20
Above All,
Do No Harm
LONG, STAGNANT, AND COSTLY WARS TEND TO BEGIN in idealistic fervor and end in cynical misery. Our own Civil War inflicted a horrendous toll of death and seared our national consciousness with a brand that has only become deeper with time. In 1862, the Union Army rejoiced in singing the year’s most popular ditty:
Yes we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom,
We will rally from the hillside, we’ll gather from the plain,
Shouting the battle cry of Freedom …
So we’re springing to the call from the East and from the West
And we’ll hurl the rebel crew from the land we love the best.
By 1864, Walter Kittredge’s “Tenting on the Old Camp Ground” had become the favorite song of both sides. The chorus, with its haunting (if naive) melody, summarizes the common trajectory:
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease;
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace.
But nothing can quite match the horrors of World War I, the conflict that the French still call la grande guerre (the Great War) and that we labeled “the war to end all wars.” America entered late and suffered relatively few casualties as a consequence—so we rarely appreciate the extent of carnage among soldiers or the near certainty of death or serious maiming along lines of stagnant trenches, where men fought back and forth month after month to take, and then lose again, a few shifting feet of territory. I feel chills up and down my spine whenever I look at the “honor roll” posted on the village green or main square of any small town in England or France. Above all else, I note the much longer lists for 1914–18 (often marking the near extermination of a generation of males) than for 1941–45. Rupert Brooke could write his famous poems of resignation and patriotism because he died in 1915, during the initial blush of enthusiasm:
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed.
An actual gas attack in World War I.
His fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, who survived and became a pacifist (a condition first attributed to shell shock and leading to his temporary confinement in a sanatorium), caught the drift of later realism:
And when the war is done and youth stone dead
I’ll toddle safely home and die—in bed.
Sassoon met Wilfred Owen, the third member of this famous trio of British war poets, in the sanatorium. But Owen went back to the front, where he fell exactly one week before Armistice Day. Sassoon published his friend’s single, slim volume of posthumous poetry, containing the most famous and bitter lines of all:
What passing-bells for these who died as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
Among the horrors of World War I, we remember not only the carnage caused by conventional tactics of trench warfare with bombs and bullets but also the first effective and large-scale use of newfangled chemical and biological weapons—beginning with a German chlorine gas attack along four miles of the French line at Ypres on April 22, 1915, and ending with 100,000 tons of various chemical agents used by both sides. The Geneva Protocol, signed in 1925 by most major nations (but not by the United States until much later), banned both chemical and biological weapons—a prohibition followed by all sides in World War II, even amid some of the grimmest deeds in all human history, including, and let us never forget, the most evil acts ever committed with poisonous gases in executing the “final solution” of the Holocaust in Nazi concentration camps. (A few violations have occurred in local wars: by the Italian army in Ethiopia in 1935–36, for example, and in recent fighting in Iran and Iraq.) The Geneva Protocol prohibited “the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices.”
A recent contribution to Nature (June 25, 1998), the leading British professional journal of science, recalled this episode of twentieth-century history in a remarkable letter entitled “Deadly relic of the Great War.” The opening paragraph reads:
The curator of a police museum in Trondheim, Norway, recently discovered in his archive collection a glass bottle containing two irregularly shaped sugar lumps. A small hole had been bored into each of these lumps and a glass capillary tube, sealed at its tip, was embedded into one of the lumps. A note attached to the exhibit translated as follows: “A piece of sugar containing anthrax bacilli, found in the luggage of Baron Otto Karl von Rosen, when he was apprehended in Karasjok in January 1917, suspected of espionage and sabotage.”
Modern science to the rescue, even in pursuit of a mad scheme that came to naught in a marginal and forgotten outpost of a great war—the very definition of historical trivia, however intriguing, in the midst of great pith and moment. The authors of the letter removed the capillary tube and dumped the contents (“a brown fluid”) onto a petri dish. Two columns of conventional scientific prose then detailed the procedures followed, with all the usual rigor of long chemical names and precise amounts: “After incubation, 200μ1 of these cultures were spread on 7% of horse-blood agar and L-agar medium (identical to L-broth but solidified by the addition of 2% Difco Bacto agar).” The clear results may be stated more succinctly, as the authors both grew some anthrax bacilli in their cultures and then confirmed the presence of DNA from the same organism by PCR (polymerase chain reaction for amplifying small amounts of DNA to levels that can be analyzed). They write: “We therefore confirmed the presence of B. anthracis [scientific name of the anthrax bacillus] in the specimen by both culture and PCR. It proved possible to revive a few surviving organisms from the brink of extinction after they had been stored, without any special precautions, for 80 years.”
But what was the good baron, an aristocrat of German, Swedish, and Finnish extraction, doing in this forsaken area of northeastern Norway in the middle of winter? Clearly up to no good, but to what form of no good? The authors continue:
When the Sheriff of Kautokeino, who was present at the group’s arrest, derisively suggested that he should prepare soup from the contents of the tin cans labeled “Svea kott” (Swedish meat), the baron felt obliged to admit that each can actually contained between 2 and 4 kilograms of dynamite.
