agents with rapid public health response. In this article, examples of biological warfare and terrorism are discussed and current debates on dual- use research are highlighted. Introduction During the First World War, the German chemist Fritz Haber persuaded the Imperial army to use gas on the fields of Flanders to rapidly end the trench war. He personally supervised the release, and it was only due to the reluctance of the military leaders that the surprise attack led to no territorial gains. Instead, the rapid retaliation by the Allied forces added yet another level to the horrors of this war. In the same war, the Germans used bacteria to infect pack animals of the allies in undercover operations. Therefore, it was no surprise that the French and later the British did not want to be second-guessing when it came to biological weapons and established programmes that were aimed at probing the use of infectious disease agents as biological weapons. Indeed, the leaders of the axis powers in the Second World War had little regard for the lives of their perceived and real opponents. The Germans conducted horrendous medical experiments, including the use of infectious disease agents (Klee, 2001; Spitz, 2005), whereas the Japanese were engaged in developing a full biological warfare programme (Harris, 1994). In more than 25 centres in occupied China, they tested different disease agents on prisoners and released some of these agents over civilian territories to study the spread of disease and to terrorise the population. It is unclear how many people were killed, but believable estimates reach into hundreds of thousands. During the Second World War, the USA spent an esti- mated US$2 billion on developing a series of powerful nuclear bombs that were instrumental in ending the war against Japan. The US also spent US$400 million on developing biological weapons during the same period, which, according to some congressmen, was a lot of money for comparatively little ‘Bang’ as none of these weapons was ever used. However, enough scientists believed in their utility that after the war the US bought into the Japanese knowledge. It traded the immunity of war criminals against a bag full of mostly useless data from experiments on humans. Then the US built up an even bigger operation that included releasing surrogate pathogens onto their own population, some being Adventist volunteers, others unsuspecting Californians. Although the deal with the Japanese was highly embarrassing, the US programme did develop a vaccine against Rinderpest, which is the second infectious disease after smallpox to be eradicated (Mariner et al., 2012; Figure 1 and Figure 2). The US programme was suddenly stopped, probably because it was realised that these weapons were hard to control and could easily pro- liferate to third states. In contrast, the Soviet Union, right after signing the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapon Convention, built up a gigantic programme to transform numerous disease agents into weapons of mass destruction. It killed not a single ‘enemy’ but claimed lives within the Soviet Union itself: in 1979, during an accident, dozens of people died when Anthrax spores leaked from a factory, apparently after a worker forgot to replace a filter in the production pipeline (Meselson et al., 1994; Alibek, 1999). They also lost one of their best researchers after he injected himself accidentally with a virus causing a lethal haemor- rhagic fever (Alibek, 1999). The Soviet Union imploded Keynote article Article Contents . Introduction . From Infections in War to Biological Warfare . Attempts on Controlling Biological Weapons . Allegations and Misinformation . Ethics, Money and Terrorism . Acknowledgements Online posting date: 15 th January 2014 eLS subject area: Microbiology How to cite: Frischknecht, Friedrich (January 2014) Biological Warfare: From History to Current Affairs. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd: Chichester. DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0003290.pub3 eLS & 2014, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. www.els.net 1