Whistle blowing has been of enormous help to law enforcement in revealing embezzlement, corporate theft, corporate piracy, stock market manipulation, tax evasion, and other illegal practices that might otherwise have gone undetected. Sometimes, as in Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon papers for the Vietnam War and for the presently imprisoned Wiki-leaks whistleblower, Bradley Manning and Wiki-leaks founder Julian Assange, public reaction is mixed. We don’t like snitches and sometimes we prefer loyalty to a scoundrel rather than the betrayal of the companies that employ the whistleblowers. I am much more sympathetic to the whistleblowers than I am to those with power who are doing something wrong.
I was shifted to this view while researching a book on Agent Orange which I am still writing and revising. Almost all of what I have written is based on primary sources obtained from documents in the Kennedy Library in Boston and in the Matthew Meselson collection at Harvard University. A substantial number of those documents are declassified from their status as Top Secret or Confidential. This is what I learned. Most of the documents involving policy decisions on the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War were not military documents but civilian documents from government agencies and White House personnel. Most had little to do with military secrets of importance to the enemy. They had a lot to do with finding ways to describe the use of Agent Orange as “weed-killers,” or as essentially harmless to human health, or as a Vietnamese program rather than a US program before we got heavily involved in that war. They included quite a few military documents that expressed doubts about the usefulness of using Agent Orange for defoliation of tropical forests, for revealing enemy bases hidden in those forests, or for starving the enemy troops into submission.
When one weighs the terrible damage done to people’s lives in times of war, especially so-called “collateral damage,” I believe the status of real heroes should be assigned to those who release these documents before they are declassified. A healthy debate on those issues by Congress (most of whom were not privy to these secret documents) might have saved more US lives (not to mention civilian and military Vietnamese lives) if the debates were informed with these findings. Instead policy was based on inadequate information or misleading information. It certainly illustrated to me the reporters’ credo that in times of war the first victim is truth.
Showing posts with label Vietnam war. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Vietnam war. Show all posts
Monday, March 21, 2011
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Life Lines 42
MAKING A DIFFERENCE: MATTHEW MESELSON AND THE SOCIAL ROLE OF SCIENCE
Most scientists are not public figures. They do their work in their laboratories and find sufficient pleasure in adding to new knowledge. Some people would like it to be that way and feel that scientists, like shoemakers, should stick to their last. My mentor, Hermann Muller was not that way and Matthew Meselson’s mentor, Linus Pauling, was not that way. When I interviewed Meselson recently at Harvard, I learned that Pauling told him, as a graduate student, not to get involved in protests because his authority as a graduate student would be minimal and his real value to science (and society) was through his contributions and comments on those contributions in his later career. Muller said much the same to his students. He said we would find ourselves increasingly called upon in our careers to speak out on issues (like radiation protection) and we would find ourselves in the public eye not always in a happy way.
Meselson followed Pauling’s advice and for his dissertation he introduced a new technique, density gradient centrifugation, that turned out to be just the tool he (and a fellow graduate student, Frank Stahl) needed to test the then recently introduced double helix model of DNA that Watson and Crick had published. They proved the key predictions of how DNA replicated and their paper became an icon of science (it was the subject of a book by a historian of science who called it the most elegant experiment in the 20th century).
Meselson was recruited to Harvard and asked, a few years later to participate in seminars on nuclear arms disarmament (Kissinger was one of the participants). He shifted from nuclear arms to something he knew more effectively as a chemist and molecular biologist. He sought to ban chemical and biological warfare. He was asked by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to go to Vietnam in 1969 with a scientific team to evaluate the health hazards and ecological damage from spraying herbicides on crops and foliage (mostly with Agent Orange). He played a role in getting the program cut back and in getting President Nixon (via his friend and colleague, Henry Kissinger) to submit the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing chemical warfare agents (including herbicides and incapacitating agents) during war -- a policy abided by Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, but rejected by Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (until Nixon changed his mind).
A decade later Meselson investigated an alleged use of poisonous toxins by the USSR in S. E. Asia called Yellow Rain. He went to Laos and other places where the attacks were alleged to have taken place and he showed that the Yellow Rain was not poison but was actually bee feces, mostly mixed local pollen that he was able to identify through his microscopic analysis. Meselson also went with his wife, Jeanne Guillemin (a sociologist at Boston College) to Sverdlovsk and they studied a Cold War episode of an anthrax epidemic that killed about 60 people that the USSR claimed was due to contaminated meat and not from a nearby germ warfare laboratory. Meselson used old weather reports and showed they fitted the distribution of the released cloud in the Sverdlovsk area proving that the outbreak was from the germ warfare facility and not contaminated meat.
