Customer Reviews

The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was fascinated from this book from the moment I picked it up: Ed Regis has the knack of being able to immerse his reader so deeply in the moment that it is a wrench to put it down. I am a practising microbiologist with a morbid fascination with biological weaponry and nasty zoonoses; this book certainly informed me perhaps better than I needed to be about things I had only previously read about at third- or fourth-hand, or heard as apocryphal anecdotes.

The only things I could fault in this book are that a) it is too short; b) it does not cover some of the more interesting recent biowar developments, such as Iraq's and South Africa's ventures into the field (but see a).

Apart from this, it is a fascinating, detailed and scholarly account of one of the darker areas of recent scientific history. It sits happily on my shelf next to his "Virus Ground Zero : Stalking the Killer Viruses With the Center for Disease Control", which I consider a masterwork (but then, I love Ebola...).

The editorial review in the amazon.com entry for Ed Regis's "Biology of Doom" refers to a Herculean effort on the author's part to mine thousands of pages of previously-classified material on biological warfare research in Germany and Japan from the massive archives on the subject maintained in the United States and elsewhere as though merely the exertion were sure of yielding new insights on the subject... wish it were so, but it isn't.

"Biology of Doom" is another book on biological warfare, on a bookshelf already groaning with them. The "teaser" - the premise: that there is something especially sinister about the involvement of the governments of the world to develop diseases to be used as weapons in order to accomplish national goals beyond the grasp of conventional armed force and threats-and-blandishments diplomacy, remains a true tease... because there still isn't anything worse about biological warfare than what we already know.

And what we already know, that Japan's infamous military germ warfare research Unit 731 and other Axis war criminal doctors were spared hanging for war crimes and murder by an American germ warfare agency greedy for the masses of data compiled by Japanese researchers, is undoubtedly terrible. It's also not news.

As far back as the early 1980s writers such as Sterling Seagrave ("Yellow Rain") have been alluding to this work, and for quite a long time since then an unsophisticated reader could have gotten the impression that the ONLY work done on biological and chemical warfare was being done at Fort Detrick, Porton Down and the Dugway Proving Ground - in other words, by America, Great Britain and their NATO allies - when the sorry fact was that the defensive work done at those installations was dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the treaty-breaking biological warfare industry run by the Soviets while they slandered us lustily.

Regis does do respectable work in allowing us to visualize the monsters of Unit 731 coldly testing every killer germ and fungus imaginable to them on innocent men, women, and children... unfortunately, while Regis may have succeeded in drawing some previously undrawn dots in on the whole nasty chiaroscuro of military BW, he gives us no new or startling images that other writers had not already revealed to us.

In justice, Dr. Regis does draw more attention in his book to the Whitecoats, the brave conscientious objectors who during World War II volunteered to be exposed to biological warfare agents so that their effects might be closely monitored in the human model, and this is certainly a worthwhile addition to the popular literature on the history of biological warfare. Other parts of his book dealing with the history of Fort Detrick, such as the story of the "8-ball" enclosure, are fascinating but again have been covered by other writers in the popular literature (even in one or two popular-audience science-fiction novels written during the 1970s).

Certainly I share Regis' outrage about the callousness with which innocent blood was shed by the bioweaponeers of several countries, and at how so much indisputable evidence of so many murders comitted by the defeated countries of World War II in the name of better, deadlier weapons of war was kicked under the rug by the victors of that same war in their lust to learn all they could about that same obscene research... what Regis and too many of the other chroniclers of biological warfare research have failed to do is to capture the imagination of the world and vividly demonstrate the vast human tragedy of this research so that the public might be motivated to prevent the wrongs they describe from recurring.

And unfortunately, better research just doesn't make a better book, not by itself, without some effective means of making the reader care about what was uncovered. I wish I could reward all of Dr. Regis's hard work with better than an average rating, but he didn't give us better than an average book. The weakness of amazon.com's rating system is that I can't give half-points, because the book probably is above average, but I cannot honestly award a "4" to this book.

It is ironic to see Edward Hagerman criticizing Ed Regis for errors of fact in a review of BIOLOGY OF DOOM, since the book that Hagerman did with Stephen Endicott on a similar subject is so full of misinterpretations at best, and distortions of fact at worst, that it is one of the prime examples I use to show my students bad history. Regis has a gift of telling great stories, and can entertain as well as shock. He does a fine job describing the combination of competence and chaos that often surrounds weapon development. My only concern with this book is its lack of footnotes, as I would like to be able to tell where the author got his information from documents, which are generally reliable, and from interviews, which can be very problematic. Readers should also strive to read more works in this subject area if they are really interested in it, in order to get some different points of view. Regis' bibliography has some good examples.

I picked this book up at the airport, opened it on the plane and I couldn't put it down. Edward Regis turns this topic into a narrative that is as interesting as a Tom Clancy novel. The book is clearly well researched, and is filled with wit, as well as with a rather disturbing picture of our military development of biological weapons.

I am a general surgeon and have practiced since 1956 in Frederick, Maryland - the location of Fort Detrick. I have had intimate knowledge of and direct relationships with the researchers at Fort Detrick. And, as a Seventh-day Adventist (SDA) church member, I have had direct relationships with many of the 2,200 SDA soldiers who volunteered as experimental subjects in what was known as "Project Whitecoat." These projects were conducted by the United States Army Medical Corp Biological Research Division at Fort Detrick from 1954-1973. "Biology of Doom" is extremely well written, very readable and certainly informative. Dr. Regis extensively reports the biological historical events that preceded & followed the 44 years of my contacts with the researchers and volunteers. The book "For God and Country" by Mole & Mole, describes the biological research events of those intervening years. Now that Dr. Regis has made us aware of the biological research of other countries, we can more readily accept the need for the United States to develop it own program. I can personally attest to the factual accuracy of the two chapters that deal with the Whitecoat research projects and I have therefore concluded that the information in the remainder of the book must also be factually accurate.

Ed Regis tells the fascinating and complete history of biological warfare. The people, places, devices, and organisms. The book is well written, the story unfolds in a way that makes it easy to understand and interesting. One does not have to be interested in warfare or microbiology to appreciate the book.

This book isn't just a history. Regis's story of the U.S. and British biological warfare program leaves the reader very relieved upon reaching the part about how the program was abandoned when the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972 was signed. Unfortunately, the next part of his book discusses how the USSR responded to that agreement -- which it signed -- by launching an all-out biological warfare program that created weaponized stocks of superlethal smallpox, bubonic plague, etc. Those stocks still exist and threaten the world today. Nor were the Russians the only violators. Apparently, once the US abandoned the field, other nations concluded that it had become possible for them to obtain a decisive advantage by doing research; before, they had assumed that the US would promptly match any developments, preventing them from achieving any advantage. A devastating example of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and something to remember when other calls for relinquishing technology appear.

This is a superior account of a difficult subject-biological weapons. It shows exhaustive research, careful weighing of evidence, and a balanced assessment of these horrible weapons. It is also a great read as Regis finds a compelling, surprising, and at times heroic narrative line in a mountain of government documents and assembles a clear history of what had been fragmentary bits of information.

Statements by anyone claiming to know anything about bioweapons need to be checked against this clear, comprehensive, compulsively readable book.

With his Biology of Doom Regis has given us a harrowing story of the history of U.S. germ warfare research, complete with details of plague experiments on human beings,a drug-induced suicide, the deaths of thousands of animals, and much more. Creepy -- and a great read!

This book is the best book on Bio Warfare I've ever read.

Not only does Ed Regis include a lot of hard facts and concrete details, he also includes a unique insight on this subject complete with commentary and backround information.