Two weeks later, the 18-year-old soldier fell as sick as he'd ever been. Fever. Headache. Blurred vision. The desert wind had carried a waft of the debilitating disease known as Q fever, unleashed by Army scientists.
And Long, a human guinea pig by his own
consent, had helped prove that Americans were vulnerable to a new type
of weapon: the germ. That was more than 46 years ago. Long was part of
Operation Whitecoat, a set of 153 Army tests from 1954 to 1973 that mark
an extraordinary chapter in medical research history, one that probably
could not be repeated today. The Whitecoat experiments exposed hundreds
of healthy young men to debilitating diseases that might be used in
biological warfare. And the experiments were conducted on soldiers
recruited from a single religious group: the Seventh-day Adventist
Church.
Now the Whitecoats, who have received little public attention over the
years, are being lauded as heroes. By offering the first details of how
biological weapons move through the environment and affect the human
body, their experiments laid out many of the scientific insights that
officials need as they boost U.S. defenses against bioterrorism and
investigate the anthrax attacks that have killed at least four
Americans.
"I firmly believe that if those experiments had not shown our
vulnerability to biological warfare, there would be no biological
defense program today," said Col. Arthur Anderson, an Army
immunologist. "As a result, the services provided during this
outbreak of anthrax would be completely in the Dark Age."
But ethical concerns probably would rule out Operation Whitecoat today,
because the experiments would put volunteers at undue risk, said
Jonathan Moreno, a University of Virginia bioethics researcher.
Should those standards now be relaxed?
"Before Sept. 11, would we have found these tests more
objectionable than we do now? I think we would," Moreno said.
"We might be willing to live with more ambiguities and moral
compromises now, in the harsh realities of the 21st century."
No test subjects died during Operation Whitecoat, Army officials say.
The Army only now is conducting a study of possible long-term effects on
those exposed, asking the 1,000 or so volunteers who could be located to
fill out health questionnaires.
Like today, the nation was trying to grapple with the new and
frightening threat of biological warfare at the time Operation Whitecoat
was created.
After World War II, Americans learned that Japan had conducted extensive
germ attacks and experiments on humans, mostly in Japanese-occupied
areas of China. By some accounts, more than 10,000 people were infected.
But to U.S. scientists, biowarfare was an unproven threat. Once
released, biological agents seemed hard to control in battle. And it was
unclear how many casualties might result. Little was known about the
number of germs it took to harm someone, and whether they could be
released broadly, through an aerosol.
"We needed to fully understand the nature of aerosols and
infectivity in man," said William C. Patrick III, a former official
in the U.S. bioweapon program. "You could only get so much
information from an animal model."
And so, in 1954, the Army approached Adventist leaders about forming a
partnership.
Adventists had a special niche in the armed forces. Following the
commandment "Thou shalt not kill," many sought status as
conscientious objectors and became medics. That often put them on the
battlefield, but in life-saving roles.
Army scientists thought the well-educated Adventists, with their natural
interest in health matters, would make good test subjects. Moreover,
Adventists--at least those who followed church rules--did not smoke, or
drink alcohol or coffee.
"They were a cleaner piece of paper on which to work an
experiment," said Richard O. Stenbakken, who supervises Adventist
clergy in the armed forces. When testing an experimental drug or disease
agent, "you didn't have to ask if their reaction was because they
were drunk as a skunk on Saturday night."
In all, more than 2,100 young Adventist soldiers made the trip from Ft.
Sam Houston in Texas, where the Army conducted medic training, to serve
their tours of duty at the Army's biological warfare program at Ft.
Detrick, Md. Many would have ended up in Korea or Vietnam. Once at Ft.
Detrick, they were expected to volunteer for at least one experiment
while holding clerical, motor pool or other military jobs. But some took
part in more than one and a few participated in none.
"They gave us pretty good duty," said Lou Bitzer, 64, an auto
mechanic in St. Charles, Mo., who as a Whitecoat inhaled bacteria that
cause tularemia, a plague-like disease. "I never sat down to a
table where there wasn't a tablecloth or a flower on there."
Soon, Whitecoat experiments began laying out the details of biological
weaponry, the type of information that is becoming a staple today of
news reports about the anthrax attacks on the East Coast.
For example, tests such as the 1955 Q fever release in Utah established
that germs could be spread effectively through an aerosol.
Moreover, early tests showed that germs embedded into tiny particles are
most dangerous. Where large particles settle quickly to the ground,
small particles float invisibly on air currents, and they can be inhaled
deeply into a victim's lungs.
This lesson apparently was well considered by whoever mailed anthrax
bacteria to the Washington office of Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.
Anthrax spores in the letter were so small that they found their way
over the air currents to the nostrils of 28 people.
Operation Whitecoat also helped scientists use animals as proxies for
people in biological tests. The researchers exposed rhesus monkeys,
guinea pigs and Whitecoat volunteers to a nonlethal disease, such as Q
fever or tularemia. The tests showed how many more germs were needed to
make a person sick than each type of animal.
