The Biology of Doom - The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project by Ed Regis

Author:Ed Regis
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 080505765X
Publisher: Owl Books
Published: 1999-11-18T05:00:00+00:00

There had been a final mission to Tokyo after Norbert Fell returned from Japan. This one was to get the slides.

Fell had reported that the Japanese had saved approximately 8,000 slides of pathological sections taken from some 200 human cases of disease caused by a range of biological warfare agents. That, however, had proved to be a gross underestimate. There were in fact 15,000 slides from more than 500 patients, this out of an overall total of 860 human corpses upon which the Japanese scientists had performed autopsies. The American scientists wanted to get their hands on the slides, the test protocols, and the autopsy reports, and so on October 28, 1947, approximately four months after the departure of Norbert Fell for Camp Detrick, a new two-man team arrived in Japan.

Leader of the pair was Edwin V. Hill, M.D., chief of Basic Sciences at Detrick, a tall, graying man with glasses who also had a graduate chemistry degree from MIT. The other was Joseph Victor, M.D., a Detrick pathologist who had taught pathology at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Although their primary objective was to collect the slides of human pathological material, Hill and Victor would also conduct more than thirty new interrogations of Shiro Ishii and twenty other Japanese scientists who had worked in the germ warfare program at Ping Fan, Harbin, Mukden, or elsewhere.

One of the scientists, Masahiko Takahashi, had specialized in the aerosol delivery of infectious agents, a topic of surpassing interest at Camp Detrick. On November 20, Hill and Victor interviewed Takahashi, who described to them the chamber he used for human experimentation. It was octagonal shaped, he said, with a capacity of twenty-eight cub*- meters. He would put a group of human subjects in the exposure chamber *nd then, using "an insect type sprayer similar to the flit gun," would introduce an aerosol of a given infectious agent at the rate of "approximately 1 *c of bacterial suspension per second." He experimented with sprays of plague, anthrax, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis, and cholera, among other diseases, with varying rates of human mortality.

Another scientist, Shiro Kasahara, told Hill and Victor of hi* experiments with Songo fever, a recently discovered form of epidemic hemorrhagic fever that affected both humans and animals. He'd taken blood from humans suffering from the disease and injected it into horses; conversely, he'd taken blood from sick horses and injected it into humans. "Mortality of the natural disease in Japanese soldiers was 30 percent when the disease was first discovered," he told them. "However, mortality in experimental cases was 100 percent due to the procedure of sacrificing experimental subjects," which was to say, killing them.

The scientists took kidney, spleen, and liver sections from the sacrificed human cases, and mounted them on microscopic slides. Those slides were now in the hands of Tachio Ishikawa, the Unit 731 pathologist, who was photographing them for the Americans.

Midway through the process, Ishikawa had decided that he had so many more tissue sections than he had originally estimated that he'd need additional supplies to photograph them all.

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