As the former biological warfare research base of the US military, the Fort Detrick Laboratory not only took over the biological warfare data of the 731 Japanese troops invaded China, which were stained with thousands of people in the middle of the last century, but also studied and stored a variety of deadly biological weapons, and was even exposed to experiment with "brainwashing" for mental control.
After 1969, although Fort Detrick's main business shifted from "biological weapons research" to "biological defense project" and became the only P4 biological laboratory of the US military, many security loopholes have been exposed one after another. This high-level laboratory with 67 high-risk pathogens (including Ebola virus, anthrax , plague, etc.) has experienced serious incidents of anthrax bacteria being killed by human leakage, as well as low-level loopholes such as damaged protective clothing and illegal wastewater treatment.
Fort Detrick's image as "evil biological laboratory" has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the Americans. In the 1995 American disaster film "Horror Zone" and the 2009 video game " killing the original form ", both mentioned or alluded to Fort Detrick's experience in biological warfare research. What is better known is the drama "Blood Epidemic" produced by National Geographic Channel in 2019. With the help of this drama, Fort Detrick's role in the 1989 suspected Reston-type Ebola leakage was pushed to the forefront, and the protagonist Nancy in the play worked for Fort Detrick.
To this day, controversy continues to surround this infamous "dark laboratory".
Just as I was about to fall asleep, someone gave me a pillow
In early 1942, the United States, which had steadily failed on the Pacific battlefield, launched the "Doolittle Raid" plan to bomb Japan for the first time, in order to wipe out the shame of Pearl Harbor.
According to the Japan Times, after the local bombing, the Japanese army hopes to counterattack the US military in any possible way. One of the plans is to put the rinderpest virus in a high-altitude balloon and let the balloon flow across the ocean with the high-altitude air and hit the US mainland directly. However, due to fear of devastating revenge from the United States, the Japanese army eventually became "cowardly".
Although the Japanese army temporarily dispelled the crazy idea of launching a biological war against the United States, the Japanese army's research on biological weapons has not stopped. The Washington Post published an article pointing out that the headquarters of the Kwantung Army's epidemic prevention and water supply department, the notorious Japanese Unit 731, conducted various biological warfare and bacterial warfare research in Northeast China, including human tests, and threw biological bombs on the Chinese battlefield. The bombs contained flies infected with Vibrio cholerae, causing tens of thousands of people to die.
was shocked by the bacterial war that Japan had fought, and the United States chose to join forces with its enemy country.
After an investigation, the US military took a crush on the abandoned Detrick Airport in Maryland as the "US version 731" station. It is convenient to have a geographical advantage: it is both remote and "isolated from the world", and is not far from Washington, DC and the Edgewood Arsenal, the American Institute of Chemical Warfare. Of course, after nearly 80 years of development, Detrick is no longer as desolate as he used to be.
In 1943, Detrick Airport officially stopped operating. In the same year, the federal government purchased more land around the airport and renamed it "Camp Detrick". After a big project, the U.S. Army Biological Warfare Laboratory (USBWL) rose to the ground.
Detrick became the research center for American biological warfare during World War II.
NPR reported that during World War II, Detrick had 4 biologics manufacturers. In 1944, after completing simulation tests, the Army Biowarfare Laboratory prepared to produce 1 million anthrax bombs for the US military. It is considered its most important biological weapon and has a high lethality rate. However, the following year, the end of World War II, the US military canceled the order.
Although the end of World War II made the US military no longer urgently need such "big killing weapons" as biological weapons (of course, because the United States has a larger killing weapon - nuclear weapons), the US military's ambitions in this field have not been destroyed.
Just as I was about to fall asleep, someone gave me a pillow. This person is the leader of the 731 Japanese army unit who holds a lot of information and tries to escape the post-war trial - Shiro Ishii .
The American magazine National Interest pointed out that in order to avoid death, Shiro Ishii and the US military reached a "deal": hand over all the research data he obtained through live experiments in exchange for himself and his scientists to avoid prosecution of war crimes.