Most scientists are not public figures. They do their work in their laboratories and find sufficient pleasure in adding to new knowledge. Some people would like it to be that way and feel that scientists, like shoemakers, should stick to their last. My mentor, Hermann Muller was not that way and Matthew Meselson’s mentor, Linus Pauling, was not that way. When I interviewed Meselson recently at Harvard, I learned that Pauling told him, as a graduate student, not to get involved in protests because his authority as a graduate student would be minimal and his real value to science (and society) was through his contributions and comments on those contributions in his later career. Muller said much the same to his students. He said we would find ourselves increasingly called upon in our careers to speak out on issues (like radiation protection) and we would find ourselves in the public eye not always in a happy way.
Meselson followed Pauling’s advice and for his dissertation he introduced a new technique, density gradient centrifugation, that turned out to be just the tool he (and a fellow graduate student, Frank Stahl) needed to test the then recently introduced double helix model of DNA that Watson and Crick had published. They proved the key predictions of how DNA replicated and their paper became an icon of science (it was the subject of a book by a historian of science who called it the most elegant experiment in the 20th century).
Meselson was recruited to Harvard and asked, a few years later to participate in seminars on nuclear arms disarmament (Kissinger was one of the participants). He shifted from nuclear arms to something he knew more effectively as a chemist and molecular biologist. He sought to ban chemical and biological warfare. He was asked by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to go to Vietnam in 1969 with a scientific team to evaluate the health hazards and ecological damage from spraying herbicides on crops and foliage (mostly with Agent Orange). He played a role in getting the program cut back and in getting President Nixon (via his friend and colleague, Henry Kissinger) to submit the 1925 Geneva Protocol outlawing chemical warfare agents (including herbicides and incapacitating agents) during war -- a policy abided by Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower, but rejected by Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon (until Nixon changed his mind).
A decade later Meselson investigated an alleged use of poisonous toxins by the USSR in S. E. Asia called Yellow Rain. He went to Laos and other places where the attacks were alleged to have taken place and he showed that the Yellow Rain was not poison but was actually bee feces, mostly mixed local pollen that he was able to identify through his microscopic analysis. Meselson also went with his wife, Jeanne Guillemin (a sociologist at Boston College) to Sverdlovsk and they studied a Cold War episode of an anthrax epidemic that killed about 60 people that the USSR claimed was due to contaminated meat and not from a nearby germ warfare laboratory. Meselson used old weather reports and showed they fitted the distribution of the released cloud in the Sverdlovsk area proving that the outbreak was from the germ warfare facility and not contaminated meat.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
LIFE LINES 36
HOW SCIENCE DEALS WITH POSSIBILITY RATHER THAN A CLEARCUT CAUSE AND EFFECT
A few years ago I wrote a Life Lines column about Napoleon’s death. For several decades historians believed Napoleon was poisoned by the addition of arsenic to his food while he was in exile at St. Helena. As evidence they cited studies of a sample of his hair, bombarded with neutrons, which demonstrated a high incidence of arsenic in the hairs. I felt at that time, that was not a sufficient proof and I cited a news article I had remembered reading a generation earlier when Clare Booth Luce was an Ambassador to Italy and lived in Rome. She got quite sick from what turned out to be arsenic poisoning caused by her inhaling arsenic dust that flaked off from the paint in her room.
In a recent issue of Science, I noted that an Italian study of hair from Napoleon as a child as well as hair from members of his family and other contemporaries who never went to St. Helena, showed a similar high amount of arsenic in their hairs. Arsenic was widely used in paints, cosmetics, and as food additives in those days. The Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics concluded that homicide could be ruled out in the face of this widespread arsenic contamination of French middle class and wealthy people. To prove homicide something other than the presence of arsenic in the hair would be required.
