Biohazard

Many of the ministry's facilities were installed in the centers of towns and cities, to keep their military connection camouflaged. This suggests how little those who ruled our lives worried about our health.

Across the street from the apartment block where I grew up in Alma-Ata (now Almaty), the former capital of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Kazakhstan, a large, rusting factory served as a makeshift playground for children in the neighborhood. It was a fantastic world of hulking machinery and cavernous tunnels, made all the more alluring by the large Keep Out signs posted conspicuously on the property. We would crawl through the fence on afternoons after school and, shifting through piles of metal, would occasionally stumble on odd-smelling canisters, painted in army green. Luckily, we never managed to open them.

Many years later, going through some old reports, I discovered that the factory was used by the Ministry of Agriculture until the early 1960s to make anti-crop and anti-livestock agents. It was called Biokombinat.

The Enzyme Project

In the early days of the Cold War, when we appeared to be leading the world in space and nuclear weapons technology, Soviet biology was paralyzed. We had gone from being one of the world's powerhouses of immunological and epidemiological research to a backwater of demoralized and discredited scientists. The cause was one man — a Russian agronomist named Trofim Lysenko.

Lysenko came to national attention in the late 1920s, when he reported a successful experiment breeding winter peas in a remote farm station in Azerbaijan. His cultivation of several generations of plants resistant to cold temperatures led him to conclude that genetic theories about humans were wrong: rather than being a slave of his genes, man was capable of changing his essential traits through exposure to different environmental conditions.

Lysenko, who once bragged that he never reported the results of an experiment that contradicted his theories, claimed his work proved that environment was more important than heredity in the evolution of plants and animals. Calling genetics a bourgeois discipline that insulted the proletariat, he emerged as a paragon of the "new" Soviet science based on Marxist materialism. By the 1940s Lysenko was a confidant of Stalin. With the patronage of the Soviet dictator, he maneuvered his way to the top of the Soviet scientific establishment, imposing, in the process, an iron brand of political correctness on the nation's biologists.

Dissenting scientists were condemned to prison camps or publicly humiliated. No journal that published an article on genetics could survive. By the 1950s, little remained of the pioneering spirit of Russia's great biologists and geneticists.

The gap in our scientific knowledge was of no interest to the strategic planners responsible for modernizing our weapons program after World War II. Genetics didn't seem to have any connection to biological warfare. But a series of brilliant discoveries between the 1950s and 1970s unleashed a revolution in Western science, forcing the Soviet Union to recognize that it was behind in more ways than one.

In 1953, two young scientists, James Watson and Francis Crick, identified the shape of DNA, the genetic code that determines the behavior of all life on earth. Over the next two decades, researchers found ways to manipulate DNA in the laboratory. They discovered that genes of separate organisms could be cloned and spliced together, a process that opened a new frontier in the study of the behavior and treatment of disease.

Soviet biologists knew about the work in the West thanks to smuggled journals and reports, but research conducted in Russian labs was heavily restricted. The influence of Lysenko — who lived until 1976—was too powerful. A few experts recognized that the ability to manipulate genes broadened the horizon of bioweaponeering, offering the possibility of producing new strains capable of overcoming vaccines and antidotes. To some, it also raised the disconcerting possibility that our competitors in the West could put us at a severe strategic disadvantage.

Only one scientist had the clout, and the courage, to speak up. His name was Yury Ovchinnikov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a renowned molecular biologist.

Ovchinnikov understood the significance of what he had read in Western scientific journals, and he knew that there were no Soviet laboratories, and few Soviet scientists, equipped to match that level of work. He decided to resolve the crisis in Russian biology by appealing to the self-interest of the masters of our militarized economy. In 1972, he asked the Ministry of Defense to support a genetics program devoted to developing new agents for biological warfare.