In the view of the person in charge of the US Bioweapons Program, the data on biological warfare in Unit 731 is "absolutely priceless."
After obtaining Shiro Ishii's research data, Detrick's Army Biological Warfare Laboratory developed rapidly. NPR reports pointed out that in the 1950s, the Bioweapons Project was one of the most confidential projects in the Pentagon, which focused on the development of biological agents that can deal with enemy forces and animals and plants.
Crazy Biological Research
In 1956, Camp Detrick was designated by the federal government as a permanent R&D facility for biological research in peacetime and was renamed Fort Detrick. The task of the facility is to continue biological research and maintain the world's leading position in biological warfare in the United States.
To achieve this goal, the US military conducted a series of horrifying experiments at Fort Detrick, such as the US military attempting to launch mosquitoes carrying yellow fever viruses through aircraft or helicopters in a biological warfare program to attack enemy countries. According to data, Fort Detrick was able to produce 500,000 mosquitoes carrying yellow fever virus every month at that time, and the US military was not satisfied with this and planned to increase this number to an astonishing 130 million per month.
In addition to using "pervasive" mosquitoes as weapons, Fort Detrick has also studied many pathogens that can be used to destroy crops or trees, and even developed a variety of biotoxins and conducted simulated combat experiments in densely populated cities in the country, such as New York.
The New York Times disclosed in 1975 that an engineer named Charles Senseney of the U.S. Department of Defense said that he had participated in the Fort Detrick Army Laboratory's "vulnerability study" in New York, which aims to test the dangers of biological warfare.
Sancey claimed that Fort Detrick staff were directed by the U.S. Army and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to throw a "light bulb" with simulated biotoxins on tracks of two subway lines in New York in 1966 or 1967.
Sanceni pointed out that after the "light bulb" exploded, the airflow generated by the subway train drove the simulated biotoxin to spread along the railroad tracks. "In a short time after the two subways passed, the simulated biotoxin had spread from 15th Street to 58th Street."
However, the New York project is only part of many trials in Fort Detrick. Sanceny admitted that Fort Detrick staff also secretly deployed a colored dye into the water supply system of a building in the capital Washington, DC to test the speed of death or disability of a building's residents after the building's water supply system was put on a biological weapon.
At the same time, Fort Detrick also conducted research on the use of drugs to control the human spirit. The US political news website Politico disclosed in September last year that the CIA conducted a mental control study in Fort Detrick in the 1950s, and the agency's secret operation agency chief named it "Blue Bird."
In 1951, Dulles hired chemist Sidney Gottlieb to advance research on mental control projects. The latter was called "Joseph Menger of the United States" by Stephen Kanzee, the author of the book "Chief Poisoner: Gottlieb and the CIA 's pursuit of mental control." Menger was the notorious Nazi "medicine" in Auschwitz concentration camp.
Gottlieb combined various psychotropic drugs and combined with electric shock to conduct mental control experiments on prisoners in secret detention centers.
reported that in 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black prisoners and injected them with "two, three, and four times" doses of hallucinogens for 77 consecutive days. No one knows where these victims are. They may also know nothing about the CIA project they are "involved in".
In another experiment, captured Korean People's Army soldiers were forced to take strong stimulants after being injected with sedatives. When they were in a weak transition state, the experimenters at Fort Detrick put them in a high temperature and electric shock environment in an attempt to control their spirits.
"This is the most terrifying experiment the U.S. government has conducted on humanity," Politico wrote.
However, in 1973, most records surrounding Fort Detrick and CIA mental control programs were destroyed.
The truth of the concealed death
Just as Fort Detrick was conducting various terrorist experiments, accidents inside and outside the laboratory occurred frequently, pollutant leakage, animal deaths, employees' bizarre deaths, residents' cancer... A series of events shocked the American people.
