Fireside chat with Dr Matthew Meselson

Summary

This discussion features Dr. Matthew Meselson, a renowned scientist and arms control advocate, sharing insights from his career. The conversation covers several key episodes in his work, including his groundbreaking DNA replication experiment, efforts to ban biological weapons, and investigations into alleged chemical warfare incidents.

Meselson describes how his “most beautiful experiment” helped confirm the Watson-Crick model of DNA replication. He then explains his role in convincing the U.S. government to renounce biological weapons, arguing they would be strategically disadvantageous as cheap weapons of mass destruction accessible to smaller nations.

The discussion covers Meselson’s investigation of the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, which he proved was due to an accidental release from a Soviet bioweapons facility. He also details his work examining the use of herbicides in Vietnam and debunking claims of “yellow rain” chemical attacks in Southeast Asia.

Throughout, Meselson emphasizes the importance of on-the-ground investigation and scientific rigor in addressing arms control issues. He argues for the value of verification regimes in deterring violations of arms control agreements. The conversation concludes with Meselson expressing concerns about potential negative consequences of life extension technology and other seemingly beneficial scientific advances.

Keypoints

Major discussion points:

– Matthew Meselson’s work on DNA replication and the “most beautiful experiment”

– Meselson’s role in ending the US biological weapons program and establishing the Biological Weapons Convention

– Investigation of the 1979 anthrax outbreak in Sverdlovsk, USSR

– US use of herbicides in Vietnam and the “yellow rain” controversy

– Concerns about emerging technologies like life extension and autonomous weapons

Overall purpose:

The discussion aimed to explore Meselson’s long career at the intersection of biology and arms control, highlighting key scientific discoveries and policy contributions that helped shape international norms around biological and chemical weapons.

Tone:

The tone was largely conversational and reflective, with Meselson recounting personal anecdotes and experiences in a warm, engaging manner. There were moments of humor mixed with serious discussion of complex scientific and policy issues. Toward the end, the tone shifted to more forward-looking concerns about emerging technologies.

Speakers

– Ljupčo Gjorgjinski

Area of expertise: Social scientist, diplomat

Role/Title: Not specified

– Matthew Meselson

Area of expertise: Biology, arms control

Role/Title: Professor at Harvard University

Additional speakers:

– Jean Guillemin (mentioned, not present)

Area of expertise: Not specified

Role/Title: Matthew Meselson’s late wife

– Henry Kissinger (mentioned, not present)

Area of expertise: Foreign policy

Role/Title: Former U.S. Secretary of State and National Security Advisor

This discussion featured Dr. Matthew Meselson, a renowned scientist and arms control advocate, sharing insights from his distinguished career at the intersection of biology and international security. The conversation, moderated by Ljupčo Gjorgjinski, covered several key episodes in Meselson’s work, including his groundbreaking DNA replication experiment, efforts to ban biological weapons, and investigations into alleged chemical warfare incidents.

DNA Replication Experiment

Meselson began by describing what he termed his “most beautiful experiment”, which helped confirm the Watson-Crick model of DNA replication. He emphasised the elegant simplicity of the experiment’s design and the importance of his collaboration with Franklin Stahl. Meselson also mentioned Linus Pauling’s forgotten idea about gene replication, which influenced their approach. This work exemplified the power of interdisciplinary approaches in scientific investigations.

Ending the U.S. Biological Weapons Programme

A significant portion of the discussion focused on Meselson’s role in convincing the U.S. government to renounce biological weapons. He presented a compelling argument that such weapons would be strategically disadvantageous for the United States, as they represented cheap weapons of mass destruction accessible to smaller nations. Meselson detailed his protocol for influencing the president’s decision, which involved framing scientific and ethical concerns in terms of national security interests when presenting to government officials. This strategic approach proved crucial in ending the U.S. bioweapons programme and establishing the Biological Weapons Convention.

Sverdlovsk Anthrax Outbreak Investigation

Meselson detailed his investigation of the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak, which he proved was due to an accidental release from a Soviet bioweapons facility. He highlighted the use of meteorological data to determine the release date and emphasised the importance of on-site investigation and interviews. Meselson noted the crucial role his wife, Jean, played in interviewing families and collecting data. This case study underscored the value of combining different fields of expertise to achieve comprehensive and accurate results in arms control investigations.

Herbicide Use in Vietnam

The conversation then turned to Meselson’s work examining the use of herbicides in Vietnam during the war. He described his interactions with General Abrams, who believed the herbicides lacked military utility. Meselson detailed his efforts to collect human milk samples to assess potential long-term health effects on the Vietnamese population. He also shared an anecdote about the “people sniffer” technology, illustrating the disconnect between Washington decision-makers and on-the-ground realities in Vietnam.

Yellow Rain Controversy

Meselson shared his findings from the investigation into claims of “yellow rain” chemical attacks in Southeast Asia. He described the extensive investigation process, which involved collaborating with various experts, including bee specialists and chemists. His team’s evidence suggested that the substance was actually bee faeces, not a chemical weapon. This case highlighted the potential for misinterpretation of refugee accounts by U.S. officials and demonstrated the importance of rigorous scientific investigation in addressing arms control issues. Meselson mentioned that some information related to this investigation remains classified.

Emerging Technologies and Future Concerns

The conversation concluded with Meselson expressing concerns about potential negative consequences of seemingly beneficial scientific advances, particularly life extension technology. He noted that numerous companies are working to develop marketable products to extend human lifespans, which could have unforeseen societal impacts.

Throughout the discussion, Meselson consistently emphasised the importance of on-the-ground investigation and scientific rigour in addressing complex arms control issues. The conversation also touched on the potential involvement of private industry, particularly pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in future biological weapons convention discussions.

Meselson briefly mentioned an interaction with Henry Kissinger, highlighting the interconnected nature of scientific work and high-level policy decisions in the field of international security.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Ah, all right, well, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are in the world. It’s morning here in Cambridge, Massachusetts, we’re at the home of Dr. Matthew Meselson, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century and certainly one of the most impactful. into areas in life sciences and in arms control. We can talk about several of the episodes where you were involved, Matthew, but first of all, thank you for welcoming me and us in your home this morning. It’s a pleasure. So this week on Wednesday was the 50th anniversary of the coming into force of the Biological Weapons Convention. You are a, if not the, catalyst for the existence of this convention and this legal instrument into the international system, and we will talk about that. But first I want to propose a metaphorical framework, if I may, for our discussion. I’m a social scientist and I can allow myself metaphors, and a diplomat and I can allow myself persuasion, perhaps. So I’ll use it in that, and this is it. If we imagine ourselves in a room, and this room is the international system, there’s a thermostat and one person has their hand on that thermostat. I’m using Norbert Wiener’s systems theory of feedback loops. There are two scientists. There are many scientists in the room, but there are two scientists over there. To use Szilard’s speech on the sensitive minority among scientists, we call one of them the sensitive scientist. This scientist looks at the data, looks at what is a comfortable environment to live in, says that perhaps 21 centigrade, perhaps 2019, different things are considered for different organisms. The other, let’s call it the comfortable scientist, where she wishes to be in shorts at 25 degrees centigrade at all times, and will use the arguments to that person who has the hand on the thermostat to influence in that way. The thermostat is both a measuring device, it collects information, so it’s a corrective, but it also allows for this tool to be used. You, I would certainly put, in the sensitive minority, you have influenced biology with the most beautiful experiment. And I suggest we start there. Can you give us an idea of the thinking of where you were at, what was the information, what were the hypotheses, and what is it that drove you to structure the experiment as you did? Matthew.

Matthew Meselson: As is well known, Jim Watson and Francis Crick proposed a double-strand structure of DNA. And they also proposed a hypothesis for how the molecule might replicate itself, because if it is the substance of the genes, the genes replicate themselves every time a cell divides. And their proposal was the one that is almost spoken to directly by the molecule itself, which is the two strands come apart, and then on their surfaces they deposit the building blocks of a new strand, one new strand on one of the single strands, another new strand on the other single strand, and now you have two double strands. Incidentally, this was all proposed by Linus Pauling in 1948 in a talk he gave to a group of businessmen in England asking the question, how might the gene divide? And what he wrote was that if the gene is made up of two parts which are complementary, that means they fit together, it might replicate by the two parts coming apart from each other, and each one guiding the synthesis on its surface. Now Linus forgot this, that he had done this. He was a man who had multiple ideas every week, and then would forget some of them. So he had forgot that. was perhaps responsible for the fact that years later, after the Watson and Crick structure was proposed, well, no, sorry, slightly before it was proposed, Linus published a three-strand model, which is wrong, of forgetting the fact that he had a beautiful idea which required a two-strand model, so.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: You had the beautiful experiment, and in your own words, as we’ve spoken, it was more to convince others than to really prove.

