As a party to the treaty, but with a biological weapons programme already in place, France formally reserved a crucial exception: the right to arm itself for retaliation in kind, that is, to prepare to strike back with germ weapons should it be attacked first. In 1925, the signing of the Geneva Protocol banned the use of both chemical and bacteriological weapons. … how do scientists, who are educated to help humanity, justify the use of their privileged knowledge for the explicit goal of killing civilians en masse? Although he published a few scientific articles, his role as director of the French biological weapons programme-which lasted until the German occupation in 1940-essentially removed him, his staff and their work from the open scientific community. Trillat fostered close ties with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, where he had been a researcher. It was headed by Auguste Trillat, an inventive German-educated chemist who envisioned and tested the sustained virulence of airborne pathogens. In addition, as was fully revealed after the Second World War, Adolf Hitler had a distinct aversion to biological weapons and rejected all advice to develop them ( Geissler, 1999).ĭespite patchy intelligence, France started its own biological weapons programme in the early 1920s. Germany instead concentrated on conventional rearmament and the expansion of its tank divisions and air force. After the First World War, France, the UK, the USA and the Soviet Union all suspected that the defeated Germany was secretly developing biological weapons to refine its wartime campaign of infecting pack animals with anthrax and glanders. Such suspicions were invariably based on poor intelligence and political agendas that, for the most part, claimed unrestricted latitude for military research. One frequent justification for developing strategic biological weapons was the suspicion that an aggressive enemy had already armed itself with similar weapons.
However, it is possible that new or imagined threats to national security could persuade biologists to set aside any moral qualms about secret science in the name of patriotism or for economic security, a career in laboratory science, or some combination of these motives. At present, the development and testing of biological weapons is banned by international law and all major state-funded programmes have been terminated therefore, such activity is associated only with criminals or terrorists. Only occasionally do we find information on why and how individual scientists became engaged in promoting and creating biological weapons, yet it is valid to investigate their motivation. Although we now know a lot about the political and military rationales that spurred the development of these weapons, we know much less about the involvement and recruitment of hundreds and-in the case of large, long-term programmes-even thousands of scientists from universities and medical schools ( Guillemin, 2005a). The intense secrecy that surrounded offensive biological weapons programmes makes it difficult to gain insight into individual scientists' motivations. Their participation provokes an important question: how do scientists, who are educated to help humanity, justify the use of their privileged knowledge for the explicit goal of killing civilians en masse? And if the human race wants to ban biological weapons, what can we learn from their history to prevent future generations of biologists from engaging in such activities? Yet none of the major biological weapons programmes that were established during the twentieth century-in France, Japan, the UK, the USA and the former Soviet Union-would have been possible without the active leadership and cooperation of biological and medical scientists. When considering the potential threat of biological weapons in the hands of rogue states or terrorist groups, security experts tend to assume that scientists will always lend a hand to prevent such nefarious use of their research.
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