This is such a clickbait. Everybody reading that title imagines that they tested spreading of some contagious disease (and put it in the same category as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256831) - but what was tested was how the bacteria was moved by the air in the subway. They tried a common soil bacteria that they believed was harmless (and which wikipedia says "is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans").
"""And while the people who conducted these experiments did so under the belief that the bacterial species they used were harmless, it has since been revealed that they can cause health problems."""
The bacteria used there was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis "This species is commonly found in the upper layers of the soil and B. subtilis is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans."
We live surrounded by bacteria, an probably often by Bacillus subtilis - because it is a common bacteria found in soil.
It's not clickbait. It's completely unacceptable to perform biological experiments on people without their consent. It doesn't matter if you think the bacteria is harmless, it's an extreme violation of human rights to test on a unknowing citizens.
Presuming you have thought your argument through and can defend it justly: You better not fucking change my desired PM 2.5 or <insert other environmental factor>.
But this wasn’t a biological experiment on the citizens, which is the issue. It was an experiment to test the spread of material in a subway system.
The article is claiming without support that this was pathogenic biological testing on people, which is not the case.
Let’s assume instead they used a harmless chemical tracer. Would that still count as a violation? What about releasing flour through ducts?
The issue with the article that makes it click bait is they are making a claim of “germ warfare”, insinuating that citizens were exposed to dangerous infectious agents which is simply untrue.
If the article approaches the subject honestly, and then question wether such action was ethical, even using a harmless substance, that would be one thing. But as it’s written, the article pushes misinformation, which is a shame, because it’s clearly an important subject.
I'm not sure why you are leaving out the fact that they also used Serratia marcescens, which is considered pathogenic[1].
As for the other bacteria, what they used was not the "common soil bacteria" Bacillus subtilis, but Bacillus atrophaeus[2] which was known as Bacillus globigii at the time. I think this is the only clear factual mistake I can find in the article.
The article also claimed that Bacillus globigii is now considered a pathogen, but I can't find much information about it outside of the referenced book. I'll leave it to someone else to weigh in on this one.
I think the more click-baitey aspect of the article title is that they didn't specify that this occurred 60–80 years ago; it's phrased as if this test recently happened. The US defense agencies today sure aren't perfect, but they certainly aren't this reckless anymore. The fear during the first few decades of the Cold War instigated a lot of poor moral decisions by the US Government that can't just be extrapolated to the organization today.
Agree. Article contains misinformation and should be flagged. In fact the bacteria in question is often and readily consumed. Not to mention the fact that we are awash in bacteria all the time.
The source stating that the bacteria are considered pathogens, is selling his book. The link to the National Academy of Sciences is also broken.
Also most bacteria can be opportunistic pathogens, depending on the situation, even the ones in our gut.
So while the ethics can be deemed questionable, the article presents the situation as if harm was certainly done, when in the most likely case not a single person was adversely effected.
It talks about how the CIA worked with Dr. Mary Sherman and Dr. Alton Ochsner to develop a cancer causing bio-weapon intended to give Castro cancer, but ultimately became part of the plot to assassinate JFK when that fell through.
Jeff Kaye is doing great work digging through the archives about US Biological Weapons (BW) use during the Korean War (on the north and on China), and has made a few notable recent discoveries. I recommend reading his work.
I think the takeaway is that the CIA doesn't do anything nefarious nowadays. After all those sizeable reforms and firings, the CIA is now a completely benign entity. After those famous reforms that they had. It is now for instance illegal for the CIA to have psyops propaganda campaigns targeting American civilians for instance. Thank god for all those reforms that they have had. Those good old CIA reformed fellas.
I also agree that the CIA has been completely reformed and all wrongdoing was in the past; it really doesn't make any sense to examine their conduct too closely today, that just makes everyone's life worse. I would also like to note that myself and my family are not under duress but unfortunately cannot make physical appearances at the moment.
The CIA is not an independent organization. They are directed by the president and have congressional oversight. Keep in mind thar these "nefarious" programs, as far as I know were not hidden from congressional oversight. This stuff just isn't an election time issue.
Radiological testing on the now infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing complex:
[1]
> Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children.
> Residents in some areas of [St. Louis] noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954,” Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor writes in Behind the Fog, an examination of the United States’s Cold War-era radiological weapons programs. “Large puffs of a billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices. The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow-moving vehicles.”
But what's the connection between radioactive contamination and the failure of Pruitt-Igoe? Wikipedia doesn't seem to mention any contamination issues, but says that deteriorating building maintenance and social conditions (crime, poverty, segregation, etc) were to blame. Radiation didn't vandalize the elevators or mug residents in the hallways.
They wanted to know the long term consequences of syphilis. At a time when we had a readily available cure for it. What do you suppose the value of this study was other than to learn how to weaponize a disease?