The baron’s luggage also yielded some bottles of curare, various microbial cultures, and nineteen sugar cubes, each containing anthrax. The two cubes in Trondheim are, apparently, the only survivors of this old incident. The baron claimed that he was only an honorable activist for Finnish independence, out to destroy supply lines to Russian-controlled areas. (Finland had been under loose control of the Russian czar and did win independence after the Bolshevik revolution.) Most historians suspect that he had traveled to Norway at the behest, and in the employ, of the Germans, who had authorized a program for infecting horses and reindeer with anthrax to disrupt the transport of British arms (on sleds pulled by these animals) through northern Norway.
The baron, expelled after a few weeks in custody, never carried out his harebrained scheme. The authors of the Nature letter, Caroline Redmond, Martin J. Pearce, Richard J. Manchee, and Bjorn P. Berdal, have inferred his intent:
The grinding of the sugar and its glass insert between the molar teeth of horses would probably result in a lethal infection as the anthrax spores entered the body, eventually facilitated through the small lesions produced in the wall of the alimentary tract by the broken glass. It is not known whether reindeer eat sugar lumps but presumably the baron never had the chance to carry out this piece of research.
As anthrax cannot be transmitted directly from animal to animal, the scheme probably would not have worked without a large supply of
sugar cubes and very sweet teeth in the intended victims. But the authors do cite a potential danger to other participants: “However, if the meat from a dying animal had been consumed without adequate cooking, it is likely that human fatalities from gastrointestinal anthrax would have followed.” The authors end their letter with a frank admission:
This small but relatively important episode in the history of biological warfare is one of the few instances where there is confirmation of the intent to use a lethal microorganism as a weapon, albeit 80 years after the event. It did not, however, make any significant difference to the course of the Great War.
We may treat this botched experiment in biological warfare as light relief in a dark time, but the greatest evils often begin as farcical and apparently harmless escapades, while an old motto cites eternal vigilance as the price of liberty. If Hitler had been quietly terminated after his ragtag band failed to seize local power in their Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich—even the name of this incident marks the derision then heaped on the protagonists—the history of our century might have unfolded in a much different, and almost surely happier, manner. Instead, Hider spent a mere nine months in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf and worked out his grisly plans.
We humans may be the smartest objects that ever came down the pike of life’s history on earth, but we remain outstandingly inept in certain issues, particularly when our emotional arrogance joins forces with our intellectual ignorance. Our inability to forecast the future lies foremost among these ineptitudes—not, in this case, as a limitation of our brains, but more as a principled consequence of the world’s genuine complexity and indeterminism (see chapter 10 for a general discussion of our inability to predict coming events and patterns). We could go with this flow, but our arrogance intercedes, leading us to promote our ignorant intuitions into surefire forecasts about things to come.
I know only one antidote to the major danger arising from this incendiary mixture of arrogance and ignorance. Given our inability to predict the future, particularly our frequent failures to forecast the later and dire consequences of phenomena that seem impotent, or even risible, at their first faltering steps (a few reindeer with anthrax today, an entire human population with plague tomorrow), moral restraint may represent our only sure salvation. The wisdom of the Geneva Protocol lies in understanding that some relatively ineffective novelties of 1925 might become the principal horrors of a not-so-distant future. If such novelties can be nipped in the bud of their early ineffectiveness, we may be spared. We need only remember the legend of Pandora to recognize that some boxes, once opened, cannot be closed again.
The good sense in this vital form of moral restraint has been most seriously and effectively challenged by scientists who stand at the cutting edge of a developing technology and therefore imagine that they can control, or at least accurately forecast, any future developments. I dwell in the camp of scientists, but I want to illustrate the value of moral restraint as a counterweight to dangerous pathways forged either by complacency or active pursuit and fueled by false confidence about forecasting the future.
I told a story about aristocratic bumbling with ineffective biological weapons in World War I—but we might be in quite a fix today if we had assumed that this technology could never transcend such early ineptitude, and if we had not worked hard for international restriction. But a much deeper lesson may be drawn from the second innovative, and much more effective, technology later banned by the Geneva Protocol: chemical weaponry in World War I. The primary figure for this lesson became one of the founders of my own field of modern evolutionary biology—J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964), called “the cleverest man I ever knew” by Sir Peter Medawar, who was certainly the cleverest man I have ever known.