Matthew Meselson: Not exactly. The DNA molecules are very long, and the two strands of the double-strand molecule are wound around each other, and so you have to get them apart. And since they’re wound around each other, this is not just a question of separating them, but of unwinding them. And unless you break chains, that means that you have very long molecules that have to be rotated at a high speed inside of the cell. And Max Delbruck, an eminent biologist, initially a physicist, calculated the viscous drag, the power, that you would need to do the work of unwinding the big DNA molecules, and it was prohibitive. So he proposed that there are breaks being made which allow the strands to rotate around single bonds. I won’t go into the details, but he had his own model for how DNA, how to get the strands apart from each other. I didn’t know any of that. I was a graduate student at Caltech in chemistry, a student of Linus Pauling, but I wanted to get into biology. And in the biology department, there was Max Delbruck, a physicist. So in a sense, he could speak my language, and he could tell me how I could get into biology. He had a fearsome reputation. If he thought someone was speaking nonsense, even in an important lecture before the whole department, he’d get up and- and say, that’s nonsense, or even walk out. So he had a fierce temper. And the first thing when I walked into his little office, he was a man with no pretensions, no big office, very small office, a marvelous person. He said, what do you think about these new papers by Watson and Crick? I said, I’d never heard of them, showing how isolated I was in the Department of Chemistry. He got out of his chair and grabbed a heap of the reprints of those articles, which Jim had sent him in, threw them at me, and they fluttered down onto the ground. And he shouted, he said, get out, and don’t come back until you’ve read them. What I heard was, come back. So I read the two papers, and I went back. And then Max explained to me why he required breaks to be made in the DNA molecule. He was largely right in this respect, but he didn’t know at that time about enzymes called topoisomerases, which have the effect of breaking the molecules and then putting them back together again, but allowing swivels so that you can avoid having to rotate the whole unreplicated part, or even worse, swing the arms around like that to get the two chains apart. So I had this in my mind that Max Delbruck was interested in DNA replication. I’d never heard about DNA before, at least not about the Washington Creek structure, before I went to see Max. And I was taking Linus Pauling’s course on the nature of the chemical bond at that time. And one of the things that we learned was about how to calculate the strength of the hydrogen bond and the deuterium bond, and the ratio of those two strings from what’s called the zero-point energy in quantum mechanics. So I was very impressed. It’s a one-line proof. It’s amazing. I’m thinking about it. I’m thinking about heavy water. How do I get into biology? I don’t know any biology. biology, heavy water, maybe that’s how to get into biology. Maybe you could make a mouse out of heavy water. There was a guy who tried that, the mouse died. Maybe the water was impure, who knows? Anyway, I’m looking for a way to get into biology. And I go to a lecture by Jacques Monod. He and Jacob and Pardee responsible for the repressor theory of how genes are turned on and off, not just for the theory, for doing the experiment that showed it. And he’s giving a lecture at Caltech. The famous French biologist had been in Caltech years earlier before the war established the Pasadena Bach Society. Jacques was a cellist. He was also a prominent resistance fighter in Paris during the war. He gave a lecture about what he was studying, which was the induction of an enzyme by bacteria. And I won’t go into detail, but he proposed an experiment to answer the question he was asking. And in my opinion, it was a really ridiculous experiment. It couldn’t possibly, it was no good at all. But it came to me a different way of answering the question that Jacques was asking. And I went to my supervisor, Linus Pauling, and I told him my idea. He said, that’s a nice idea, but finish your thesis work, which was X-ray crystallography. And then Jim Watson was living at Caltech that year, after having, together with Crick, discovered the double helix. And I told him my idea, and he said, that’s a good idea. Finish your X-ray crystallography. To do this, which involves centrifuges, which are devices which spin things around, you should really go to Stockholm, because that’s where the centrifuges were invented, and much work done on them. And I think he also said something about there being, there were no girls at Caltech at that time. I think he said something on that topic too, regarding Sweden. So, I had this idea, I won’t go into detail unless you want me to describe it. How did you meet Frank Stahl? So, the following summer, Jim invited me to come to Woods Hole, where he was going to teach the physiology course. Wonderful course, taught every year by different people. This year it was going to be Jim. And I could go there, not to be a teaching assistant, but to masquerade as a teaching assistant so I could get paid. He would vouch for my being a teaching assistant when I really wasn’t at all. Because he wanted me to do an experiment, which is what I was really doing there, to test his idea that maybe RNA, like DNA, was also a double helix. I did the experiment. The experiment showed it was not. Then there was a great hurricane, Hurricane Carol, that destroyed the equipment in the laboratory, and so on and so forth. But that summer, I met a man named Franklin Stahl. He was just finishing his PhD work at the University of Rochester, studying the genetics of bacteriophages, which are viruses which infect bacteria. And he was a student in that course that Jim and Francis Crick were teaching together. And I would visit with Francis and Jim during the times when they were preparing the courses. It was up on the third floor of a building across the street from which there was a tree. And under the tree, there’s a man sitting there. And Jim goes over to the window and points at that man and says, That fellow is a student in my course. His name is Franklin Stahl, and he has a very high opinion of himself. Let’s give him the Hershey taste experiment to do all by himself. That’s an experiment that’s rather difficult to do, and it was done by two people. It was a very important experiment. It showed that the important thing in the virus, in the bacteriophage, is the DNA. It goes into the cell. The protein stays on the outside. And they were going to challenge. So I thought this was very unfair to gang up on this poor student. So I went downstairs, and I warned him that he was being ganged up upon by Jim and Francis. And I asked him what he was doing, and he was trying to solve some integrals involving his thesis problem. And I knew nothing about bacteriophages. So as we sat together there on the lawn, where he was selling gin and tonic, by the way, on the side, had a big bottle of gin, and some tonic, and some ice, and some limes. And, uh.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Multifunctional.

Matthew Meselson: What?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Multifunctional.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, indeed. Franklin says, in retrospect, he’s still alive and in good health, and we’re still very good pals. He’s in Eugene, Oregon. That he was selling gin and tonic to passers-by in order to engage them in interesting conversation. I had mistakenly thought he was doing this to get enough money so he could provide himself with a lot of gin. But one way or the other, anyway. So he educated me a little bit about bacteriophage genetics, and I solved those integrals for him, which were quite elementary. Now he’s a better mathematician than I ever was. So we got to be good pals, and I suggested to him that since he was coming to Caltech a year later, that we do this experiment that I had in mind to test how DNA replicates. And he said he would. and when he came to Caltech we rented a big wonderful old Victorian house from Caltech and we lived there together with John Drake and Howard Temin who later got a Nobel Prize for his work on RNA viruses and we did the experiment and it was a wonderful time. Our house was right across the street from the lab. We could go back and forth at any hour or open the refrigerator and have a snack at any hour or open the cupboard where the whiskey was. It was a great time.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: There isn’t, I think, a basic biology textbook that doesn’t have the chapter or at least the heading, the most beautiful experiment. The beauty is in its simplicity and at the same time its effectiveness.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, it’s a very elegant part of nature and it allowed us to look at it.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Because I like the way you’ve described it in conversation as well, two types of people are looking at biology and I think life as well. Those who think it must be very complex and that life is complex and those who view it as life is simple, biology is simple. We approach it in such a manner.

Matthew Meselson: That’s an interesting point. At that time, which was 1954, at Woods Hole there were many biologists who come to Woods Hole in the summertime. It’s a wonderful place during the summer. You can meet colleagues from other locations. If you want, you can bring your family. It’s a beautiful environment. Anyway, at that time, 1954, you could say approximately anyway, there were two kinds of people. Those who believed that the DNA structure of Watson and Crick had to be wrong because it was too simple and biology is very complicated and messy and gooey. And those who believed it couldn’t be wrong because it was too simple to be wrong. really were these two attitudes anyway at that time. Of course, nobody doubts it any longer.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: And this is the mindset, your mindset, that when faced with the challenge of weapons of mass destruction, first nuclear, as you were put to the task, but then you say, well, no, this is my specialty, let me focus on that. It is that kind of the mindset that comes with some important insights at Fort Detrick. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Matthew Meselson: Well, during the summer of 1963, my laboratory was working very well by itself, that is the people in it. I had nothing particular to do. And I had a friend who had a beautiful little house in Georgetown, Washington, near the State Department, not too far from the State Department. And I was invited by the newly created United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the State Department building, a part of government created by Jack Kennedy, to come down for the summer and be a consultant. I think the real reason they invited six of us to come down, paid us not only a salary but living expenses, was that they were newly created. They’d been given an appropriate amount of money by the Bureau of the Budget, but they had no good idea what to do with the money. And if they didn’t use it by the end of the year, they’d have to give it back. And that meant that in following years, they would get less. Or at least that’s my imagination as to why they troubled to bring six people down. And I was one of those six. So they said I should work on European theater nuclear arms control. I knew absolutely nothing about it. I’d read nothing about it. I knew that Henry Kissinger, who was a friend up here in Cambridge because of I’ll tell you why later, but that he knew all about it and had written a book about it already published, called The Necessity of Choice. And so I realized that I’d become deeply embarrassed if I tried to write anything on a subject on which I knew nothing, which is okay, unless other people know an awful lot about it. And then it’s rather embarrassing to try and say anything useful. So my boss, who was himself a chemist at the agency, I went to see him, Franklin Long was his name, and asked him if he couldn’t give me something else to do. And since I’m a chemist and a biologist, maybe in that area, and he said, sure. We had a man who was working on the arms control of chemical and biological weapons, but he became very depressed and he killed himself. And you can have his desk. And you can have his safe with all the classified documents in it. So his name was George DeRuel. I never met him, of course, since he had killed himself. And so that’s what I did, I started. And I thought, the first thing I should do is go find out what we knew about other countries. And I went over to the CIA, and a very nice man showed me what we knew, which was very little. We had some suspicions, including about this facility in Sverdlovsk, by the way, because that was established very early, in the First World War, and the Germans knew about it. So then I thought I should find out what we were doing, and I went over to Fort Detrick as an official visitor, very official, so I got a very fancy tour of the place by a colonel whose name was Leroy Fothergill, an immunologist from Harvard. And we came to a big building about seven stories tall, and it looked from a distance as though it had windows, but when you get up close they’re not real windows, they just look like windows. So obviously we were trying to disguise something. I remember thinking that’s a bad way to disguise it because that calls attention to the fact that it’s not an ordinary building. Anyway, I asked Dr. Fothergill what we do in there. He said, we have a 10,000, either gallon or liter, I forgot, fermenter, and we make anthrax spores there. And I knew that anthrax spores could be used as a biological weapon, I’d read about that. But I asked him, why do we do that? He said, because it will save money. It’s much cheaper as a strategic weapon than nuclear weapons. And I thought, yeah, it would be a lot cheaper and technically a lot easier, much, much easier than making a nuclear weapon. But then, and I don’t know when it dawned on me, I think it was in the taxi ride back, it’s a fairly long taxi ride, go from Fort Detrick in Maryland back to the State Department in Washington. It dawned on me that, hey, wait, a cheap weapon of mass destruction, that’s what the United States doesn’t want. Because if all the cheap, all the poor countries could then have powerful weapons of mass destruction instead of just the Soviet Union and maybe the Brits and the French were coming along and the Israelis. So I realized I had a winning argument to get this stuff stopped. And I didn’t like it either because it was my science, biology. And I knew, because even then, it was the beginning of the revolution in molecular biology, that we would be developing methods of doing very sophisticated things with living beings. And to have this technology change the mind of your enemy, sterilize them, really dreadful things. We shouldn’t do it. But the argument that should be presented to government officials was, look, this is about the worst thing you could do, is introduce into the world a really cheap strategic weapon. So. In laboratory work, often we take out a yellow pad and we write down a protocol, which means you write down the name of the experiment you’re going to do, and then what you need, each different reagent, each piece of equipment, you make sure you’ve got them, and then you write in detail the steps that you’re gonna do, and you just follow it like a robot, and you do the experiment, it’s called a protocol. So I wrote a protocol for how to get, now there’s only one person who could stop this program, the president, other people could advise him, but he’s the only one with the authority to cancel it. So how to do that? I remembered a story I’d heard about Franklin Roosevelt, involving a question in the banking field, that a friend of his had gone to see him, a banker, and asked him to do something, and Roosevelt said, I’m convinced, now go out and put pressure on me. In other words, the president isn’t completely free to do whatever he wants. So what did that mean? That meant maybe you should convince some people in the Congress, you should go see some of the people who advised the president, members of his cabinet if possible, but maybe people just below that level, and you should write some papers and publish them. So I decided to do all those things, and I went over to the Congress building, and all members of the House and Senate have assistants, and very often they’re much younger than the person himself, and therefore, since I’m still pretty young at this point, could just walk in on them and start talking, and very often the legislative assistant of a senator or a congressman is always on the lookout for issues for his person to advocate, to distinguish them from the herd, so to speak, it must be a better way to say that. Anyway. So, I found that people were eager to hear about the question of biological weapons. I wasn’t thinking much about chemical weapons at that time.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: But it’s exactly that kind of simplicity, the elegant simplicity of that argument that has stood the test of time.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: And so, today, and just for historical context, basically, I think that because of that Kissinger convinced Nixon, I would love to hear more about that as well, but the U.S. unilaterally stopped its bioweapons program.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, in 1969. But that doesn’t mean that the people in charge of those programs wanted to stop the programs. They were thoroughly convinced that it was a good idea. They were comfortable in their- Usually, they’d make two of arguments, not the one so simple as Colonel Fothergill made that it would save money, but rather that we’ve got to do it because the Russians are going to do it. And so, we have to do it, which is not- I mean, it’s symmetric, it’s true. But that’s not a logical argument. I have to do this because you may do it. Maybe I should do something quite different because you’re doing it.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: I have other tools.