The presence of arsenic in the hair is at best a necessary but not sufficient evidence of the deliberate poisoning of Napoleon. Most physicians who examined Napoleon’s body after he died concluded he died of stomach cancer although in those days there was no cell theory to back that up. While we may never know what caused Napoleon’s death, we at least can cast doubt that he was murdered. We crave certitude but science tells us we are limited to what we know and can’t let speculation substitute for knowledge. This is why the problem of Agent Orange exposure (or its dioxin contaminant) is so difficult. The presence of dioxins in veterans at parts per trillion (which is a very small amount compared to Napoleon’s arsenic) is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence that a veteran’s cancer, or enlarged prostrate, or diabetes is associated with that exposure. Because there is no proof that Agent Orange exposure causes human health problems other than chloracne (a skin disease) the National Academy of Sciences in the US uses a statistical association. If there are more veterans than predicted with a particular type of cancer, then those veterans are given the benefit of the doubt and their medical costs are covered. But if a veteran exposed to Agent Orange gets, let us say bladder cancer, and there is no excess association between those veterans and bladder cancer, that veteran does not get government provided medical care. The problem is really more social than scientific. If all people (or veterans) were covered by a national health insurance, then all people would have government-provided reimbursement for health care. We have done that with Social Security for retirement since the 1930s and someday we will extend that outlook to our health. Proof requires standards of science that are sometimes difficult to achieve, like the effects of low doses of radiation on cancer or mutation production, the effect of microwaves on cancer or mutation induction, and the possible health hazards of hundreds of chemicals in our environments and diets. In general harm from heavy, chronic or acute doses of exposure are easier to prove or disprove.
A few years ago I wrote a Life Lines column about Napoleon’s death. For several decades historians believed Napoleon was poisoned by the addition of arsenic to his food while he was in exile at St. Helena. As evidence they cited studies of a sample of his hair, bombarded with neutrons, which demonstrated a high incidence of arsenic in the hairs. I felt at that time, that was not a sufficient proof and I cited a news article I had remembered reading a generation earlier when Clare Booth Luce was an Ambassador to Italy and lived in Rome. She got quite sick from what turned out to be arsenic poisoning caused by her inhaling arsenic dust that flaked off from the paint in her room.
In a recent issue of Science, I noted that an Italian study of hair from Napoleon as a child as well as hair from members of his family and other contemporaries who never went to St. Helena, showed a similar high amount of arsenic in their hairs. Arsenic was widely used in paints, cosmetics, and as food additives in those days. The Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics concluded that homicide could be ruled out in the face of this widespread arsenic contamination of French middle class and wealthy people. To prove homicide something other than the presence of arsenic in the hair would be required.
The presence of arsenic in the hair is at best a necessary but not sufficient evidence of the deliberate poisoning of Napoleon. Most physicians who examined Napoleon’s body after he died concluded he died of stomach cancer although in those days there was no cell theory to back that up. While we may never know what caused Napoleon’s death, we at least can cast doubt that he was murdered. We crave certitude but science tells us we are limited to what we know and can’t let speculation substitute for knowledge. This is why the problem of Agent Orange exposure (or its dioxin contaminant) is so difficult. The presence of dioxins in veterans at parts per trillion (which is a very small amount compared to Napoleon’s arsenic) is a necessary but not sufficient piece of evidence that a veteran’s cancer, or enlarged prostrate, or diabetes is associated with that exposure. Because there is no proof that Agent Orange exposure causes human health problems other than chloracne (a skin disease) the National Academy of Sciences in the US uses a statistical association. If there are more veterans than predicted with a particular type of cancer, then those veterans are given the benefit of the doubt and their medical costs are covered. But if a veteran exposed to Agent Orange gets, let us say bladder cancer, and there is no excess association between those veterans and bladder cancer, that veteran does not get government provided medical care. The problem is really more social than scientific. If all people (or veterans) were covered by a national health insurance, then all people would have government-provided reimbursement for health care. We have done that with Social Security for retirement since the 1930s and someday we will extend that outlook to our health. Proof requires standards of science that are sometimes difficult to achieve, like the effects of low doses of radiation on cancer or mutation production, the effect of microwaves on cancer or mutation induction, and the possible health hazards of hundreds of chemicals in our environments and diets. In general harm from heavy, chronic or acute doses of exposure are easier to prove or disprove.
LIFE LINES 34
HOW ROBINSON CRUSOE HELPED STAVE OFF DEFEAT FROM THE AMERICAN SIDE IN THE VIETNAM WAR
While at Harvard doing research for a book on Agent Orange, I came across a book given to Matt Meselson by Dr. John Constable. It was written by Le Cao Dai, a Vietnamese surgeon and published in English (Memoirs of War—The Central Highlands: a North Vietnamese Journal of Life on the Ho Chi Minh Trail 1965-1973 Hanoi, The Gioi, 2004). Dr. Constable was a friend of Dr. Dai and helped the Vietnamese establish plastic surgery units before, during, and after, the Vietnamese war. Dr Dai’s book is based on a journal he kept to be given to his wife in case he was killed. Dr Dai and his fellow soldiers were instructed to be like Robinson Crusoe once they left North Vietnam. They would have to improvise from the resources of the tropical rain forest after they established their portable field hospital.
