Monthly Archives: September 2006

Proteus bacteria (in green)

Biological warfare is nothing new to the human race. Attempts to use disease to bring down enemies date as far back as we have detailed histories of warfare. Even when the mechanisms for the spread of disease were poorly understood, biological warfare was popular. Dropping cadavers into an enemy’s water supply was common. Some inventive Tartars even tried catapulting victims of bubonic plague over the walls of the city of Kaffa (modern day Feodesia) during a siege.

More recently, several European nations spread smallpox–inadvertently and otherwise–among Native Americans, and later attempted to use biological warfare to their advantage during the first World War. Only after World War I did the 1925 Geneva Protocol attempt to limit biological warfare, with mixed success.

In all this time however, every attempt at biological warfare has been essentially offensive. The idea has always been to incapacitate or kill the enemy. Except once, in Poland, during World War II, where a pair of quick-thinking doctors used a little-known organism to keep the Nazis at bay.

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Picture from the Los Angeles TimesIn early 1942 the United States was still reeling from the Attack on Pearl Harbor. They’d declared war upon the Empire of Japan, but had thus far fought unsuccessfully in every engagement. The West Coast was wary, and prepared for a seemingly inevitable invasion. Cities from Seattle to San Diego had invasion plans including things from air-raid sirens to blackout procedures. Nerves were drawn taut, and there was no shortage of false alarms.

On the night of 24 February 1942 the Air Raid sirens sounded, and the Coast Guard Anti-aircraft guns were ordered to “green alert,” putting them in readiness to fire. From the time the battle began until it ended in the early hours of the morning, thousands of people had witnessed the search lights around Los Angeles fix on a target hovering above the city, and anti-aircraft rounds detonate in the sky. Reputable news agencies reported the attack, complete with eye-witness accounts. But the Japanese claim that they never attacked, and there was no wreckage to indicate that anyone actually did. These conflicting accounts cast uncertainty on the nature of the unidentified aircraft that caused the Battle of Los Angeles.

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The year was 1957. The power of the atom had been unleashed upon the world. Technology–along with just about everything else–was booming. Safe, plentiful nuclear energy promised to be too cheap to meter, and radioactive waste seemed only a minor concern. It was an age of optimism and naiveté; a time of action without consequences.

Though man was the master of the Earth, only once had he managed to explore beyond the confines of the atmosphere, in the form of a beachball-sized spacecraft called Sputnik. Werner von Braun’s rocket men had drawn up plans for spacecraft that would launch humans into orbit, but even then it was clear that inefficient chemical rockets would allow only a few to enter space; the rest of mankind would be mere spectators. Fresh from their success with the atomic bomb, a small team of Manhattan Project physicists gathered to try and change all that. Working in secret within the brand new Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now called DARPA), they designed and tested an enormously ambitious nuclear spaceship concept that would have made everything the Soviets and NASA were doing seem like hobby rockets in comparison. The codename was Project Orion.

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From childhood, we are taught that the human body has five senses. I’m sure we can all recite them: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. This list has remained unchanged since the time of Aristotle. To most people, a “sixth sense” refers either to one outside the realm of the scientific, or one that simply does not exist in most humans.

However, ask a neurologist how many senses the human body has, and you might get a surprising answer. Many identify nine or more senses- some listing as many as twenty-one. The first category of senses is the “special” senses, including the familiar sight, hearing, taste, and smell. The second category is made up of the somatic senses, which we usually lump under “touch”- including our perception of pressure, heat, and pain. The third category, however, is not nearly as well-known. These are the interoceptive senses- those that deal with data originating in the body itself.

It is fairly obvious what happens to a person when a sense fails. Many members of society are missing one or more senses. It is common knowledge that blindness is the absence of sight. Deafness, of hearing. Everyone knows what it’s like to lose taste and smell as well; this loss accompanies every head cold. But what happens when the body loses knowledge of itself is a far stranger occurrence.

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CyanobacteriaAbout two and one-half billion years ago, life on Earth was still in its infancy. Complex organisms such as plants and animals had not yet appeared, but the planet was teeming with microscopic bacteria which thrived in the temperate and nutrient-rich environment. Greenhouse methane lingered in the atmosphere and trapped the sun’s warmth, creating a climate very accommodating to the stew of microbes life that made their home on primitive Earth.

But a billion years of bacterial evolutionary progress was soon stunted by a catastrophic global event. Geologists find no signs of a great meteor impact nor a volcanic eruption, but they have uncovered the unmistakable geologic scars of rapid worldwide climate change. Average temperatures, which were previously comparable to our present climate, plummeted to minus 50 degrees Celsius and brought the planet into its first major ice age. This environmental shift triggered a massive die-off which threatened to extinguish all life on Earth, and paleoclimatologists have good reason to believe that this world-changing event was unwittingly caused by some of the planet’s own humble residents: bacteria.

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