Regarding MKUltra - the only reason we know what we know about it, after the CIA director directed in 1973 that all documents on it be destroyed, is that some of the MKUltra documents were mislabeled and not destroyed. They were discovered in a 1977 FOIA request.
Remember when the CIA spent six years putting together six thousand page report on the torture it conducted and then "lost" it right before it was to be delivered and then "found" it again once it was clear that they weren't going to get away with that lame excuse?
> Horrific, yet sadly not the only time the US government has used bio weapons on their own population.
Hyperbole. You are saying that the US government used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis (the bacterium in question) to attack the US population, which is clearly an exaggeration on several fronts.
I’m waiting for the articles where people are convicted of crimes…
I won’t hold my breath, for justice anyway, just for protection from my government experimenting on me without consent while policing themselves and accountable to nobody.
Beyond quaint; I think a lot of people born after genuinely find it hard to comprehend the mindset. (Maybe we're just still in cultural shock from winning. If we won so handily it couldn't have been big of a deal, was it?)
I encountered this with a friend when discussing MKUltra recently. He was hung-up on the why. But why? Why did they do it? Well, despite the reputation for its straightlacedness slapped on the decade after the fact, the 1950s were actually a rather wonky time culturally in America. (Flying saucer madness... hm. Sounds familiar.) A time when a lot of rather sensible people were at least open to the possibility of far-out ideas like telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and brain reprogramming. And these same sensible people were lying awake at night in genuine terror that the Soviets would develop telepathic brainwashing agents before red-blooded Americans did. Their motivations, as bizarre as it seems to us today, were quite straightforward.
There was real and actual danger to the millions of people killed and maimed in the proxy wars between the US and USSR. But aside from a few acute crises, there was very little danger to civilian Americans or Russians living their day-to-day lives. Arguably, there is far more danger today due to gun violence, which has killed vastly more Americans than Russia ever did.
On that subject, I cannot recommend enough an episode of a Lawfare-related podcast (ChinaTalk) called "Hoover, Communism, and the FBI" [1], which explore the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the zeigeist of the early twentieth century, and an revisiting the "red scare" in light of the since declassified information of Russian spying networks on US soil.
Related to this is the "Venona project" [2], where US agency could break the encryption of old soviet telegraph, and learn a great deal on soviet spy network.
Well, they couldn't exactly run realistic and viable computer models in the years of 1949-1969... so they took a harmless, commonly used model organism, and conducted tests.
Something science teachers do as a simple experiment now (with various substances), something Mark Rober even did on his own channel with 'Glo Germ' powder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5-dI74zxPg
My all time favorite is still when we tested chemo-like AIDs drugs on foster kids without guardians. Side-effects to include:
"rashes, vomiting and sharp drops in infection-fighting blood cells as they tested antiretroviral drugs to suppress AIDS or other medicines to treat secondary infections."
I'm surprised no one has mentioned Operation Sea-Spray:
Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret biological warfare experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California, in order to determine how vulnerable a city like San Francisco may be to a bioweapon attack
People got sick and one person died, all from bacteria they thought to be harmless at the time.
"This test was one of at least 239 experiments conducted by the military in a 20-year "germ warfare testing program" that went on from 1949 to 1969. These experiments that used bacteria to simulate biological weapons were conducted on civilians without their knowledge or consent."
Readit News
This is such a clickbait. Everybody reading that title imagines that they tested spreading of some contagious disease (and put it in the same category as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36256831) - but what was tested was how the bacteria was moved by the air in the subway. They tried a common soil bacteria that they believed was harmless (and which wikipedia says "is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans").
"""And while the people who conducted these experiments did so under the belief that the bacterial species they used were harmless, it has since been revealed that they can cause health problems."""
This is such a weasel language, everything can cause health problems (is water harmless? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_intoxication).
The bacteria used there was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis "This species is commonly found in the upper layers of the soil and B. subtilis is thought to be a normal gut commensal in humans."
We live surrounded by bacteria, an probably often by Bacillus subtilis - because it is a common bacteria found in soil.
Raising the humidity level 5% to see if it reduces coughing?
Reducing harmful ozone in the air to see if it reduces breathing issues?
Bringing a puppy on the subway to see if riders smile more?
Presumably these are all OK without getting consent of everyone on the subway. Or are these violations of human rights as well?
I mean I suppose it all comes down to whether there are any expected harms? Or no?
Be careful.
The article is claiming without support that this was pathogenic biological testing on people, which is not the case.
Let’s assume instead they used a harmless chemical tracer. Would that still count as a violation? What about releasing flour through ducts?
The issue with the article that makes it click bait is they are making a claim of “germ warfare”, insinuating that citizens were exposed to dangerous infectious agents which is simply untrue.
If the article approaches the subject honestly, and then question wether such action was ethical, even using a harmless substance, that would be one thing. But as it’s written, the article pushes misinformation, which is a shame, because it’s clearly an important subject.