This they did. They quickly learned to keep dry by sleeping in hammocks. If two trees were not close enough, they tied one end of the hammock to the spokes of a parked bicycle. For their trucks they always made sure to carry a pole cut from a young tree so that if the truck tipped over in the muddy terrain, they could right it, using the pole as a lever. They made their own sandals from unrepairable automobile or truck tires. They brewed their own alcohol from a plant with high sugar content and thus could carry out antiseptic surgery. They kept hospital records on the backs of can labels when they ran out of paper. They never assembled more than ten people in any one location and the last person in a marching column would erase the footprints of the group on the trail. They preserved rice and beans from rotting by storing them in tied condoms. They covered their flashlights and punched a hole in the cover allowing a spaghetti thin beam to see their way in the dark. They set up decoy smoking hearths in areas that would then be sprayed, sparing their own covert position. If they did happened to get sprayed, they could dismantle their field hospital and move it to a new location in a matter of hours, long before the herbicides caused the leaves to fall.
One of the important lessons frequently ignored in war, is not to underestimate the enemy. When we thought of the Vietnamese as “gooks” and reduced their personalities to their (or our) worst propaganda, we erred by failing to see them as resourceful human beings like us. Just as we enjoyed reading Robinson Crusoe as children, so did our Vietnamese adversaries, either in Vietnamese or French (as French Indochina before their civil war began, they were bilingual). The other important lesson is that everything is connected. Daniel Defoe read the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish adventurer who was abandoned on an island in the Atlantic Ocean and who was rescued several years later. Had Defoe not embellished Selkirk’s story, turning him into the memorable character Robinson Crusoe, we would probably never have heard of Selkirk’s adventure. But as a literary classic written more than 200 years ago, it lives on around the world and captured the imaginations of the Viet Cong living in the Ho Chi Minh Trail as vividly as it did to each of us when as a youngster we thrilled to Robinson Crusoe’s resourcefulness, courage, and passion to live. .
While at Harvard doing research for a book on Agent Orange, I came across a book given to Matt Meselson by Dr. John Constable. It was written by Le Cao Dai, a Vietnamese surgeon and published in English (Memoirs of War—The Central Highlands: a North Vietnamese Journal of Life on the Ho Chi Minh Trail 1965-1973 Hanoi, The Gioi, 2004). Dr. Constable was a friend of Dr. Dai and helped the Vietnamese establish plastic surgery units before, during, and after, the Vietnamese war. Dr Dai’s book is based on a journal he kept to be given to his wife in case he was killed. Dr Dai and his fellow soldiers were instructed to be like Robinson Crusoe once they left North Vietnam. They would have to improvise from the resources of the tropical rain forest after they established their portable field hospital.
This they did. They quickly learned to keep dry by sleeping in hammocks. If two trees were not close enough, they tied one end of the hammock to the spokes of a parked bicycle. For their trucks they always made sure to carry a pole cut from a young tree so that if the truck tipped over in the muddy terrain, they could right it, using the pole as a lever. They made their own sandals from unrepairable automobile or truck tires. They brewed their own alcohol from a plant with high sugar content and thus could carry out antiseptic surgery. They kept hospital records on the backs of can labels when they ran out of paper. They never assembled more than ten people in any one location and the last person in a marching column would erase the footprints of the group on the trail. They preserved rice and beans from rotting by storing them in tied condoms. They covered their flashlights and punched a hole in the cover allowing a spaghetti thin beam to see their way in the dark. They set up decoy smoking hearths in areas that would then be sprayed, sparing their own covert position. If they did happened to get sprayed, they could dismantle their field hospital and move it to a new location in a matter of hours, long before the herbicides caused the leaves to fall.
One of the important lessons frequently ignored in war, is not to underestimate the enemy. When we thought of the Vietnamese as “gooks” and reduced their personalities to their (or our) worst propaganda, we erred by failing to see them as resourceful human beings like us. Just as we enjoyed reading Robinson Crusoe as children, so did our Vietnamese adversaries, either in Vietnamese or French (as French Indochina before their civil war began, they were bilingual). The other important lesson is that everything is connected. Daniel Defoe read the story of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish adventurer who was abandoned on an island in the Atlantic Ocean and who was rescued several years later. Had Defoe not embellished Selkirk’s story, turning him into the memorable character Robinson Crusoe, we would probably never have heard of Selkirk’s adventure. But as a literary classic written more than 200 years ago, it lives on around the world and captured the imaginations of the Viet Cong living in the Ho Chi Minh Trail as vividly as it did to each of us when as a youngster we thrilled to Robinson Crusoe’s resourcefulness, courage, and passion to live. .
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