The New York Times published two reports on September 20 and 21, 1975, revealing that the U.S. Army had covered up the cause of deaths of three Fort Detrick civilian employees, and all of them died strangely in the 1950s and 1960s.
The daughter of microbiologist William A. Boyles cried that his father had worked in Fort Decreck before his death and died in 1951 from a "rare disease." When he first started, he was diagnosed with a common cold by an army doctor, but as his condition worsened, the Army Hospital refused to accept him. He was forced to stay in a local hospital and then fell into a coma and died.
The US military did not admit until July 1975 that Boyles' real cause of death was anthrax, and said that the military had previously forged his death certificate and designated his death as "bronchial pneumonia accompanied by gastric ulcers and bleeding."
At the same time, the U.S. military also admitted to covering up the true cause of death of two other Fort Detrick employees: an electrician and an animal manager died of illness on July 5, 1958 and October 10, 1964, respectively. They were once identified by the military as having died of a "rare disease."
However, the real cause of death of the electrician was also anthrax, but the US military at the time said that he died of "occupational respiratory disease." The real cause of death for the animal manager was Bolivia hemorrhagic fever, but his death certificate listed the cause of death as "viral encephalitis whose cause has not been determined."
In addition, there were also employees of Fort Detrick who made great news when they were alive, saying that the lethality of biological weapons in the laboratory was amazing.
According to the New York Times in 1998, Bill Patrick was a senior employee of Fort Detrick, who studied bacterial warfare and oversees the work of the team. He admitted that he was always present when the U.S. military secretly tested deadly bacteria in remote areas. For example, in 1968, he went to the sea one thousand kilometers southwest of Hawaii to observe a bacterial weapon test. At that time, the US military dispatched fighter planes to throw the bacterial weapons developed by Fort Detrick onto a barge, which was filled with hundreds of rhesus monkeys and guinea pigs. After being attacked by bacterial weapons, half of the animals died.
At the same time, Patrick admitted that his three colleagues also died after accidentally touching the bacterial weapon.
The repeated biological weapons leaks caused deaths caused a blow to the public opinion across the United States. Under heavy pressure, then-US President Nixon was forced to order the suspension of the research and development of biological weapons in 1969, destroy existing biological weapons, and prohibit the conduct of "offensive biological research" in the United States. Since then, Fort Detrick's research has shifted to "defensive biological research."
However, critics within the U.S. military pointed out that "offensive" and "defensive" biological research are actually the same thing. Therefore, the public's opposition has not subsided. The New York Times reported in July 1970 that the Peace Organization Alliance launched a protest demonstration that month and petitioned Congress to demand that the US military stop developing and producing chemical and biological weapons. A coalition against biological weapons called the "CBW Movement" also called the transformation of the biological weapons research facility in Fort Detrick into a World Health Center.
Faced with waves of protests, the US government had to "concessions" again. According to the New York Times in October 1971, Nixon went to Fort Detrick on the 19th of that month and announced the conversion of the Army's biological warfare research center into a cancer research center.
Experts in the U.S. federal government praised this move. They believe that biological weapons are "almost useless" for a country that already has chemical weapons and nuclear weapons. However, some analysts suspect that Nixon was just "making a show", saying that he did so just to create his image as a "bioweapon Terminator", and there may be no substantial changes in the development of biological weapons in the U.S. military. The controversy continues, and the surrounding residents have bizarre cancer
0 The New York Times published an article in 1988 that after Nixon announced the transformation of Fort Detrick into a cancer research center, scientists are still involved here in what they call "Medical Defense B.W. Research" to develop vaccines or antidotes that may be used to deal with any bacterial weapons in the U.S. military. The Pentagon has identified a number of deadly diseases that can be used to launch biological warfare, all of which are listed on the Fort Detrick research list, including Rift Valley fever, anthrax fever and hemorrhagic fever.
"For this, we are engaged in a unique medical defense research," said Colonel Richard Barquist, director of the Army Institute of Infectious Diseases.
