Porton Down Research Establishment

Other products of Porton Down s research and development at the end of the 1930s included eye shields to protect against high-altitude liquid mustard gas attack, the oil-skin anti-gas cape, impregnated battle dress, protective dubbing for boots, detectors and detector paints, decontamination procedures, gas identification sets for service units, respirators and anti-gas covers for horses and dogs. Protection for camels was also studied a prototype respirator still exists in the establishment at Porton Down. 

All armies learned several lessons from this non-gas war. The phrase ffad Britain and the United States been prepared for war in 1936, there would not have been a war was taken as a self-evident truth.72 Certainly it was recognised that chemical warfare establishments, notably at Porton Down in the United Kingdom and Edgewood Arsenal in the United States, needed to be permanent organisations that concentrated on training, research and development, and chemical warfare preparedness. This lesson, from a slightly different angle, is reflected in the words of K.C. Royall, the US Under Secretary for War The better job you do, the less likely it is you will have to put to actual use the products of your work. 73... 

PRO, WO 33/1014, 2nd Annual Report of the Chemical Defence Research Establishment, Porton Down (1922). 

McKee, W.H.E., Woolcott, B. (1949). Report on exposures of unprotected men and rabbits to low concentrations of nerve gas vapour. PRP-143. Chemical Defence Research Establishment, Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. 

Sim, V.M. (1956). Effect on pupil size of exposure to GB vapour. Porton Technical Paper 531. Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Directorate of Chemical Defence Research and Development, Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. 

The papers contained in this Volume were presented at a meeting held at the Chemical Defence Establishment, Porton Down, Salisbury, on March 22 and 23, 1971, and which was attended by government scientists from the U.K., Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, together with a number of academic research workers. 

The British contribution to an understanding of how germ attacks might be carried out was considerable, although Porton Down carried out far fewer such tests. Much of the early American work on how clouds might drift over a city was based on the results of experiments conducted by Porton scientists in which they released smoke clouds in built up areas of Salisbury, Wiltshire, just down the road from the Microbiological Research Establishment, and at Southampton in Hampshire. 

However, between i960 and 1966 scientists from the Porton Down Microbiological Research Establishment took part in a series of tests in which terminal cancer patients were treated with two rare... 

Bolton, T, Films, Ethics and Politics at Porton Down, 1939 to 1968 A Study of Films from the Chemical Defence Experimental Establishment, Porton Down, in Relation to Medical Research Ethics in World War Two and Cold War Contexts (University of Kent, unpubhshed MA thesis, 2004). 

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support funding provided by the Chemical Defence Establishment, Porton Down, which included a senior research assis-tantship for Dr. R.J. Gowland under the terms of MoD Contract Number D/ER1/9/4/2081/067/CDE and by the Science and Engineering Research Council which allowed purchase and construction of atomization and milling equipment under the terms of SERC Grant Number GR/F/03028. 

Callaway, S., Dimhuber, P, 1971. Estimation of the concentration of nerve agent vapour required to produce measured degrees of miosis in rabbit and human eyes Technical Paper No. 64. Chemical Defence Research Establishment Porton Down, Salisbury, Wiltshire, UK. 

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