Matthew Meselson: Yes.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: More powerful and more effective.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, or even try to convince you that it’s not in your interests, or any of our interests, except for those little guys, and we don’t care about them.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: This is a key thing. I think that somebody today might say, well, that was the bilateral world. The dynamic of power is different. But I think that I would answer to that is, there’s always a power symmetry. Even if there’s more great powers, and even more smaller powers, even the smaller powers may have terrorist organizations within them that have that power symmetry against them. Regional rivalries when one is more powerful and the other is more powerful. It’s in the interest of all for there to be some kind of a framework that says, this we don’t play with. We can play with other things.

Matthew Meselson: Yes. extrapolate that to how Jack Kennedy might have behaved if he hadn’t been assassinated, he would have gone to Nikita Khrushchev and said, Nikita, I know we believe that you’re developing biological weapons, and so are we, but thinking about it, Nikita, both of us should stop this, because this could provide strategic capability to all kinds of little countries, and we’re the big countries, we should stick with nuclear weapons, Nikita. I don’t know, Jack Kennedy might have done just that kind of thing, because he had developed, after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a good relationship with Khrushchev, which was destroyed in the presidency of President Eisenhower, and it broke Eisenhower’s heart. I know about this almost firsthand, because his science advisor, Eisenhower’s, at the time, was George Kistiakowsky, and they were very close. George loved Eisenhower, and Eisenhower had hoped, after he had become president, to end the Cold War, and he had a detailed plan to present to Khrushchev his ideas, and then the U-2 got shot down, the reconnaissance aircraft. Eisenhower had been assured that it was a weather plane that had strayed off course and based in Turkey, and entered the Soviet airspace by mistake, and he made that argument to Khrushchev publicly. We apologize, it was a mistake, and then it turns out that the Soviets shot down the U-2, and the pilot, Francis Gary Powers, survived. So they had the pilot, they had the plane, it clearly was not a weather observation. plane, it was clearly a photographic reconnaissance plane. So Eisenhower had been lying, and he did so because the CIA assured him that nobody would ever know what the plane really was, because they didn’t know that it would crash land inside of Russia with a live pilot. This meant that the government of one country could lie to the government of another country, but the head of state, if he wants to preserve his channel of communication with another head of state, must not lie. He should leave the lying to his assistants, that’s okay. But if he himself lies and is found to be lying, that’s it. He’s not going to be able to communicate, even in his own interests.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: That’s a rule usually taught to diplomats as well.

Matthew Meselson: Of course.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: You don’t always need to say the full truth or the truth, but don’t lie.

Matthew Meselson: Don’t lie. Because you value your ability to communicate with the other officials.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: And you use that logic when it came time to add the T in the BTWC.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, you don’t have to tell the truth, you just mustn’t lie.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: And you gave an argument to the president that it was his credibility on toxins.

Matthew Meselson: According to Kistiakowsky, it broke Eisenhower’s heart. He was broke because he thought that this would be his great mission as president to end the Cold War. And this had been snatched out of his hands because the CIA lied to him, told him it was a weather plan, didn’t tell the president of the United States what it really was, according to George. I’m sure this has been written up somewhere. Anyway, I’ve drifted off topic a bit, so you better…

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Oh, toxins. Kissinger. The question to Kissinger by journalists.

Matthew Meselson: Okay. Well, when… negotiation was going on to develop a chemical weapons convention, there had already been a renunciation of biological weapons by the United States. And so the question came up about toxins. Clearly, poison gas is a chemical weapon, not biological. It’s a chemical. But toxins are things made by living cells, like botulinal toxin. And so the question was, do we prohibit toxins because they are not living, sorry, do we prohibit toxins because they’re made by living things, although not living? Or do we consider them as chemicals because they can, in principle, be made by chemists instead of by living cells? So in which category do we place them? If we consider them to be biological weapons, they’re already prohibited because we already have the biological weapons convention. But if we consider them as chemicals, then maybe they’ll be allowed because we don’t yet have a chemical weapons convention. So there was much dispute about this. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, of course what happens is when presented with a question how shall we regard toxins, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs will ask the member of the Joint Chiefs staff, whose responsibility is chemical weapons, what he thinks, or she. And then that person will ask the officer in charge of the chemical corps what he thinks. And then the word will go back on up. And so the Joint Chiefs view was that toxins should be regarded as chemicals because then we could still use them, if they’re made by chemists and not by living cells. And chemists, in principle, could make them. The State Department thought this is ridiculous. People will think that we’re inconsistent. carry strong suggestions of biology. We’ve already renounced biological weapons. And besides the State Department, we usually would take the more peaceable position. So there was division within the government. And Henry Kissinger, who was National Security Advisor to President Nixon, his staff wrote up a proposal which recommended the State Department view. But Mel Laird, who was the Secretary of Defense at that time, Melvin Laird, had a middle view, which was if the toxins are made by bacteria, we renounce them. But if they’re made by chemists in laboratories or in industrial facilities, we reserve the right to use them because then they’re chemicals. So that was his position. Now Henry’s staff had recommended the State Department to get rid of him completely. But Henry tended to the other view because he needed the cooperation of Mel Laird for all kinds of things. And Henry’s way of thinking would have included his effectiveness in the government. And if he didn’t allow himself to agree with something important with the Secretary of Defense, he might not be able to count on cooperation between him and the Secretary of Defense on something that he really cared about. And at that moment, Henry didn’t really know much or think much or care much about toxin weapons, pretty exotic assumptions, after all. Now this is in 19, oh my, I think it’s 1970. I wish I had my notes here. Henry goes down to Key Biscayne, that’s an island off Miami, with President Nixon and a group of officials to do all kinds of work but in a vacation atmosphere. And one of the things they were going to do is to decide about toxins. I had written a paper called What Policy for Toxins. toxins, and in that paper I included things that I thought were appropriate for me to talk about, like they really wouldn’t be very useful militarily. You use them as artillery shells, but the weight of the artillery shell is mostly the metal. And so the fact that the toxin is a lot more poisonous than nerve gas, so that the warhead can weigh less, it doesn’t save much weight, so you’ve still got the same amount of stuff to ship to the battlefield, and the handle, and all the same weight restrictions on how much you can fire, all those things. And they don’t work through the skin, whereas we have a nerve agent that does go through the skin, and would force the other guys to put on protective clothing, lots of technical arguments why you don’t need these things. They’re just a lot more poisonous, but that doesn’t matter too much either, because the radius of effectiveness does not scale linearly with the toxicity. So all those reasons. And then I thought, I read something in the Washington Post by a friend who was in the editorial board, Steve Rosenfeld was his name, and he wrote something, if I can remember the words, how can the president renounce typhoid, because he had just, Nixon, renounced biological, only to embrace botulism. And I thought about that, it had a ring to it, basically it was saying, wouldn’t the president look ridiculous? So I added something to my paper, I usually tried not to talk politics, because that’s not my field, but I gave it the heading, the authority and credibility of the president of the United States. So anyway, Henry’s down there with the president and Key Biscayne, and apparently they couldn’t find a copy of my paper. The president had not… seen it yet. Henry had it because I’d sent it to him. So they called me, but I was out to dinner, so they didn’t get me. Then they called Paul Doty, my friend in Cambridge in the chemistry department, a good friend of Henry’s, to see if he had my paper. He couldn’t find it either. And then, according to Paul, and this is also in Paul’s diary, at 11 o’clock, Henry calls Paul in Cambridge and says, we found it. We found Matt’s paper, and the president has decided to renounce toxins no matter what. And what caught his eye was that section on the authority and credibility of the president. Now, I should have realized that. Why does the president of the United States care about whether a 155 shell weighs 100 pounds or 110 pounds? It’s not his cup of tea. But he cares about his authority and credibility. So that was a lesson for me. And the lesson is, when you’re writing something to convince something of someone, don’t give your arguments. Try and imagine his arguments, the ones that would matter to him.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: A proper diplomatic approach. But you also had in that paper, that was the third point, third heading. The other two were the military utility. And so you…

Matthew Meselson: Yes, I did put that in. But whether the president paid any attention to that, I have no idea.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: But the others in the room might have. And that’s also important. You need to have their support for that. So jumping ahead slightly to early 2000s, and I want to enter into the territory of the Biological Weapons Convention that is somewhat a difficult one, in the sense that the Chemical Weapons Convention becomes negotiated, comes into effect in the 1990s. It has the OPCW, a verification, very detailed inspections that are there. So the same attempt is tried with the… biological weapons convention. The VEDEX exercise tries to see what measures are possible. An ad hoc group is created that worked for six, seven years. And they come and the argument can be made that no matter what, after George W. Bush comes to power, and specifically John Bolton, no matter where it was, it would have been cut, which really happened. And even though there were 1244 square brackets in the final document, the blame goes to the United States for withdrawing. But I want to focus on another critical element. And that is because right now, we’ve restarted in a way, in the working group, a discussion on verification, specifically, compliance and verification. And I think that there’s a renewed thinking of what that would look like in today’s age. The temptation is to go back to see what the thinking was at that time, see how you can apply it to today’s age. But one aspect that is going to be necessary now, as it was then, is to include the private sector, both the pharmaceutical industry, a new biotech industry, I don’t know if we can say that there are two separate one or one in the same industry. But to do this successfully this time, I think it’s going to be key to involve the private sector into this discussion. And for that, it’s going to be necessary to have a good argument on intellectual property, because I think that is going to be their concern. The other concern is a national security concern that countries are going to say, we don’t want some countries, they’re going to say we don’t want any inspections, etc, etc. So to better arm ourselves in today’s age, I want to look at that age and the involvement, if any, of private industry into the negotiations and the debate from the US perspective. during that time?

