Biohazard

For scientists like Domaradsky, the biological weapons program was both a blessing and a curse. While it provided the money and laboratory space for advanced research, security restrictions ensured that only a small circle of people would ever know the results of their work. Domaradsky patented ten different plasmid transferral techniques and claimed to be the first in the world to isolate the plasmid responsible for the virulence of plague. But his patents and discoveries were locked in classified government archives, where they remain today.

In his memoirs, Domaradsky described the toll Biopreparat's security restrictions took on scientists even in its earliest days. The soft classical music playing from loudspeakers in the labs did little to ease the pressure of constant surveillance. Scientists were forbidden from talking to their families about their work. Their lives were so constricted that they had to spend their vacations together at the same state holiday camp. A lab chief at the Kirov military facility once ordered the windows of his country cottage boarded up so that he wouldn't have to see his colleagues' faces.

The level of paranoia was so high that Biopreparat employees were often barred from attending scientific conferences abroad. Domaradsky found this embarrassing. "I had to think up reasons for rejecting tempting invitations from foreign colleagues," he recalled. "I would have to say I'd broken my leg, or caught something, or had family problems."

On one occasion, he had to get permission to work on a special culture of plague directly from Yury Andropov, then the chairman of the KGB. When he had successfully completed the work, he was asked to bring the results to the Kremlin. Accompanied by an armed guard, he carried a dish with a culture of genetically altered plague through the gates of the ancient fortress like a rare jewel. He solemnly presented the dish to military and Party apparatchiks. It isn't clear what they had hoped to see.

Such absurdities drove him to despair, but his most bitter struggle began in 1982, when Kalinin appointed a new military commander of Obolensk.

Nikolai Nikolayevich Urakov, an autocratic general from the Fifteenth Directorate, had been deputy director of the Kirov facility. He was fond of giving orders in obscure military jargon and had little patience for civilians, especially those he considered malingerers.

Urakov was himself an accomplished scientist. He had received a state award for developing a Q fever weapon and, for as long as I knew him, he never stopped talking about "his" weapon in tender terms. "I wish we could go back to Q fever," he would say nostalgically. "That was a real weapon, but nobody takes it seriously anymore."

Urakov made Domaradsky's life miserable, pressing him constantly about missed deadlines and undermining his authority by bringing young officers in to take over lab work. He even tried to recruit me when I was in Stepnogorsk.

"We could make a great team," he said.

The proximity to Moscow and the chance to work with some of our most creative scientists made this a tempting offer, but I refused. I knew Kalinin wouldn't want me to move away from the weapons production lines.

Meanwhile the tug-of-war inside Obolensk moved to Biopreparat headquarters. I was at Samokatnaya Street one day when the scientist and the general squared off inside Kalinin's office for an argument that could be heard over the entire floor. As I listened outside Kalinin's door, the two men seemed to be on the verge of violence. Domaradsky accused Urakov of "sergeant major" tactics; the general responded in kind. Exasperated, Kalinin finally begged Domaradsky to keep his emotions in check.

"Is this any way for a scientist to behave?"

It was a question that could properly have been addressed to any one of us.

Kalinin eventually chose to back the interests of the military over the prerogatives of science. Domaradsky was no longer at Obolensk when I came to headquarters in 1987. He had been demoted to the position of a lab chief at an institute in Moscow.

It is clear from Domaradsky's memoirs that he believes the military retain control of biological research today. He notes that both Kalinin and Urakov have remained the heads of major scientific institutes and complains that his hopes of pursuing experiments with plasmids have dried up for lack of funds.

Summing up his government career, Domaradsky declares that the genetics program he worked on for so long "justified neither the hopes nor the colossal amount of material investment."

"Essentially nothing remarkable was ever produced," he concludes.

Domaradsky, unfortunately, was wrong. What Domaradsky began, Urakov would finish. He was able to develop multiantibiotic-resistant strains of plague with a far larger spectrum of resistance, sufficient to overcome practically all antibiotic treatments. And another program that Domaradsky had overseen, Project Bonfire, took a surprising turn.