Biohazard

Techniques were soon found to manipulate these exchanges. The new processes that were developed changed not only medicine but pharmacology, agriculture, and dozens of other fields. Insulin, for example, a hormone crucial to the treatment of diabetes but produced only in small quantities by the body, could be grown in the laboratory by transferring its genes to bacteria. Human insulin became widely affordable to diabetics for the first time. The genes of corn, rice, and other crops were similarly manipulated to improve the plants' resistance to disease.

News of these developments aroused excitement in the Soviet Union, and envy. Why couldn't our scientists perform just as well? Brezhnev's decision in 1973 to allow genetic experiments under the umbrella of Biopreparat came as an unexpected gift to many Soviet scientists, who had until then been forced to watch the unfolding genetic revolution from the sidelines. The hunger to be on the newest frontier of biology was so powerful that scientists who answered the call to participate in the new program were willing to overlook its connection with weapons-making.

In the winter of 1972, Igor Domaradsky, a molecular biologist and geneticist, was relaxing at a hotel near Moscow when he received an urgent message from the Ministry of Health. He was told that a government car would arrive shortly to take him to an important meeting. Within the hour, Domaradsky found himself in the Kremlin, talking to one of the chiefs of the Military-Industrial Commission.

Domaradsky was offered a job in a mysterious new organization which, he was told, would be devoted to investigating antibiotic-resistant strains of plague and tularemia. As a young scientist, he had made valuable contributions to research on plague. During the 1950s he served as a director of anti-plague institutes in Siberia and southern Russia, where he improved existing vaccines against plague, cholera, and diphtheria. Domaradsky was under no illusion as to the nature of the work he was being asked to do, but he was convinced he could continue his own research under the mantle of the weapons program.

"Our work was directed towards the solution of strictly scientific problems," Domaradsky wrote in a memoir published privately in Moscow in 1995. "It was only later that doubts of a moral nature arose."

Domaradsky, who became deputy director of the scientific advisory council to Biopreparat and represented the organization on the Inter-Agency Scientific and Technical Council, consoled himself at first with the thought that geneticists and biochemists who wanted to remain at the top of their field had no other place to go. "Few of the people who escaped the temptations offered by the government achieved anything in life," he wrote in his memoirs, "or got a chance to work."

The Inter-Agency Council was responsible for coordinating the flow of information between the various branches of government and the state scientific organizations implicated in the Soviet biological weapons program — the Ministries of Health and Agriculture, the Ministry of Defense and of Chemical Industry, the Fifteenth Directorate, and the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It met once every two to three months to discuss the main direction of research and weapons development. The link with the Academy was one of the most important. Four of its institutes were directly involved in biological warfare. Although they didn't develop weapons, they provided Biopreparat in particular with advice based on their fundamental research into pathogenic microorganisms and on their investigation of genetic engineering.

Several of the country's most prominent Academicians were on the Interagency Council — Rem Petrov, an expert in regulatory pep-tides; Academician Scriabin, an expert on the physiology of microorganisms and an institute director; Academician Mirzabekov, a younger scientist who distinguished himself early for work in molecular biology; and Professor Boronin, who succeeded Scriabin as head of the Institute of Biochemistry and the Physiology of Microorganisms near Moscow.

When I met Domaradsky nearly a decade later, he was a bitter man. An irascible and brilliant theorist with a slight limp due to a childhood bout with polio, he was contemptuous of the organization's military leaders. He had been in the program for so long he could remember when people like Kalinin and Klyucherov, who had briefly served as his deputy, were brash young men. He was convinced they were conspiring to prevent him from pursuing his research.

Few people measured up to Domaradsky's standards, and I was no exception. He sat on the board that reviewed my doctoral thesis and was the only member to criticize my research. But many of us saw more in him to pity than to dislike. He embodied the losing struggle for self-respect waged by many of our most talented scientists locked inside our biological war machine.