Matthew Meselson: Well, let me start by saying that, first of all, I think most nations, I would hope, realize that they have no good reason to develop biological weapons. Certainly the big countries should understand that. We understand that. So given that, where might the threat come from? Clearly from terrorism. And verification to detect terrorists developing biological weapons is a very different matter. The terrorists are not going to use the factories of the big pharmaceutical companies to make biological weapons. They’re going to use clandestine facilities, either in the country which they wish to attack, or maybe in some other country, and bring it in, because after all, a biological weapon doesn’t take up much space. So it’s a completely different situation. So if you decide that the main threat is not coming from other countries, then whatever international legislation you introduce should focus on the terrorist possibility. Now, I don’t want to take up too much of your time, but I want to mention something in that regard. The rate-limiting step for any big enterprise is to have the idea in the first place. Chemists talk about the rate-limiting step in a series of chemical reactions. The rate-limiting step in developing biological weapons is the intention to do so, the idea. Can there be arms control of ideas? Well, in a way, yes. For example, if a friend of mine has written a paper for the New York Times with color illustrations, all about the threat of putting an infective organism in a water supply. It’s a great article, beautifully written, wonderful illustrations. I will go to him and say, for God’s sake, there’s a last thing that should be published. You’re going to put an idea into the head of someone who would not otherwise have had that idea. And since the idea is the first step, even if you were writing an article in a sophisticated journal with no illustrations, but arguing that making biological weapons is a very bad thing to do, or that there’s a big terrorist threat, don’t do it. You don’t want to call attention to the whole subject. Because out there, there might be a mind that says, oh, why not? So that’s the rate-limiting step. It’s not that hard to make a biological weapon if you have the right friends or have the right knowledge, but the rate-limiting step is the idea in the first place. Let the terrorists use automobiles and trucks, driven into crowds. Unfortunately, huge numbers of people, mostly men, are trained in the use of explosive weapons because they’re members of armed forces. Let them use those things. But don’t expand the field by warning unnecessarily to the readers of the New York Review of Books. I mean, they’re not likely to be able to do anything about it anyway. If you really think something needs to be done to reduce the probability of bioterrorism, go talk to the people in charge in the government. Talk to them. But don’t talk to an audience that might include a deranged mind who says, oh, I’m going to do that.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: To come back to your earlier point about your initial inspiration of biology being used for malicious purposes and your desire to stop that. And we’ve spent a lot of time talking about that. spoken about is that this was done in chemistry, where a clear delineation was made between good uses and bad uses of chemistry, with, among other things, the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Matthew Meselson: Based on a beautiful, important idea called the General Use Criterion, which made it possible like a knife to slice through something.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Can we use that argument right now to convince the private sector, pharmaceutical industries, biotech industries to say, this is your opportunity to make that clear line between good uses of the life sciences and bad uses of life sciences, so you can work in the good uses and we make sure that we somehow control, through arms control, disarmament, ways, the bad uses of biology. Can we approach them and for them to participate in this new exercise, and did it happen in the 90s?

Matthew Meselson: Well, I think what would appeal to industry, after all, their primary concern is their business. So with the chemical industry, which has been magnificent in supporting the Chemical Weapons Convention, they are able to point out to the public that they are cooperating with, not only cooperating with in a passive sense, but seconding some of their employees and paying those salaries to work with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. So this is good propaganda, good publicity for them. Furthermore, some, maybe most, maybe all of the executives in charge of the pharmaceutical industry are, after all, human beings. And they don’t like the idea of killing people with infective organisms. I know that for sure in the case of the former chief officer of the Merck company, one of the biggest of all the pharmaceutical companies. Roy Vagelos was the CEO of Merck, very successful too, brought Merck into a position of real leadership. At the CD, the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, in the days when they were meeting to try and develop a verification protocol, there was a self-appointed person who made us think that she represented the industry, when she did not. But none of us had the brains to go ask the industry. We thought she was speaking for the industry, and she said they wouldn’t accept on-site verification visits. I decided to go ask somebody, and since Roy Vagelos was a member of the National Academy like me, and a biochemist like me, and although I had not met him yet, I knew that we’d be pals, we had lunch on Martha’s Vineyard, and I asked him if he’d ever been asked about inspection visits to Merck facilities, he said no, he’d never heard about it. So that’s funny, this lady who’d been saying that he represented pharma, it was when pharma was a brand new organization, was lying, and we all believed it, because nobody, except when I did it, it was too late, the negotiations had already collapsed. Roy said that he would have no problem at all having inspectors come visit their production facilities, and he explained to me why. It was a very simple reason. The chemical industry said okay, they would let people come. Now, for them, this was taking a certain small risk, but the chemical industry had a public relations problem, partly because of the book The Silent Spring, and increasing concern about toxic chemicals in our environment. The word chemistry was getting a bad name. name. DuPont used to have the motto, which you hear on the radio all the time, better things for better living through chemistry, DuPont. After Rachel Carson’s book, The Silent Spring, the commercial on the radio changed. Better things for better living, DuPont. Chemistry is not mentioned. It’s a bad word. So for them to be able to say that we have helped the Chemical Weapons Convention was good and helped them. But now, what about the pharmaceutical industry? Well, the chemical industry, I think, had to risk more by letting inspectors in. And here’s why. Stop me if I’m taking too long with this. Let’s say that you’re in charge of a big chemical facility and you’re making phosgene. That’s a very big ticket industrial chemical. Many plastics require phosgene to be synthesized. Well, you sell it generally by the ton, and there’s a certain number of dollars per ton to sell it. And maybe if someone comes and sees how you make it, they could figure out that, oh, I could improve that step, change the temperature, something like that. And instead of selling it for this price, I could sell it for a few pennies less than my competitor over here. Well, a few pennies makes a difference in that business, because the cost of production is a good fraction of the total cost. Part of the cost, of course, is shipment, other things. But now consider a drug. First of all, you have to do the research. The research on phosgene was done a couple of hundred years ago. I mean, a long time ago. You didn’t do any research. Maybe the catalyst, some research. So first you have to do the research. That costs a lot of money. Second, you have to do the development. That’s different from research. That’s to show that it really works in some kind of animal, not human, like dogs. That costs money. Then, when you finally got it, you’ve got to do clinical trial, because unlike phosgene, you’re going to make a plastic with it, this is going to be consumed by human beings, and the FDA doesn’t let you do that unless there’s a clinical trial. Who pays for that? Not the government. You pay for that. Then, if you get the FDA to approve it, you’ve got to get a market developed. With phosgene, everybody knows that to make certain plastics, you’ve got to have phosgene. But no one’s ever heard of this new drug that you’ve just discovered or invented. So you’ve got to advertise it to the physicians. You actually hire people to go and visit important physicians, knock on their door, give them free samples. And then you even have to do advertising with the public, because although you could say this is not proper, you want to motivate the public to ask their doctor, please prescribe for me X. So there’s a lot of money in all this, and then you’ve also got to pay for the packaging. Very expensive. So none of it is involved in producing it cheaper. All the money… So it’s very different. So we don’t care if somebody sees how we produce it, because we’re still going to spend 99% of the money on everything except producing it. Whereas with phosgene, the money is almost all spent on producing it, and if you could save money on that, you could outwit us. You could outperform us. You have to patent it.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: If somebody tries to copy it.

Matthew Meselson: And if they try to copy it, and unless they are in a country that doesn’t follow the patent laws, which are very few places in the world anymore. There was a time when there was concern that China wouldn’t, but China does. So what Roy told me was, in addition to what I’ve just said to you, too long-winded, about the difference between the… to industries, he said, if somebody did steal something which we had patented, we have very good lawyers. We would destroy them. And that wouldn’t make us feel too bad.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: I think this is critically important, because I think that, so back to the 90s, where even you, U.S. government officials, were convinced that there was this one person or one whatever organization that is speaking in the name of industry, and thus, you thought to represent those interests, but certainly the rest of the world thinks that this is the interest that the American government is protecting, so let’s not even go there. I mean, there’s that element.

Matthew Meselson: That’s right. And the British, the British joined us in this, yes.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: So I mean, and I’m saying this because right now, we need to start doing that. There are countries that have very highly developed pharmaceutical biotech industries, U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, India, China. They would need to be convinced, and I think this is a type of argument, again, that should be used. So that goes for that intellectual property. Then we go to, well, states, biosafety, biosecurity, BSL Labs 4, or like, where do we say what is possible or how it is possible? Is it an inspection that is regular? Is it something that you challenge? So all of these things, but we can figure those things out if we delineate this, and these are the key things. So thank you very much for pointing that out because I think it’s gonna be very necessary as we start doing that, and I think we all should take note of that, especially those who are working in Geneva right now within the working group and thinking about these issues. Let me go now to the next few episodes where you were a part.

Matthew Meselson: Before we do that, let’s ask the question, what good is inspection anyway? Why bother? Why do it?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: This is the key. Is verification about ensuring compliance or is verification to perhaps prove suspected activity or attribute?

Matthew Meselson: It’s for none of those. Well, it is for all of those things, but it’s for something else. It provides an incentive to not do anything wrong in the first place. Because if you get caught, especially if it’s in an industry, the public relations consequences can be annihilating. So the threat of inspection, even if never done but hanging over your head, or even broader, the threat of detection. But in the minds of people who are decision makers, the existence of an inspection regime might increase, in their minds, the likelihood that an illegal activity might be detected. Not only by inspectors seeing it, but maybe one of the employees quietly draws you aside, maybe in the toilet room, who knows where, and says, by the way. You don’t know. So this means that the people in authority are presented with a risk. What we need to do is to magnify the risk in their minds. And there are various things you can do in developing a verification protocol that magnify the risk in the minds of the people who might otherwise be doing something that’s prohibited.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Because there’s going to be people who need to decide on that, if it’s a state.

Matthew Meselson: Yes, of course.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Maybe a person from the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, private industry.