Haldane mixed so many apparently contradictory traits into his persona that one word stands out in every description of him I have ever read: enigmatic. He could be shy and kind or blustering and arrogant, elitist (and viciously dismissive of underlings who performed a task poorly) or egalitarian. (Haldane became a prominent member of the British Communist Party and wrote volumes of popular essays on scientific subjects for their Daily Worker. Friends, attributing his political views to a deep personal need for iconoclastic and contrarian behavior, said that he would surely have become a monarchist if he had lived in the Soviet Union.) Haldane held no formal degree in science but excelled in several fields, largely as a consequence of superior mathematical ability. He remains most famous, along with R. A. Fisher and Sewall Wright, as one of the three founders of the modern theory of population genetics, especially for integrating the previously warring concepts of Mendelian rules for heredity with Darwinian natural selection.
J.B.S. Haldane in his World War I military outfit.
But a different contradiction motivates Haldane’s appearance as the focus of this essay. Haldane, a man of peace and compassion, adored war—or at least his role on the front lines in World War I, where he was twice wounded (both times seriously) and mighty lucky to come home in one piece. Some people regarded him as utterly fearless and courageous beyond any possible call of duty; others, a bit more cynically perhaps (but also, I suspect, more realistically), viewed him as a latter-day Parsifal—a perfect fool who survived in situations of momentary danger (usually created as a result of his own bravado and appalling recklessness) by a combination of superior intelligence joined with more dumb luck than any man has a right to expect. In any case, J.B.S. Haldane had a good war—every last moment of it.
He particularly enjoyed a spell of trench warfare against Turkish troops near the Tigris River, where, away from the main European front and unencumbered by foolish orders from senior officers without local experience, men could fight mano a mano (or at least gun against gun). Haldane wrote: “Here men were pitted against individual enemies with similar weapons, trench mortars or rifles with telescopic sights, each with a small team helping him. This was war as the great poets have sung it. I am lucky to have experienced it.” Haldane then offered a more general toast to such a manly occupation: “I enjoyed the comradeship of war. Men like war because it is the only socialized activity in which they have ever taken part. The soldier is working with comrades for a great cause (or so at least he believes). In peacetime he is working for his own profit or someone else’s.”
Haldane’s contact with chemical warfare began in great disappointment. After the first German gas attack at Ypres, the British War Office, by Lord Kitchener’s direct command, dispatched Haldane’s father, the eminent respiratory physiologist John Scott Haldane, to France in a desperate effort to overcome this new danger. The elder Haldane, who had worked with his son on physiological experiments for many years, greatly valued both J.B.S.’s mathematical skills and his willingness to act as a human guinea pig in medical experiments (an ancient tradition among biologists and a favorite strategy of the elder Haldane, who never asked his son to do anything he wouldn’t try on himself). So J.B.S., much to his initial disgust, left the front lines he loved so well and moved into a laboratory with his father.
J.B.S. already knew a great deal about toxic gases, primarily through his role as father’s helper in self-experimentation. He recalled some early work with his father on firedamp (methane) in mines:
To demonstrate the effects of breathing firedamp, my father told me to stand up and recite Mark Antony’s speech from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, beginning “Friends, Romans, countrymen.” I soon began to pant, and somewhere about “the noble Brutus” my legs gave way and I collapsed on to the floor, where, of course, the air was all right. In this way I learnt that firedamp is lighter than air and not dangerous to breathe.
(Have you ever read a testimony more congruent with the stereotype of British upper-class intellectual dottiness?)
The Haldanes, père et fils, led a team of volunteer researchers in vitally important work (no doubt saving many thousands of lives) on the effects of noxious substances and the technology of gas masks. As always, they performed the most unpleas
ant and dangerous experiments on themselves. J.B.S. recalled:
We had to compare the effects on ourselves of various quantities, with and without respirators. It stung the eyes and produced a tendency to gasp and cough when breathed.… As each of us got sufficiently affected by gas to render his lungs duly irritable, another would take his place. None of us was much the worse for the gas, or in any real danger, as we knew where to stop, but some had to go to bed for a few days, and I was very short of breath and incapable of running for a month or so.
J.B.S. Haldane engaged in physiological self-experimentation on the effects of various gases.
Thus, we cannot deny Haldane’s superior knowledge or his maximal experience in the subject of chemical warfare. He therefore becomes an interesting test for the proposition that such expertise should confer special powers of forecasting—and that the technical knowledge of such people should therefore be trusted if they advocate a path of further development against the caution, the pessimism, even the defeatism of others who prefer moral restraint upon future technological progress because they fear the power of unforeseen directions and unanticipated consequences.
In 1925, as nations throughout the world signed the Geneva Protocol to ban chemical and biological warfare, J.B.S. Haldane published the most controversial of all his iconoclastic books: a slim volume of eighty-four pages entitled Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare, based on a lecture he had given in 1924. (Callinicus, a seventh-century Jewish refugee in Constantinople, invented Greek fire, an incendiary liquid that could be shot from siphons toward enemy ships or troops. The subsequent flames, almost impossible to extinguish, helped save the Byzantine empire from Islamic conquest for several centuries. The formula, known only to the emperor and to Callinicus’ family, who held an exclusive right of manufacture, remained a state secret and still elicits controversy among scholars of warfare.)