Some public opinion continues to criticize Fort Detrick's research, emphasizing that there is almost no difference between "offensive" research and "defensive" research. In response, Colonel Barquist agreed, "Although there is indeed no difference between the two in terms of research, we do not develop biological weapons, which are all medical research."
It is worth noting that after the transformation to engage in "defensive" research, there were many pollutant leakage accidents in Fort Detrick. Not only did Fort Detrick employees "deal with death" when they go to work every day, but even the residents around the laboratory "had a life of a long time".
The New York Times published an article in 1988 saying that the U.S. Senate found "serious flaws" in the Pentagon's security procedures for studying chemical and biological weapons defense measures during an 18-month review.
In the report, the Senate pointed out that in the Ministry of Defense's study of vaccines, drugs and equipment, "the number of problems such as unreasonable rules and regulations, lax safety measures and failure of safety measures has increased fivefold since 1980." The report also lists accidents involving biological research in Fort Detrick, including fires and preparation leaks.
The Pentagon responded only that it would conduct a comprehensive review of the report and work with Congress to ensure compliance with the best safety standards, but avoid talking about whether biological research will continue.
But the situation did not improve later. In the early 1990s, the Fort Detrick Biological Laboratory also lost deadly strains and strains such as anthrax.
After the anthrax attack that caused panic across the United States in 2001, the U.S. FBI accused the suspect of being from Fort Detrick Biological Laboratory. The incident caused 22 infections, 5 of whom died, and 20,000 Americans took antibiotics, and the laboratory reputation plummeted.
In 2014, at least 37 accidents of cracking or perforation of protective clothing in the laboratory were exposed.
With these accidents of all sizes, residents living near Fort Detrick are inevitably worried.
According to the Baltimore Sun in 2011, although residents around Fort Detrick have been speculating for decades that Fort Detrick's experiments may have had an impact on their health, the US military responded that the Army has cleaned 4,000 tons of contaminated soil and laid anti-leakage layers underground, and residents are completely worried about it.
Maryland health officials who have studied cancer incidence in the region over the past two decades also said that there was no evidence of excessive pollutant concentrations and the cancer incidence rate among local residents was not significantly higher than the average.
However, a former pastor and businessman named Randy White pointed out that Maryland's cancer registration system is not only incomplete, but also outdated.White claimed that he had two daughters, one died of brain cancer at the age of 30, and the other had a tumor in his abdomen, and his ex-wife also died of renal cell carcinoma in November 2010, and White's mother was also diagnosed with melanoma in September 2011. In response, the doctor told White that their condition was likely caused by the surrounding environment.
Because of this, White hired epidemiologists and toxicologists to detect air, soil and water pollution near Fort Detrick. In addition, he asked his neighbors about their respective health history and measured the toxin content in their blood. Test results show that there is indeed a pollutant leakage in the area around Fort Detrick.
At the same time, the Baltimore Sun published an article pointing out that the 161 hectares of Area B, which is on the west side of Fort Detrick base, is used as a dumping site for discarded laboratory equipment and materials. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said that toxic substances were indeed found in the soil near Fort Detrick, the most of which were trichloroethylene (TCE) and perchloroethylene (PCE), both of which are known carcinogens. Apart from pollutants in the soil, the groundwater near Fort Detrick also contains the above two carcinogens. For example, in 1992, Maryland government officials measured TCE higher than normal in drinking water from four households outside District B.
After collecting relevant evidence, White launched a joint lawsuit with more than 100 residents around Fort Detrick in 2010, demanding that the federal government compensate people who suffered health damage due to the pollutant leak in Fort Detrick.
However, the Maryland District Court rejected the lawsuit in 2016, saying that the court had no right to govern the case. In 2017, the U.S. Federal Court of Appeal also stated that it would not review the case, and the matter was left unresolved, and the residents and their families had nowhere to appeal.