Matthew Meselson: Especially when the money is being appropriated. There’s a table, people are sitting around this table, there’s so much money allotted to this sector. Like in the Soviet Union, there was called the Chemical Industrial Commission, and on it sat all kinds of people, including the guy in charge of the facilities that made biological weapons. And that’s where the money came from, through that committee. And I could imagine this, what I’m about to say was told to me by a Soviet diplomat, that they’re talking about this, whether or not to provide money to make this biological weapon. And there’s someone from the foreign ministry there, and he says, well, aside from the money, what if you get caught? We in the foreign ministry take a very dim view of having to deal with the publicity consequences. And they will be the ones who will get it. We’ll have to pay the price for this thing that you want to do. And we could use this money for something different that might even be just as good or almost as good. But you are impinging on our interests here, and we don’t think you should do this.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Because the strength of the norm around biological weapons relies a lot on the stigma that is tied around biological warfare. We still remember, even if it is, I don’t know, a blanket that killed a few dozen people, even if it is a cattle with anthrax tossed over the stone walls of a city hundreds of years ago, we remember that. There’s something about it. And it’s in the first article of the convention, impugnant to the conscience of mankind.

Matthew Meselson: That’s very true. But we need to ask, who are the we? Because at Fort Detrick, when I used to visit there, not everybody thought that what was going on there was a good idea. But there were some very dedicated people who thought this was a marvelous thing to do. So, hopefully, people in Fort Detrick will remember that. positions of high authority would not be of that frame of mind. But there certainly were people who thought, like Colonel Fothergill, that they were doing something very patriotic.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Yes. So… Let’s briefly turn to Sverdlovsk. It happened in 1979, the outbreak. There was a mystery for a long time what exactly it is, obviously. It goes to the credit of Yeltsin to open it up and to invite and to be able for you to go in 1992.

Matthew Meselson: I don’t think he knew anything about it, our coming there. It was at a much lower level, I think.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: OK.

Matthew Meselson: But I can tell you about that.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Please.

Matthew Meselson: Well, when we first learned of this outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet Union, we learned about it, I think… I forget the month. Anyway, I received a call from a man at the CIA who was in charge of investigating this. His name… It will come to me anyway. He had a master’s degree in microbiology, he was a very good man. He had two daughters who were away at college, and because at that time I don’t think there was any hotel in Langley, Virginia, where the CIA is, he invited me to stay in his home using the bedroom where the two daughters used to sleep, which meant that I could talk to him about the subject over breakfast and dinner, as well as in his office. Of course, we didn’t talk about classified things in his home, only in his office. But it meant that we became very close. And there were a couple of other people on this little advisory group. I was the only one who actually came down and lived there. Julian Hauptmann was his name, H-O-P-T-M-A-N. And he was, in general, skeptical. of claims that the Soviets were developing biological weapons. We have another big intelligence agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and Julian prided himself on batting down the claims of the Defense Intelligence Agency, DIA. But in this case, he was really concerned. So what did we know? Well, there had been a person living there, a physician, who somehow, I mean I know how, but even to this day I won’t talk about it, had communicated to the United States that in the hospitals the pathologists had felt that it was not gastrointestinal, that is not from eating contaminated meat. Because those are the two possibilities, either you eat it or you inhale it. Yes, the Soviets claimed that it was because people had eaten black market meat from cattle, sheep, and cows that had been infected with anthrax. And that happens quite often in the Soviet Union. Anthrax spores are stable in the soil. It still happens around the world. It still happens in the United States. Anthrax is still a problem, although if you take penicillin or other good antibiotics early enough, you get cured. So anyway, I was already known as a person interested in, I’d already served in the arms control agency, Julian knew that, so I came down. And what we knew was that we had a report that it was inhalational, but how do we know for sure that those pathologists knew their business?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Did you think it was?

Matthew Meselson: I’m trying to remember. I wrote a memo when I got back from Washington. I should give you the memo of what we knew and didn’t know.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Did you start with a hypothesis? A proper protocol?

Matthew Meselson: Well, I started with calculations. That is, could you explain people at some distance from the release point as still receiving enough spores? So, with atmospheric diffusion theory and a given source strength, that is a given number of spores released into the air, you can calculate the inhaled dose at any point downstream, downwind. And if you have some information about the dose response, which we had only for monkeys, but if you assume that monkeys and people are about the same, you can estimate how much might have been released in order to account for some assumed number of deaths. So when I came home, I made those calculations. I knew I could show it to you in my memo. I had to learn something about atmospheric dispersion theory, but it’s pretty simple stuff. So I concluded that it was possible that a very small amount could do this, much less than a gram. And when I made better calculations quite a bit later, to my surprise, my calculations showed that even a few milligrams could kill people miles downwind. A few milligrams released at one point could kill people miles downwind. And a physicist at Berkeley published an article, I published my calculation too, but he published an independent calculation that agreed exactly with mine. So anyway, so at the time, when I wrote my memo, I haven’t come back.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Would you have published that with your insight right now, that we shouldn’t perhaps give ideas to…

Matthew Meselson: It’s already published. I have it for you here.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Today, would you do it? that that kind of knowledge, perhaps now, today’s wisdom, should be reserved?

Matthew Meselson: Well, there’s no way to get rid of it. It’s in the literature. And anybody with the slightest interest in the subject is a simple calculation. You assume that a cloud expands in a Gaussian way in each dimension and simple stuff.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: It’s great that you used the data from the World Meteorological Organization. One of the organizations I’m affiliated with, DiPLO Foundation, who are helping us today, the office in Geneva is in the World Meteorological Organization. Oh, yes, in a great big white building. Yeah, so our offices are there. And I know that Jovan values a lot the work they do. Yeah. They do amazing work. So, I mean, among the important parts of your investigation was the wind patterns of that date. You were doing it 14 years later, but you were using wind data from that time.

Matthew Meselson: Well, even at the time, because most countries of the world belong to the World Meteorological Organization. And if you belong, you’re required to report every few hours, wind speed, wind direction, cloud cover, relative humidity and a few other things to Geneva. And they put this in a big computer. And the fellow who was in charge down there, I forget his name, but I called him. And I wanted data. And he said, well, we transmit it to your country. You get it there. Boulder, Colorado, goes to Boulder, Colorado. So I called the office in Boulder, Colorado. And I found that the guy who’s doing this, that is logging it into a computer, is a graduate student. It’s a part-time job for him. And normally they charge to send you this, not much. But we struck up a friendship, and he sent me all this data for Sverdlovsk. There’s an airport in Sverdlovsk, and then there are a few nearby. and Chelyabinsk and other places. So he dumped all this data for me, which was very nice, free, he didn’t charge me. And so I had the data, and I could see on which days the wind blew from Sverdlovsk city down in a southerly direction, because all of the fatalities were south of the city. By the way, how did I know anything about that? Well, at that time, the CIA was publishing called FIBIS, Foreign Broadcast Information System, an unclassified digest of the Soviet literature of all kinds that might be of interest. And there it was recorded that there were two articles about the anthrax outbreak, one in a journal called Man and the Law, Chelyabinsk and something, and the other called Veterinaria. So the one, Man and the Law, recorded the case of a lady who violated the law by throwing a dead cow into a well. That’s contaminating the groundwater, you’re not supposed to throw dead animals down wells. So she had committed a crime. But the article said that the animal, the cow, was dead because of anthrax. And the CIA had, I guess, scanned the whole Soviet literature for the word anthrax, which is called black something, I forget the word in Russian, black something, anyway. And the other was a case in a veterinary journal recording either four or five, I forget, villages where cows and sheep had died of anthrax in the same month. Nothing about an accident, a fair loss, or anything like that, as far as the editors of those journals knew, so far as I knew, the thought of these is perfectly, you know, natural occurrences. But to me, especially the journal Veterinaria, by naming these villages, which were very obscure little places, but I could find where they were on a big gazetteer, they all fell in a straight line. Looks like wind. So I had all that before I went to Russia. So it made me think that, yeah, it had been a release. However, there was another possibility, and that is that there was a source of contaminated meat down somewhere near Chelyabinsk, which is south of Sverdlovsk, and there’s only one main highway that goes up north to Sverdlovsk. The guys who were selling the contaminated meat on the black market were driving trucks and selling it on the roadside. I mean, it’s a crazy hypothesis, but this road, this highway, is just like this wind direction. So it is possible. So, you know, it’s kind of a crazy hypothesis, but it’s not impossible. So let’s briefly turn to one… So anyway, my conclusion was the only way to really find out is to go there. And I wrote a little paper saying, you’ve got to go there somehow. And there are two ways we could go there, secretly or publicly. And I don’t know, maybe we went there secretly, none of my business. But I kept asking for permission to go there. And in one case, I was at a Pugwash meeting in Geneva. The Secretary General of Pugwash was in fact my cousin, my mother’s first cousin. His name was Martin Kaplan. And so I had very good relations with Pugwash. And there was a Soviet official attending the Pugwash meeting whose name was Dumayev, Kirill Dumayev. He was a chemist, a good chemist. And he was a chemical person on the… Scientific Technical Commission, very high-level commission. And he’s visiting Geneva. Martin knows I want to go to Sverdlovsk. Here’s a high-level Soviet official visiting. So he brought us both together in his office, and I asked Kirill Demyov, can I go to the Soviet Union? He says, why not? So he says, write to me what you want. I’ll answer you. And I wrote to him a letter saying who I would come with me. I had a colonel from Fort Detrick named Krummrein who was going to come with me, David Baltimore, who got a Nobel Prize. Or maybe it was Josh Lederberg, who also had sort of symbols of scientific reputability. And I designated on the map exactly where I wanted to go, and how did I do that? Well, I went to the CIA to see Brennan at the agency, because I thought if I get permission to go to Sverdlovsk, they might take me to a false location, to a Potemkin village, so to speak. So I’ve got to know where it really is and how to get there, what trolley line to take, what stop to get. So the CIA gave me all this information. It was wrong, by the way. It wasn’t quite the right place. Okay. So anyway, I put that in my letter. And after a while, I get an answer back. But in the meanwhile, the Soviets had managed to shoot down the Korean jet. And Kirill Dumaev’s letter says, in view of this happening, unfortunately, I’m unable to invite you. Now, whether I could have got invited anyway, I don’t know. But he did respond, I have the letter, very nice letter. Then I was reading Phibos still, and I learned that there was… No. The United States National Academy of Sciences, as a goodwill gesture, decided to invite Soviet scientists to come visit Fort Dietrich to show them we had renounced biological weapons, to show there’s nothing bad going on there. So a delegation comes, and I’m put on the welcoming committee, and there were four or five guys from the Soviet Union there. And one of them was, by now it’s Yeltsin, was Yeltsin’s minister for the economy and health. It was a combined office. And his name was Mr. Apple, Yablokov, Mr. Apple, a very nice guy. And I’m in charge of him. And the reason each of us was in charge of a given Russian was that, for some reason, the security people at Fort Dietrich required that each one of them have an escort, even when they go to the bathroom. So when this poor guy had to go to the bathroom, I’d go with him, and a man with a rifle. We were very embarrassed by this, and we joked about it. But afterwards, I decided to take him into Baltimore, which is famous for crab, especially the way they serve it, the restaurants that serve crab. They put down a roll of brown paper, and then a guy comes with a bucket full of crabs and dumps it on the table. And you eat it with your hands, and you get it all over your face. But it’s traditional. I took him there, and then we went to a jazz club, and we had a nice time. So I didn’t know anything about Sverdlovsk at that time. That was before. But when I learned about Sverdlovsk, and I learned that this same man, Yablokov, has this important job, I think, ah, he could get me into Russia. So I write to him, I’d like to come to Russia. And he said, you have to know somebody, you have to be invited. And he can’t invite me, I forget why. But then I get, after a few weeks… a telex, because we didn’t have email, we had telex, from the rector of the A.N. Gorky State University, a really beautiful university with Greek pillars. And this guy is a mathematical physicist, his name is Suotin. And if you’re in the hands of physicists, generally, you’re fine. You can, they talk your language. So in his telegram, which I have, he says, welcome to Sverdlovsk, the city is yours. It’s an amazing telegram. And he had appointed two guys to help me. One is a professor of solid state physics, named Borisov, unfortunately, no longer alive. And the other is a younger guy, who’s a physical chemist, named, it’s a name like, in my family, we have the same name. I forget it, I’ll think of it. Anyway, these two guys he appointed to help me. And Borisov had an automobile, and wherever I wanted, we went. Include down to these villages, as far as 50 kilometers south of Sverdlovsk, we went down there. Jean left her purse, and we had to go all the way back.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Your late wife.

