The project is called “Insect Allies,” and it has sent chills down the spines of millions. The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it is simply a way to mutate the DNA of crops directly in fields, by using clouds of flying insects carrying engineered viruses as the delivery system. Skeptical critics sent up a hue and cry about it this week, alleging it was nothing short of biological weapons research hidden in plain sight.
On the other side of the world, a Japanese research university has started to investigate a doctoral dissertation from 1945. The reason for the new probe? It turns out the research was written by a confirmed member of the infamous bioweapons and human experimentation group called Unit 731. But more curiously, the paper describes the deliberately-diseased subjects’ verbal complaints of headaches – truly an amazing symptom for “monkeys” to exhibit.
Both screaming headlines, which swept the globe, became part of my science-journalism day job. And they have proved to me that the fruits of my night labors, particularly my forthcoming Pandamoon Publishing novel, must truly be “on to something.”
Project 137 is based on the true history of Unit 731 and the beginning of the U.S. biological warfare program in the 20th Century. Originally it was a pet project of obsessive research, involving about a dozen books. (Once onto something, I become a pitbull with a juicy bone, as any number of editors and politicians will tell you).
But tackling this strange history in a non-fiction form seemed to not be enough, I decided somewhere early on in the work.
So instead, it swallowed alive the novel I was halfheartedly working on at the time (one about a serial-killing nurse).
I recast the bioweapons history inspiration wholesale as a fictional project, setting the main action toward the end of the 21st Century, and connecting it to the 20th Century history with a good deal of embellishment and exaggeration of the timeline and nefarious swath of the government conspiracy.
Embellishment and exaggeration… or so I thought.
Instead, the historical threads and tendencies of government to take these forbidden, illegal weapons and exploit them seems to keep resurfacing – no matter how many Geneva Protocol-style agreements or high-flown pledges at international conferences are made over the course of decades. Every nation, it seems, has dirty secrets piled up in its laboratories – just in case the other guys and gals at the United Nations aren’t playing it straight with them (the same way they themselves aren’t playing it straight).
The Insect Allies program is especially fascinating. DARPA and its partner universities have blasted out information over the first two years of the program, and the press releases lauding “food security” and making crops able to withstand natural disasters were met with relatively scant scrutiny. The DARPA official heading up the project released a statement this week touting the value of the work – while managing to not explicitly deny the potential offensive capacity of our “bug friends.”
As a group of European scientists pointed out this week, however, insects have been used by militaries to spread disease on civilian populations for millennia, from ancient Greece onward.
One as-yet unproven theory brings this sordid insect-as-bioweapon history right into your own backyard. Some historians allege that it was the U.S. biological weapons research at Plum Island off the coast of Long Island which brought a tick-borne vector to most of North America in the second half of the 20th century. It’s one you may have running in your very veins right now. You see, Plum Island is right across Long Island Sound from Old Lyme, Connecticut – the site of the first cases of the namesake Lyme Disease in the 1970s. As far as conspiracy theories go, it’s one that doesn’t necessarily require a tinfoil hat.
Unit 731, of course, also used ticks as vectors (much like how Lyme is spread). Dropping millions of the tiny bloodsuckers on China’s civilian population centers from special ceramic bombs caused outbreaks of bubonic plague which lasted for decades. Death estimates vary from a few thousands to several hundred thousand.
And it is, of course, that very sordid Unit 731 history which begins from the very first sentence of Project 137: “They watched the east.”
Indeed, it seems at least some of us are still watching the east. One doctor who apparently used other human beings as his experimentation subjects, and who was rewarded for it with a long career and 73 years of unquestioning distinction, may not be called to task. Japan’s problems acknowledging its own horrific history has me thinking that if even they manage to start setting some 20th century wrongs right again, perhaps we here in the U.S. can do likewise heading into the future – insect allies notwithstanding.