Scientists could then test lethal agents such as smallpox and plague on
animals, and make projections about what dose would be lethal for
humans. "This was a very, very important development," Patrick
said.
Although other methods were used to determine the lethal dose of
anthrax, the Whitecoat techniques laid out some of the principles that
made those calculations possible.
The data helped scientists understand how the agents would function as
weapons. Even after President Nixon renounced offensive biological
weapons in 1969, the same type of information was needed to develop
vaccines and medicines that defend against biological attack.
"This was the first work done of its kind," said Dr. C.J.
Peters, a former Army disease researcher who now leads the Center for
Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
"We'd still be arguing about these things if they hadn't done the
work."
Safety equipment also was developed during the Whitecoat experiments
that scientists still use when working with dangerous bacteria and
viruses, Anderson said. This includes biohazard suits and containment
chambers that control germs with air flows.
A central feature of the Whitecoat program was the "Eight
Ball," a huge, spherical chamber at Ft. Detrick, more than two
stories tall. Scientists would discharge bacteria or viruses into the
chamber, while volunteers wore breathing apparatus that allowed them to
draw the infected air.
Army officials say the Utah experiment in 1955, at the Army's Dugway
Proving Ground, was the only one in which germs were released in the
open air.
Long, now 65 and retired from the insurance business, recalled that he
and about 29 other volunteers were taken to a remote section of the
desert and stationed about a tenth of a mile from one another. At night,
they slept on the ground. Occasionally, a siren would blow, signaling
another release of the Q fever bacteria. The men were to wake up and
face into the breeze, breathing naturally.
But for the first five nights, a siren soon blared a second time,
indicating that the test was a scratch. Wind conditions were not right,
or something else had gone wrong.
On the sixth night, Long knew that the release had worked, even though
he never saw or felt the germs. Instead of a second siren blast,
soldiers drove up in gas masks to take the volunteers back to base. The
men showered, then stood under ultraviolet lights to kill any remaining
pathogens, then showered again. Quickly, they boarded a plane and were
flown to Ft. Detrick, where they were quarantined in a hospital.
Long worked as a lab assistant for the rest of his two years of duty.
Though he now is battling malignant melanoma and colon cancer, he does
not believe his Whitecoat participation is responsible.
"I don't know anybody who went in who felt later on that they had
been bamboozled," said Long, of Bullhead City, Ariz.
Whitecoat volunteers participated in a range of other experiments.
Instead of a likely tour of duty in Vietnam, Dean Rogers tested an
Eastern encephalitis vaccine in the early 1970s. Jonah Kumalae was part
of a study about how the body reacts to sand fly fever, a mosquito-borne
illness that bedeviled U.S. troops overseas.
In possibly the strangest experiment, in 1970, Gary Swanson and four
other men were placed in hospital beds, each separated by a curtain. On
each bed was an electronic console, covered with dials and lights.
When some of the lights stopped blinking, the men were to turn the dials
to get them flashing again. When other lights blinked, the men would
turn them off by adjusting other dials. A distracting white noise filled
the room.
The effect was something like trying to keep an aircraft running over
the roar of the engines.
Then the men were injected with sand fly fever and fell ill. Still, they
were asked to keep working, said Swanson, 55, of Silver Spring, Md.
Many soldiers were exposed to serious diseases, officials say, but none
were infected with anthrax or other life-threatening illnesses.
The Army and the church also say Operation Whitecoat was a model of the
proper use of gaining consent from volunteers in medical research.
Volunteers were asked to give consent to participate at several
stages--before they joined the program, and then twice each time they
volunteered for an experiment.
"The procedures were state of the art then and would be
today," said Anderson, who leads the medical research review board
for Army experiments at Ft. Detrick. He offered one exception: "I
don't think they would do aerosol studies today. The lung is a fragile
organ. So many conditions can trigger respiratory distress."
The program ended along with the military draft in 1973. The church
still is proud of its involvement, saying it led to vaccines and
treatments that have saved thousands of lives.
Anderson called the Whitecoats "real heroes" for taking on the
risks of the experiments.
Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at the University of Pennsylvania, said the
Whitecoat tests would not meet current standards for medical research,
including those set by the Food and Drug Administration. And he does not
believe current fears about bioterrorism justify changing those
guidelines.
"We do not expose people to conditions that could be lethal or have
high risk," Caplan said. "We do the best we can with animals.
. . . To bend the rules would make it almost impossible to distinguish
between what we're for and what the other guys are for."
Caplan also questioned the Whitecoat recruitment procedures, on grounds
that there is an element of coercion in any offer from an officer to a
soldier to volunteer for research.
Still, many of the Whitecoats were grateful for the chance to join.
"Those of us who went into the program were very fortunate,"
said Rogers, now 54 and living in Silver Spring. "We wanted to
serve our country. But some of the friends who went to Vietnam didn't
come back. The friends I had in the Whitecoats are still around."