Matthew Meselson: My wife, yes. My wife is responsible for figuring out what had happened, I’ll tell you why. It was really her accomplishment, not mine. So, I went. This is the second time I’d been to Russia on this matter. The first time was only to Moscow, where I was introduced to people who had treated the patients down there. One who was the minister of health, his name was Bogasov. And the other was a young woman who had been the nurse, or the young physician, anyway, accompanying the chief physician who went down there, and I met him, too. His name, I think. was taking me off, something like that. Oh, and I also met the epidemiologist. This was my first trip involving the anthrax, and that was only to Moscow. I wasn’t able to go down to Sverdlovsk. That happened, as I was saying, later.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Give me one moment. Just let me ask, because Arvind, I’m going to ask for your advice. We’re about 10 minutes away from the time we have allotted. But I would really like to continue a bit more. I have an idea to go into, perhaps, herbicides and yellow rain, as well. Does this sound OK? And then, obviously, whoever is there can stay, but go a bit longer. Matthew, is that OK with you? We go a little bit longer? So please. And then we’re going to herbicides.

Matthew Meselson: Yes. OK, so the way in which we found out what really happened was that Borisov, the physicist, had a friend named Larissa Mishustina, who was a member of the Duma in Moscow. And after the anthrax epidemic, she wrote a letter to Yeltsin. I have a copy of it. Dear Boris Nikolaevich, my constituents, the people who voted her into the office, would like to know if the anthrax epidemic in 1979 was caused by government activities. Because if it was, the families of those who died are entitled to extra pension money. I don’t know if they ever got any extra pension money. I just don’t know. But she got back an answer, because how could you give pension money to people if you don’t know who they are? So this letter to her included a list of 68 names of people who had died. Her letter to Yeltsin. No, Yeltsin’s response. No, Yablokov, because Yeltsin didn’t write back. University, he gave the job to Mr. Yablokov, the same Mr. Apple, in a letter signed by him and accompanied by a sheet of paper that says from KGB sources up at the top in Russian. And then it has 68 names, numbered 1, 2, 3 to 68, the name, the age, the birthday, and the address of their home where they lived. My wife, Jean, took this list and went to about 40 of those homes, knocked on the door, together with a Russian professor of English woman, well, actually, there were two different English-speaking professors, women. We thought that men would be too frightening or something. Anyway, Jean was in control of all this. And she had a questionnaire. Did they smoke? Did they have tuberculosis? Where did they work? That’s what we really wanted to know. The other questions were just general interest. Because then we could make a map of where they were working, most likely, or living or being at various times. So we had this information, not from all 68, but from most of them. For most of them, Jean asked, were they daytime workers or nighttime workers? Where did they work? Or were they drivers who would be moving around? And we had all this information, and I then plotted it on a spot satellite. You could buy satellite maps, on a spot satellite map. And I saw that nearly all the locations were in a narrow zone, beginning at what we knew to be the secret military facility, down through the city, the southern part of the city, out to the city limit. There were not many people. will be on the city limit, so no more cases of human. But those are my five villages. It all makes a straight line like that. And there was only one day in this whole time period when the wind was steadily in that direction all day long. That was, I think, April 4th, 19th? Anyway, we have the date that way, because there was only one day when the wind was blowing that way. So this was all Jean, and it’s in her book.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: I know you have it in the…

Matthew Meselson: This is her book about the anthrax epidemic in Sverdlovsk. It’s a wonderful book. And later, maybe you can include a picture of Jean interviewing a family. So that really made it… You couldn’t ask for better proof. It showed where it came from. It showed that it was airborne. It showed exactly the day it happened. Is that a picture of Jean interviewing?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: We can… You know, this will be also… The recording of this will be released, so we will put those in.

Matthew Meselson: Okay, so that settled it. Now, at that time, and until very recently, well, I don’t know how recently, but for quite a few years, the literature in Russia about this said… One thing said that we were CIA agents and that we had planted all this evidence. Crazy. Written by some colonel or captain. He was a captain in some obscure Russian journal. But there was no publicity that I knew of. But I just got an email from a woman in Russia who works for a TV channel, and they want to make a program about it. it. So I’m very happy with that, because this is a Russian story. It should be told in Russia. And it had not been told in Russia. In this case, there was an investigation, and you unraveled what the truth is.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: In the case of the use of herbicides by the US in Southeast Asia, not so much of a mystery. Everybody knew it. Most condemned it from the world. Perhaps even this bad use of chemistry, I think, to a great degree, comes from—

Matthew Meselson: Anti-plant warfare. There is a convention, an international convention, the Environmental Convention, which if you destroy plants over a large area, that amounts to an environmental disturbance.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: It’s also in the Biological Weapons Convention. Most people think about it, about disease for humans, but it’s also about anti-plant—

Matthew Meselson: I hadn’t thought of that.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: And anti—well, animals as well, right? So it can be used against livestock, not only humans.

Matthew Meselson: Yes.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: So I think that that’s a way of saying it. But the US continued using it. They saw, perhaps, military value in it.

Matthew Meselson: Well, I could tell you my story. So in the United States, there was increasing, as the years went by, concern on the part of some people that the use of herbicides for military purposes on a large scale in Vietnam was perhaps damaging the environment in a serious way by killing trees, or perhaps changing the soil properties, or getting into the diet and making people sick, particularly because a contaminant in the herbicide itself, a contaminant called dioxin, is exceedingly toxic to animals. And so there was a lot of concern. And the largest scientific organization in the United States is the AAAS, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And at each annual meeting during the time when we were using herbicides in Vietnam, there was a resolution from the membership at the annual meeting that the AAAS should do something about this, like investigate it from the point of view of effects on the environment or on health. And finally at the meeting in 1970 or 69, I guess 69, I’m not sure, the board of directors of the AAAS agreed to conduct a study. And they asked a man who was the president of an American university to direct the study and he agreed, but after a few days he declined because he said he was getting a lot of political interference. So then they asked me if I would do it. And I said I would do it if it would include giving me sufficient money to hire a small staff and to go to Vietnam because they wanted me to design a study, not to do it, but to design it. And I thought that I can’t design it without knowing more about it and I can’t find more about it on the campus of Harvard University. I have to go to Vietnam to see it. So I went to Vietnam with a Harvard graduate student and a professor and an assistant who I had hired who was a forester himself and an army veteran. And I have to cut this a little bit short, on the last day I was I was in Vietnam for six weeks and I had my own helicopter because to my surprise it turned out that the military command in Vietnam at the time, General Abrams, didn’t like the herbicides and they were in favor of us investigating it. Back in Washington, the Defense Department didn’t like what we were doing at all. They tried to get us to come back. But for that reason, since I needed a photograph of the sprayed forest from From the air and we couldn’t we had a plane that belonged to the Michelin rubber plantation people They agreed to let their pilot fly us around. But first of all, it was an old airplane and the windows were all crazed So you couldn’t get a good picture through the windows the plastic windows Yeah, they were all milky and second the pilot would have to like that so we could point our cameras down It was a mess Finally I Thought it was surprised. I got a favorable answer. I asked the general in charge General Abrams was away getting some surgery in Japan If we could have a helicopter and to my surprise the very next morning a captain comes to where I was living USA ID guest house With a letter from General Rawson saying that whenever I wanted a helicopter the night before called this number One would be waiting for me on the helipad it Tonsillote airbase and he the pilot would be instructed FAD. I didn’t know what FAD meant I asked and it turns out fly as directed So me and my colleague John Constable a medical member of my team. We flew around taking pictures in places We landed in places where no American had ever been they told us The reason we landed in such places was we were collecting human mother’s milk to analyze back home by mass spectrometry a graduate student of mine Robert Bachman And I had developed a new method for analyzing dioxin much more could detect 10 to the minus 8 grams 10 to the minus 9 grams even by a fancy Too long a story Anyway, so we needed to collect mother’s milk to see if it was getting into the human diet and we particularly were interested in women living along the Dong Nai River Because this was in what was called war zone C which was heavily sprayed, and the spray would get into the river water, and the river water would get into the fish, and the fish would get into the people, and it might appear in the mother’s milk, as indeed it did when we got back, we found it there. We don’t know for sure, although there’s been a lot written about it, whether there have been any serious health effects. There might well have been. The Vietnamese have published loads of papers about it. Doxin is very toxic stuff, and I haven’t read all of the literature. I’ve read quite a bit of it, but I must say I don’t know if there have been massive birth defects caused to Vietnamese people because of the spray. I just don’t know.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: So how was this taken back? I mean, a report, again, did it influence policy? There were others as well working to influence it within the U.S.

