Chemical warfare research

This chapter will examine the nature of project-research as it developed in the organization of chemical warfare research during World War I and will suggest that this model may have played a significant role in the attempts at increased organization of chemical research in the United States after the war, especially in the division of chemistry and chemical technology of the National Research Council. 

We worked hard, but we also found time for fun. We had picnics and barbecues where our families ate hot dogs, played softball, and hurled Frisbees. Phil Kysor made a home movie of one of these gatherings, proving statistically, to a high level of significance, that chemical warfare research did not inhibit playfulness. Rather, it significantly elevated the esprit de corps index. 

When it was time to return to my chemical warfare research, I decided it... 

I recall very few angry critics before 1966, but after 1968 they became prevalent. My first head-to-head encounter with a passionate foe of chemical warfare research, medical or otherwise, came when I wrote to C.R.B. Joyce, requesting a reprint of one of his recent articles. Sending complimentary reprints to fellow investigators was an almost universal courtesy. Nevertheless, our exchange was as follows ... 

Me Of course. We knew the Soviet Union was spending ten times as much as we were on chemical warfare research, so we would have been crazy not to keep up with them. 

Chemical warfare research and development had already been authorized and conducted during the 1950s, including experiments with human volunteers. These programs were heavily cloaked in secrecy, primarily because of fears that the public, or even Congress, might object and try to discontinue such research. 

Strictly applied, some Edgewood studies probably violated Memorandum 385. But the definition of fruitful results for the good of society poses a semantic problem. Some of the drug research carried out at universities with civilian volunteers in the 1960s might also be difficult to justify, if no particular social benefits were anticipated. Many critics eagerly discuss the broader question of whether chemical warfare research can ever be good for society. 

Today the reality is that chemical warfare research with military volunteers is essentially non-existent (except for some neuroprotection and treatment studies) and seems unlikely to be approved in the foreseeable future. Even in the civilian community, research involving the administration of chemicals of any kind, including therapeutic drugs, to human subjects has become difficult and must satisfy an increasingly long list of criteria. 

Somewhat surprisingly, following the end of the First World War, the Allied governments almost immediately seemed to forget what they had learned during the war about being prepared for future chemical warfare. The first major concerns for the chemical warfare detachments of the Allied forces then were to ensure they survived demobilisation. In both Britain and the United States cases were presented for the need for a permanent chemical warfare research establishment. In 1920 A.A. Fries proclaimed ... 

There is no doubt that by the middle of the war the Nazis had acquired vast, hidden armouries of chemical weapons and the Wehrmacht still found millions of marks to pump into the testing and production of poison gas. Indeed, the effort put by the Germans into chemical warfare research was considerable with them employing double the number of scientists than Britain,12 and their twenty factories were capable of producing about 12,000 tons of poison gas a month.13 Indeed, the Allies believed, in a report issued after the war, that the Germans had about 70,000 tons of poison gas stockpiled at various... 

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