In March this year, David Franz, a retired U.S. Army Colonel David Franz, who served as director of the Fort Detrick Laboratory from 1995 to 1998, and Judith Miller, author of "Bacteria: Biological Weapons and the Secret War of the United States", bluntly stated in an article jointly signed by the City Journal about the problems of poor laboratory management, including lack of funding, lack of attention from the Pentagon, lay leaders and insiders, and disintegration of people.
In 2016, an audit report on military biological research companies released by the Office of the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Defense also pointed out that "the health and safety of the public are at risk" because these laboratories have problems such as "using unverified research programs, lacking regular inspections, and even not being inspected, and having obvious defects and loopholes that have not been corrected by the Department of Defense."
suddenly shut down and restarted
However, despite the above problems, while surrounding residents questioned the pollutant leakage, Fort Detrick began to expand with great fanfare. In an August 2006 issue of the Nature Science Journal, the federal government plans to overhaul the existing facilities in Fort Detrick and build a new "biodefence research complex" that will include laboratories operating at the highest biosafety level that can handle the deadliest pathogens.
The plan immediately sparked public criticism as soon as it was announced. "From any perspective, this is almost meaningless." Maryland attorney and congressional candidate Barry Kissin accused. "This plan is not only expensive, but also extremely dangerous, and may pose a threat to residents' safety."
analysts believe that more laboratories will only increase threats to surrounding communities, and "pathogens may leak from the laboratory." Other opponents accused the expansion of Fort Detrick that may make other countries suspect that the United States is trying to develop offensive biological weapons.
Despite the heavy opposition, the expansion plan for Fort Detrick was successfully completed in 2008. However, just a few years after the expansion was completed, Fort Detrick was suddenly ordered to be closed by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in August 2019.
The U.S. Army Institute of Infectious Diseases Medicine in Fort Detrick issued a statement saying that research on dangerous microorganisms such as Ebola virus is currently on hold.Institute spokesman Linden said in an interview that Fort Detrick may continue to be shut down for several months because its highest level of safety laboratory "insufficient wastewater purification system capabilities."
Linden revealed that the Fort Detrick problem dates back to May 2018, when heavy rainstorms left the inlet of the steam sterilization equipment used by the institute to treat laboratory wastewater, which has been decades old. "This has stopped research for months until the institute developed a new decontamination system using chemicals to recover."
However, new problems followed one after another. Linden pointed out that although the new system requires changes to some procedures in the laboratory, it was found that the staff did not follow the new procedures during the inspection in June 2019. "Inspectors also found that there were mechanical problems in the decontamination system, and there were still chemical leakage."
According to the US "Military" news website, in addition to the failure of the wastewater purification system, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also found that during the inspection, the staff in Fort Detrick blatantly violated safety operating guidelines many times. For example, when removing biohazardous waste, the staff actually opened the door of the autoclave sterilization room, increasing the risk of contaminated air entering the autoclave. In the autoclave, staff do not even wear protective equipment.
However, Fort Detrick did not completely stop. According to the "Military" website in November 2019, the US Army Institute of Infectious Diseases Medical announced that Fort Detrick would restart some facilities. Colonel Darrin Cox, the head of the institute, emphasized that all the problems pointed out by the CDC's non-compliance with safety regulations have been resolved.
A few months later, the new crown pneumonia epidemic broke out in many places around the world, and the United States was not spared.
"Wall Street Journal " reported in March 2020 that Fort Detrick, which has studied SARS virus, Zika virus and Ebola virus vaccines in recent years, has been entrusted with an important task again. After passing the last field inspection of the CDC, Fort Detrick fully resumed operations on March 27 and received a federal government grant of up to $900 million to develop a new coronavirus vaccine.
This mysterious laboratory that has been engaged in the research of many deadly biological weapons in history has now become the front line of the United States in fighting the new coronavirus...
(Pengpai News reporter Hu Zhenqing Wang Yu Intern Wu Wenjia Zhang Jialin Wang Tongtong Wei Wencong)