Matthew Meselson: Okay. So the last day I was there, General Abrams asked me to come to his office. This is a reference of Abrams’ tank, basically, right? Yes, the tank. He was a very much loved man. He was the one who changed from the strategy of General, what’s his name? Bombs Away? What? Bombs Away? No. I forget. It begins with a W. Anyway, to winning the hearts and minds, it was a completely different approach. Didn’t work. But anyway, General Abrams asked me, amongst other things, what I thought of the military utility of the herbicides. I said, I didn’t know. We didn’t study that. And then I said, well, what’s your opinion? He said, I think they’re shit. I was surprised to hear that. I said, well, if you think they’re shit, why do we do it? And I remember his exact words. He said, you don’t understand anything about this war, young man. I was a young man. He said, those decisions are made in Washington. I have no authority. They ship it to me in 55-gallon drums, and if I didn’t offload them from the docks at Danville, and Saigon, I couldn’t offload the things I really need. So we use it. And he said, do you know what I think of the utility? And I must have said yes, he said, I think they’re shit. And I said, why is that? He says, well, don’t you know it takes about five days for the leaves to fall off after the spring? Yes, sir. Well, do you think that those guys are going to hang around, they know they’ve been sprayed, for five days so we can shoot them? And then he said, my son John, who’s a captain up in Icor, which is up top of the country of South Vietnam, agrees with me. So he had died by the time I wrote a paper about all this, which you have. It’s called From Francis and Charles Darwin to Richard Nixon, the origin and termination of the military use of herbicides in Vietnam. The story begins with Charles Darwin. Anyway, so I wanted to be sure that I remembered what General Abrams had said correctly, because this is important. So I found out that one of his sons, the same John, who he said agreed with him, has a small consulting company in Washington. I called him up and I told him what I wanted to write. And I said, is this really what you and your dad thought? And he nearly hurt my ear. He said, hell yes, like that. So I guess it’s true. And it makes perfect sense. And there were so many things we did in Vietnam. There were the bright ideas of guys. And I know who had this idea and exactly how it came about. And I wrote about that. And you have the paper. It was the idea of the chairman of the botany department at the University of Chicago. He got it going. So anyway, there were a lot of bright ideas. I’ve told you about one of these, the people sniffer. And they all show that people who were back home in an air conditioner. office in Washington may have some very wrong ideas about a war. To have the right ideas about a war you should be there on the ground. Talk to the people there.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Please share the story of the ammonia and the people sniffer.

Matthew Meselson: Exactly. Yes, that’s a great story.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Would you like to share it right now?

Matthew Meselson: Oh, well, some genius, I don’t know who, back home in Washington or in the United States got the idea that if you need to detect the enemy in the forests, and that was a problem because it was very hard to find them, that we could detect them by detecting ammonia gas. Because when men, or for that matter elephants, urinate on the ground, the urea in the urine is converted to ammonia gas by soil And ammonia gas is lighter than air, so it rises. And ammonia, which is a nitrogen atom with three hydrogens, the hydrogens go back and forth like this and they generate, they’re responsible for absorption of ultraviolet light of a very specific frequency. And you can build an infrared, sorry, not ultraviolet, infrared. You can build an infrared spectrometer that’s very sensitive, put it on a helicopter, and fly around and look for ammonia gas. And when you find it, you signal to other helicopters to come in and blast the hell out of that region. And it’s called a people sniffer, and we built a bunch of these helicopters. Well, one day I was in Quang Ngai province, staying with the American Senior Province Advisor, and in the morning there was a briefing from a team that had been on a long-range patrol during the night, commanded by a captain. And the captain reported that his men had seen, hanging from the trees, a lot of buckets. And he asked his men to bring down one of these buckets, they brought it down, they looked at it, and he told us at this morning briefing, he didn’t see any know what they were, that as far as they could tell, it was piss and mud. But the senior advisor, forget his name, a very nice guy, said he knew what it was. He had a telex from Saigon, and he explained what it was. It was meant to detect, it was meant to lure in the people sniffer so that the Viet Cong could shoot them out of the sky. And that’s what was happening. We were losing them. They were being destroyed because the same brain, which is in the minds of the guys who invented this thing back in the United States, they got the same kind of brain in the skulls of those Vietnamese guys. And they had figured out how to jujitsu this thing and turn it 100. And it’s a wonderful example, if I were in charge of training soldiers, which I certainly am not, I’d say, if you really want to understand the war, you got to go there and be there. Don’t try to figure out what to do from an air-conditioned office 5,000 miles away.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Yeah. Last yellow rain.

Matthew Meselson: Ah, so the word came to the United States that something poisonous, this was, I think, in 1976, a cablegram from an American embassy official who had heard from Hmong people who had come across the Mekong River out of Laos into Thailand and been interned in the refugee detention areas, that they were being sprayed with something poisonous from the sky, which they called yellow rain. Of course, not in English. And he just reported, his name was McAllen Thompson. He married to a Vietnamese wife. I got to know him a bit by email. He was a great beer drinker. Anyway. So that started it all, and it got in the newspapers, and so there was a congressional hearing, what was it? And I was asked to come down and testify, and I testified that I thought it could be something called DiEM, which was a French riot control, well, other countries had it too, but when the French were in control in Vietnam, they used this yellow stuff as a more powerful tear gas, very nasty stuff, makes you vomit. And I thought maybe that’s what it was. It wasn’t that, but that got me interested in it, and at that same hearing, a woman from the United States Army Medical Intelligence Unit at Fort Detrick, belongs to the DIA, named Sharon Watson, testified that it was a toxin, and and she had got, she had studied toxins for her PhD at the University of Mississippi, so she knew about toxins, and in particular, these so-called mycotoxins. So that’s how I first got interested in it, and then I decided that to try and understand it, I should invite a lot of people who were specialists in different subjects to come to Cambridge, and come to a meeting for a few days, and just talk about the subject. I invited someone from Porton in England, a guy from the CIA, and people who were experts in various subjects, including the botany of Southeast Asia, and so on and so forth, and before the meeting, I had obtained some samples of yellow rain, because the Army sent a little team down there to collect samples, and on that team was an old pal of mine, and I asked him if he could send me some, if I’d give it back, so he sent me some samples of the yellow rain, and I took a little piece, and sent it back, almost all of it, but that little piece I gave him, gave to Joan Nowicki, who is a electron microscopist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, because she has the reputation as the world’s expert on how to identify a plant family from an electron microscope picture of its pollen. So I give her and it doesn’t take much under an electron microscope. So I gave her this little piece of stuff. We published this in Nature actually, and it was on the cover. And she showed that there were many different kinds of pollen grains there in this little piece of yellow rain, but they were all from trees that are native to Southeast Asia. Okay, that made sense. So, but why pollen? If this is a chemical warfare agent, and it’s embedded these pollen grains in some waxy yellow stuff, little yellow spots. What could it be? So at this meeting where I had many people talking about it, what could it be? And the best hypothesis we came up with was maybe they spray this poison and it makes the bees sick. And so the bees vomit. And this is bee vomit. But that didn’t sound too good. Kind of ad hoc. But one of the members of this little group that I had assembled, Ashton, Peter Ashton, is an expert in tropical botany. And he had a friend who had done his PhD work in Borneo on the bees that fertilized the giant dipter crop trees of South Asia, named Tom Seeley. And by this time, Tom is a professor at Yale, and his field is bees. So after this meeting, we called Tom on the phone. We described what they look like, these spots. And I remember Tom’s word. Tom said, the State Department explanation is not parsimonious. And then he paused, I think for effect, and said, it’s bee shit. Well, we had not thought of that. But then the very next day, this was in April, I think, both of us, both Peter Ashton and I saw on the windshields, especially the rear windshields of our cars and other cars parked nearby, yellow spots. Turns out they’re everywhere. So I then, after this, brought the sample down to Joan Nowicki, and she said she’d never seen it. So I said, Joan, where do you park? Down Smithsonian parking lot. We went down there, covered with yellow spots. There’s things that we see all around, we don’t necessarily notice them, especially in the spring, because the bees have stayed in the tropical zones, in their nests all winter long, the young bees are eating pollen to get strong and so on. So on the first warm day of spring, they can fly out and collect pollen and nectar. So they get very constipated, because they’re very, very tidy, they don’t like to defecate in the nest. And when they go out, the first time they go out, they’re very, so they have what’s called a cleansing flight. And they defecate in great showers of many bees. So that gave us a hypothesis. The yellow rain is bee shit from the cleansing flights of tropical bees. Then I got a letter, maybe a phone call, I think it was a letter from Cy Hirsch, the journalist, saying, Matt, even your friends don’t believe you. Because we know that there are cleansing flights in the temperate zones, because there’s winter, and the bees stay inside all winter, getting constipated. But Laos is in the tropics, there’s no winter, so the bees don’t need to stay confined, they can go out and defecate whenever they want, so there shouldn’t be any cleansing flights. So how are we going to find out? Got to go to Thailand and see if there are cleansing flights. and I go off to Thailand, and we team up with a Thai professor who studies bees named Phuong Thep of Aquitonical. And we go to various places, including up in Chiang Mai, where we got rained on by a very huge number of bees who flew over us and defecated. So there was no doubt bees do this. There’s much more to the story. But we went then to the American embassy and told him what we had found, and so on and so forth. And he told us there was a team to find out what was behind the yellow rain sent out from Washington consisting of a physician, a language expert, and a chemical warfare officer. And so when I got home, I began to try to get their cablegrams back to Washington. And I don’t know how I did this, because they were mildly classified. But anyway, I have all the cablegrams. And what they did was to try and locate the Hmong people who had told these stories about the killing of humans by the yellow rain to see if they’d tell the same story again, the first step to verify. And it turns out that in case after case, what they had recorded, they had to have a translator, of course, because the American investigators didn’t speak the Hmong language. They had an interpreter who understood Hmong and understood English and was their interpreter. And apparently, the interpreter had just told the Americans what they wanted to hear, because in each of these cablegrams, over and over again, they’d say, when they re-interviewed the person who is supposed to have said something, like planes came and sprayed yellow stuff over us and people died. One case I remember, the man said, I never said that. I just said planes came over. Nothing about people dying and all that. But there were a lot of Hmong people who said it. And by the way, recently, there’s a woman. In the United States, a Hmong woman who is a poet, and she’s written a best-selling poetry book about this awful yellow rain. And in her book, she denounces me as a horrible person. But she’s misguided. She’s wrong. The yellow rain was bee feces. And there’s a lot more to say about this, including the chemical analyses that detected toxin. That laboratory, that was just one laboratory. No, two laboratories, but they were private laboratories. But the United States government lab, army lab, and the British at Porton analyzed many samples. They could never find anything. And this was reported to the House of Commons. So it’s a matter of record that the British found nothing. And I think that we’re also on record that we found nothing. So anyway, the whole thing was a big mistake. The yellow rain is, now there’s one thing involved in it which is still very secret. I don’t know what it is. I was just told by one of the members of that team that there’s something that’s very secret, but apparently doesn’t challenge what we found. But what it is, I don’t know. We’ve asked under Freedom of Information Act, we appealed their negative decision. We’re going to start all over again. Something very, very secret associated with this, and I don’t know what it is. It may be that the whole thing was a put-up job, and we don’t want to admit it. I don’t know. It may have been something about the child. I don’t know what it is. But apparently, and I want to find out if I possibly can. Maybe in this new atmosphere where the Kennedy assassination things have been released, we could persuade somebody to release this thing.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: It’s been a while.

