The Biology of Doom: America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (Paperback)

by Ed Regis (Author) "twenty years earlier, the U.S. Army would have laughed at the idea of making war upon the enemy by spraying germs out of a can..." (more)
Key Phrases: Camp Detrick, United States, Air Force (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Regis (Virus Ground Zero, etc.) presents a thorough, frightening look at America's biological warfare program, from its inception during the late 1930s through the 1980s. He covers all the bases in looking at the strategic and scientific developments of biological warfare both in the U.S. and among its principal adversaries, including Japan, Germany and Russia. The topic is gruesome: Regis reveals that humans, as well as guinea pigs, rhesus monkeys and other animals, were exposed to live infectious agents. Bombs were created to remain underwater, then surface and spray out germs; tests were done on the efficacy of fleas as agents to carry plague. Regis writes for the layperson, and he is careful to depict the human dramas behind the science. He writes, for instance, of the scientist who tested psychotropic agents on unwitting co-workers and of the University of Wisconsin professor who had been drafted into the war effort and found it impossible to get out (as Regis puts it, "being in the profession was all too much like being in the Mafia: once you were in, you were in for good"). Along his way to reporting this important and underdiscussed aspect of the Cold War, Regis offers a great deal of startling evidence on the use of biological agents during the Korean conflictAand, also disturbing, that America used data from Japanese biological warfare tests done on Manchurian criminals. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American
Regis ... interested himself in what the U.S. and other countries did during and after World War II to develop methods of biological warfare. With the aid of the Freedom of Information Act, he obtained more than 2,000 pages of formerly secret U.S. government documents on the subject. They form the foundation of this account, which traces the U.S. biological weapons program from its inception in 1942 to its termination by President Richard Nixon in 1969 ... By then, according to Regis, "the U.S. Army had officially standardized and weaponized two lethal biological agents, Bacillus anthracis and Francisella tularensis, and three incapacitating biological agents, Brucella suis, Coxiella burnetii, and Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus. The Army had also weaponized one lethal toxin, botulinum, and one incapacitating toxin, staphylococcal enterotoxin B." ...

Notwithstanding all this activity ... nations have so far avoided serious biological warfare. Regis thinks the reason is that biological weapons lack "the single most important ingredient of any effective weapon, an immediate visual display of overwhelming power and brute strength." --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Holt Paperbacks; 1st edition (October 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 080505765X
• ISBN-13: 978-0805057652
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (17 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #708,567 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Biology of Doom - aaaaarrrgh!, January 29, 2001

By	Ed Rybicki "[e-mail]" (Cape Town, Western Cape South Africa) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (Hardcover)

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...).

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The elephant laboured mightily and brought forth... a vole, October 31, 2001

By	vfrickey (off in the mountains somewhere) - See all my reviews

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 sued 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.

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Readable, entertaining, thought-provoking, December 30, 1999

By	Conrad Crane (West Point, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (Hardcover)

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.