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The 1953 probable assassination of Frank Olson by the CIA could use a little more expansion - and he wasn't so much a biochemist as a microbiologist. He appare

The 1953 probable assassination of Frank Olson by the CIA could use a little more expansion - and he wasn't so much a biochemist as a microbiologist. He apparently was working on a specific program called ARTICHOKE in 1953 that involved torture and assassination using the MKULTRA arsenal of drugs and poisons: https://wariscrime.com/new/scientist-frank-olson-killed-by-the-cia/ https://wariscrime.com/new/scientist-frank-olson-killed-by-t... Of particular interest is this: > "Cournoyer also told them Olson learned biological weapons, including anthrax, were used during the Korean War, despite denials by the U.S. government. Cournoyer repeated his story in a 2002 German TV documentary film, “Code Name ARTICHOKE,” which can be seen on YouTube." That would be enough of a reason for the CIA to conduct an assassination. It didn't become public that the USA had collected all of Japan's biological warfare data and given Shiro Ishii, head of that program, amnesty for his Mengele-like crimes until the 1970s. If all that had been revealed in 1953, it would have made US denial of the use of biological weapons in North Korea much less plausible. For more background on Olson and the CIA, this paper (Kuzmarov 2020) looks good: https://www.jstor.org/stable/48645495 https://www.jstor.org/stable/48645495 > "In 1947, Olson and Rosebury produced a technical monograph after constructing a special chamber for the study of “airborne clouds of highly infective agents” that recommended the use of airplanes as the “best delivery systems for biological agents.” In May of the previous year, members of Congress hoping to secure support for a $4.6 million naval appropriations bill, leaked to the Associated Press news about a “new germ spray capable of wiping out large cities and entire crops at a single blow, a secret weapon” deliverable from high-flying planes, “far more deadly than the atomic bomb.”" I can guess what happened: under the influence of an unexpected dose of LSD, Olson (a previously straight-laced company man by all accounts) suddenly realized that he didn't want to spend his life making bioweapons and torture/assassination tools. Outcomes like that had a lot to do with the CIA giving up on LSD (as well as its later criminalization by the state).

mcpackieh 3y ago
It seems to be a popular belief that biological weapons research was abandoned by all rational governments because biological weapons can't be controlled and the infections would travel back to their source. But anthrax doesn't have this problem. The spores are highly infectious, if you dust an area with anthrax spores it has a devastating effect. But at the same time, anthrax is barely contagious from person-to-person. If you take basic hazmat precautions and burn the bodies, there is little risk of the anthrax spreading out of control. The area spores were dropped on may remain deadly for decades, but that won't spontaneously spread to other areas. It's a practical and effective biological weapon. In 1972, the Soviets accidentally released a cloud of anthrax spores from from one of their research/production facilities. It killed at least 68 people in that area, maybe many more, but didn't spread uncontrollably through the population.
- logicchains 3y ago
  > biological weapons can't be controlled and the infections would travel back to their source If a country found a way to make a racially-targeted bioweapon they could avoid that. Or a bioweapon for which only they had a vaccine/antidote.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    > racially-targeted bioweapon Possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity (high false positives, high false negatives, respectively). But society's concept of "race" is nearly exclusively limited to physical appearance and has no basis in any part of the genotype which doesn't affect visual phenotype. Therefore to achieve high specificity and sensitivity you'd need a bioweapon which targets individuals based on complex combinations of genes which together govern physical appearance, often in relatively subtle ways. This is relatively impossible because overall physical appearance isn't a vector for infections. Even if you did this relatively impossible thing, you'd get a lot of false positives and negatives for most populations due to intermixing -- Latin America for example has very, very few groups of indigenous populations which aren't significantly mixed with the European colonizers' genes. When I say it's "possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity" I mean that you could find other genes that are somewhat loosely correlated with our current definitions of "race", such as how some Africans are somewhat more likely to have sickle-cell disease (SCD) and that provides about a 75% protection against HIV, and heterogenous carriers of the gene (SCT - Sickle Cell Trait) have about 40% lower incidence rate of HIV. But even in the most concentrated areas of Africa, only 3% of some populations have SCD. And that dismal math will repeat for any "race-based" infection system -- you might be able to get slightly higher rates of infection in another target "race" but it won't be dramatically different enough from the effects on your constituent population to make it useful.

mcpackieh 3y ago

It seems to be a popular belief that biological weapons research was abandoned by all rational governments because biological weapons can't be controlled and the infections would travel back to their source. But anthrax doesn't have this problem. The spores are highly infectious, if you dust an area with anthrax spores it has a devastating effect. But at the same time, anthrax is barely contagious from person-to-person. If you take basic hazmat precautions and burn the bodies, there is little risk of the anthrax spreading out of control. The area spores were dropped on may remain deadly for decades, but that won't spontaneously spread to other areas. It's a practical and effective biological weapon. In 1972, the Soviets accidentally released a cloud of anthrax spores from from one of their research/production facilities. It killed at least 68 people in that area, maybe many more, but didn't spread uncontrollably through the population.

logicchains 3y ago
> biological weapons can't be controlled and the infections would travel back to their source If a country found a way to make a racially-targeted bioweapon they could avoid that. Or a bioweapon for which only they had a vaccine/antidote.
- reaperman 3y ago
  > racially-targeted bioweapon Possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity (high false positives, high false negatives, respectively). But society's concept of "race" is nearly exclusively limited to physical appearance and has no basis in any part of the genotype which doesn't affect visual phenotype. Therefore to achieve high specificity and sensitivity you'd need a bioweapon which targets individuals based on complex combinations of genes which together govern physical appearance, often in relatively subtle ways. This is relatively impossible because overall physical appearance isn't a vector for infections. Even if you did this relatively impossible thing, you'd get a lot of false positives and negatives for most populations due to intermixing -- Latin America for example has very, very few groups of indigenous populations which aren't significantly mixed with the European colonizers' genes. When I say it's "possible with relatively low specificity and sensitivity" I mean that you could find other genes that are somewhat loosely correlated with our current definitions of "race", such as how some Africans are somewhat more likely to have sickle-cell disease (SCD) and that provides about a 75% protection against HIV, and heterogenous carriers of the gene (SCT - Sickle Cell Trait) have about 40% lower incidence rate of HIV. But even in the most concentrated areas of Africa, only 3% of some populations have SCD. And that dismal math will repeat for any "race-based" infection system -- you might be able to get slightly higher rates of infection in another target "race" but it won't be dramatically different enough from the effects on your constituent population to make it useful.