Matthew Meselson: More than 50 years, isn’t it? Something like approximately 50 years.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: First of all, let me apologize. There’s questions in the chat. One option is perhaps we take up five minutes. minute break and come back and if there are any questions. Another option is we do this again. We’re not being recorded now, are we? We’re having a conversation, there are people listening.

Matthew Meselson: But you said that you would enjoy making a goulash dinner and that you’re a superb chef.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Yes, I still intend to do that. Tonight we do that. If you’re willing. I’m at Matthew’s house at the moment very graciously and we will absolutely do that.

Matthew Meselson: Maybe we could invite a couple of pals.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: That’d be great.

Matthew Meselson: I want to show you this book. This is Henry’s last book on leadership. It’s amazing. He’s already very old. This is his last book and very shortly before he died, he sent me a copy and asked his secretary to mail it to me. And his handwriting is not so good anymore.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Matthew Meselson for acting as a national conscience in matters of survival. Is that right? Yeah. Matthew, very well chosen from Kissinger. A national conscience, a global conscience. We owe you so much. Really thank you for all that you’ve done both as a scientist and in contributing to arms control with your beautiful logic, simple yet powerful insights.

Matthew Meselson: I have a new concern. No, things that are done for human benefit might backfire. And the one I think about most is there are worldwide approximately a hundred different companies trying to develop a marketable product to extend the human lifespan. It sounds like a great thing to do, but there could be difficult consequences. If, for example, we extended the human lifespan to, let’s say, 150 years, what would happen?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Well, first of all, I doubt there will be poor people who would live to 150.

Matthew Meselson: Of course. So social strife would be accelerated. Well, how would we get enough housing? How would we grow enough food? What would happen to our philosophical views, our spiritual views? I don’t know. It’s going to happen. The total investment in the United States alone is about a trillion dollars in this research. In China, it’s less, but there’s a lot of work going on in China, and I think I know how it can be done. And if I don’t know, at least the fact that I think I know means that it’s a field in which you can have ideas. And there may be other things which are thought of as beneficial, but now that we’re beginning more and more to actually construct our own intimate environment, advanced intelligence, AI, it could be that some of the things we need to worry most about are things which initially are done beneficial. And then, of course, there are other things, like the thing in which you’ve become very involved, autonomous weapons. Although maybe it would be good if we could fight our wars on another planet just with machines. We stay here and sip soda pop.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: We send some of the people who want to do that. The one person who has become so famous for wanting us to go to Mars and occupy Mars a few weeks ago said, in Moscow, obviously, said that compassion is the weakness of the West.

Matthew Meselson: Did he really say that? Has he not read Dostoyevsky? I doubt it. There’s a lot of compassion there. How about reading Crime and Punishment? That’ll make you weep with compassion.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: So it’s that kind of a mind that wants to, yeah, further.

Matthew Meselson: Be careful, maybe that’s said by his enemies. He has said a lot of things which sound like an altruist, but God help us if… Oh boy.

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: Thank you very much for this conversation. We need to do this again. Thank you to all who came to this talk. Obviously, I owe you certainly, there were a lot of questions and I’m sorry about not being able to bring them in, but we can do this another opportunity.

Matthew Meselson: How do I tell my friends if they want to watch this?

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski: We’ll have a recording of it. We’ll put it on the Diplomacy Light podcast, so I’ll put that up and I’ll send you a link.

Agreement points

Importance of interdisciplinary approaches in scientific investigations

Elegant simplicity of the experiment design

Importance of collaboration with Franklin Stahl

Use of meteorological data to determine release date

Importance of on-site investigation and interviews

Evidence that “yellow rain” was actually bee feces

Importance of involving private industry in discussions

Both speakers emphasize the value of interdisciplinary approaches in scientific investigations and policy discussions, highlighting how combining different fields of expertise leads to more comprehensive and accurate results.

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers agree on the importance of strategic thinking in arms control and the need to present compelling arguments to policymakers that align with national interests and security concerns.

Cheap strategic weapons are against U.S. interests

Importance of presenting winning arguments to government officials

Deterrent effect of inspection regimes

Unexpected consensus

Critique of decision-making processes in military operations

Lack of military utility according to General Abrams

Misinterpretation of refugee accounts by U.S. officials

Meselson’s account of General Abrams’ criticism of herbicide use in Vietnam and the misinterpretation of refugee accounts in the yellow rain investigation both highlight unexpected consensus on the flaws in military decision-making processes, particularly when decisions are made far from the field of operations.

Overall assessment

Summary

The main areas of agreement revolve around the importance of interdisciplinary approaches in scientific investigations and policy-making, the need for strategic thinking in arms control, and the value of on-site investigations and data analysis in uncovering the truth about alleged chemical and biological weapons use.

Consensus level

There is a high level of consensus between the speakers on these key points, which implies a shared understanding of the complexities involved in arms control and the investigation of alleged weapons use. This consensus suggests that future efforts in these areas should prioritize interdisciplinary collaboration, strategic thinking, and thorough on-site investigations.

Different viewpoints

Unexpected differences

Overall assessment

summary

No significant areas of disagreement identified

difference_level

Very low level of disagreement. The speakers appear to be in general agreement and build on each other’s points throughout the conversation. This alignment suggests a shared understanding of the topics discussed, which may facilitate further collaboration and progress in the areas of arms control, biological weapons, and interdisciplinary scientific approaches to global security issues.

Partial agreements

Similar viewpoints

Both speakers agree on the importance of strategic thinking in arms control and the need to present compelling arguments to policymakers that align with national interests and security concerns.

Cheap strategic weapons are against U.S. interests

Importance of presenting winning arguments to government officials

Deterrent effect of inspection regimes

Key takeaways

Meselson’s DNA replication experiment demonstrated the power of elegant simplicity in scientific design

Cheap biological weapons are against U.S. strategic interests, which was a key argument for ending the U.S. bioweapons program

On-site investigation and interviews were crucial for uncovering the truth about the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak

Herbicide use in Vietnam lacked military utility according to some military leaders like General Abrams

The ‘yellow rain’ in Southeast Asia was determined to be bee feces, not a chemical weapon

Verification regimes in arms control can serve as a deterrent even if inspections are not frequently conducted

Resolutions and action items

Meselson suggested renewed efforts to declassify remaining secret information about the ‘yellow rain’ incident

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski proposed involving private industry, especially pharmaceutical and biotech companies, in future biological weapons convention discussions

Unresolved issues

Long-term health effects of herbicide use on the Vietnamese population

Unspecified ‘very secret’ information related to the yellow rain investigation

How to effectively verify compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention

Potential unintended consequences of life extension technologies

Suggested compromises

None identified

I realized I had a winning argument to get this stuff stopped. And I didn’t like it either because it was my science, biology. And I knew, because even then, it was the beginning of the revolution in molecular biology, that we would be developing methods of doing very sophisticated things with living beings. And to have this technology change the mind of your enemy, sterilize them, really dreadful things. We shouldn’t do it. But the argument that should be presented to government officials was, look, this is about the worst thing you could do, is introduce into the world a really cheap strategic weapon.

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Reason

This comment reveals Meselson’s key insight that led to the U.S. renouncing biological weapons – that they would be cheap and accessible strategic weapons. It shows his ability to frame scientific and ethical concerns in terms of national security interests.

Impact

This comment explains a pivotal moment in arms control history and sets up much of the subsequent discussion about Meselson’s efforts to influence policy on biological weapons.

It provides an incentive to not do anything wrong in the first place. Because if you get caught, especially if it’s in an industry, the public relations consequences can be annihilating. So the threat of inspection, even if never done but hanging over your head, or even broader, the threat of detection.

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Reason

This insight about the deterrent effect of inspections and verification regimes challenges simplistic views of arms control and highlights the psychological aspects of compliance.

Impact

It shifted the discussion to focus more on the purpose and effects of verification regimes rather than just their technical aspects.

The rate-limiting step for any big enterprise is to have the idea in the first place. Chemists talk about the rate-limiting step in a series of chemical reactions. The rate-limiting step in developing biological weapons is the intention to do so, the idea. Can there be arms control of ideas?

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Reason

This comment applies scientific thinking to policy in an innovative way, highlighting the importance of controlling knowledge and intentions rather than just materials.

Impact

It introduced a new perspective on biosecurity and led to discussion of responsible communication about biological threats.

I have a new concern. No, things that are done for human benefit might backfire. And the one I think about most is there are worldwide approximately a hundred different companies trying to develop a marketable product to extend the human lifespan. It sounds like a great thing to do, but there could be difficult consequences.

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Reason

This comment demonstrates Meselson’s ability to identify emerging ethical and societal challenges from scientific advances, even those intended to be beneficial.

Impact

It shifted the conversation to broader issues of responsible innovation and unintended consequences of technology, beyond just weapons.

Overall assessment

These key comments shaped the discussion by repeatedly demonstrating how scientific insights can inform policy and ethics. Meselson’s ability to frame complex scientific and ethical issues in terms of practical policy considerations was a recurring theme. The discussion flowed from historical examples of his work on biological weapons to broader reflections on responsible innovation and the societal impacts of science. Throughout, there was an emphasis on the importance of on-the-ground knowledge and the potential for unintended consequences in both military and civilian applications of science.

What was the highly secret information associated with the yellow rain investigation that remains classified?

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Explanation

This classified information could provide important context or insights about the yellow rain incident and investigation process.

What are the potential consequences of extending human lifespans to 150 years through anti-aging research?

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Explanation

This raises important ethical and practical questions about the societal impacts of dramatically extended lifespans.

How can the private sector, especially pharmaceutical and biotech industries, be effectively involved in discussions around biological weapons control?

Speaker

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski

Explanation

Engaging industry is critical for developing effective and implementable biological weapons control measures.

What verification measures for biological weapons control would be feasible and effective in today’s context?

Speaker

Ljupčo Gjorgjinski

Explanation

Developing appropriate verification protocols is essential for strengthening biological weapons control agreements.

What were the long-term health effects, if any, of herbicide use in Vietnam?

Speaker

Matthew Meselson

Explanation

A comprehensive understanding of these effects is important for assessing the full impact of herbicide warfare.