As for the other bacteria, what they used was not the "common soil bacteria" Bacillus subtilis, but Bacillus atrophaeus[2] which was known as Bacillus globigii at the time. I think this is the only clear factual mistake I can find in the article.
The article also claimed that Bacillus globigii is now considered a pathogen, but I can't find much information about it outside of the referenced book. I'll leave it to someone else to weigh in on this one.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serratia_marcescens#Pathogenic...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_atrophaeus
Can you quote something from the article about Serratia marcescens? I cannot find it in the article.
Deleted Comment
2-1) if 1) is not okay, how it becomes okay with bacteria, OR,
2-2) if 1) is okay, what?
2-2) It's ok to infect people with Covid so it's clearly ok to hit em with water. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_challenge_study
So is E. coli.
The source stating that the bacteria are considered pathogens, is selling his book. The link to the National Academy of Sciences is also broken.
Also most bacteria can be opportunistic pathogens, depending on the situation, even the ones in our gut.
So while the ethics can be deemed questionable, the article presents the situation as if harm was certainly done, when in the most likely case not a single person was adversely effected.
The most well known examples are MKUltra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MKUltra
And the Tuskegee Syphilis Study: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_Syphilis_Study
If you want to look at something slightly more speculative, I recommend Dr. Mary's Monkey: https://www.amazon.com/Dr-Marys-Monkey-Cancer-Causing-Assass...
It talks about how the CIA worked with Dr. Mary Sherman and Dr. Alton Ochsner to develop a cancer causing bio-weapon intended to give Castro cancer, but ultimately became part of the plot to assassinate JFK when that fell through.
https://twitter.com/jeff_kaye/status/1657318979378225153
Thankfully, far less "let's test on people", but Dugway, Utah has quite a history of testing and mass animal slaughters from fallout clouds and such.
[1]
> Pruitt-Igoe was not proof of a Cold War logic; it did not display the “inevitable” failures of planned housing. It was an organized sabotage—and a clandestine site for radiological weapons experimentation. These studies were conducted on innocent and unconsenting civilians, who were mostly poor, mostly Black, and mostly women and children.
> Residents in some areas of [St. Louis] noticed unusual activity in the days and nights throughout 1953 and into 1954,” Dr. Lisa Martino-Taylor writes in Behind the Fog, an examination of the United States’s Cold War-era radiological weapons programs. “Large puffs of a billowy powder were sprayed into the air by strangers in passing vehicles affixed with spray devices. The luminous powder lingered in the air behind the slow-moving vehicles.”
[1] - https://proteanmag.com/2022/11/28/pruitt-igoe-a-black-commun...
This one did not involve deliberately infecting anyone, the subjects in the study already had syphilis.
That doesn't make it better, but it isn't a good example of the government "using bio weapons."
Deleted Comment
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cia-torture/cia-says-...
Hyperbole. You are saying that the US government used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_subtilis (the bacterium in question) to attack the US population, which is clearly an exaggeration on several fronts.
https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/homeland-security-depl... ("Non-Toxic Gas to Be Deployed in 100+ NYC Locations, Including Transit, In Bio-Attack Readiness Test")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28889222 (5 comments)
I’m waiting for the articles where people are convicted of crimes…
I won’t hold my breath, for justice anyway, just for protection from my government experimenting on me without consent while policing themselves and accountable to nobody.
I encountered this with a friend when discussing MKUltra recently. He was hung-up on the why. But why? Why did they do it? Well, despite the reputation for its straightlacedness slapped on the decade after the fact, the 1950s were actually a rather wonky time culturally in America. (Flying saucer madness... hm. Sounds familiar.) A time when a lot of rather sensible people were at least open to the possibility of far-out ideas like telepathy, extra-sensory perception, and brain reprogramming. And these same sensible people were lying awake at night in genuine terror that the Soviets would develop telepathic brainwashing agents before red-blooded Americans did. Their motivations, as bizarre as it seems to us today, were quite straightforward.
On that subject, I cannot recommend enough an episode of a Lawfare-related podcast (ChinaTalk) called "Hoover, Communism, and the FBI" [1], which explore the life of J. Edgar Hoover, the zeigeist of the early twentieth century, and an revisiting the "red scare" in light of the since declassified information of Russian spying networks on US soil.
Related to this is the "Venona project" [2], where US agency could break the encryption of old soviet telegraph, and learn a great deal on soviet spy network.
[1] https://www.lawfareblog.com/chinatalk-hoover-communism-and-f...
[2] https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-project-venona
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Something science teachers do as a simple experiment now (with various substances), something Mark Rober even did on his own channel with 'Glo Germ' powder https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5-dI74zxPg
Operation Sea-Spray was a 1950 U.S. Navy secret biological warfare experiment in which Serratia marcescens and Bacillus globigii bacteria were sprayed over the San Francisco Bay Area in California, in order to determine how vulnerable a city like San Francisco may be to a bioweapon attack
People got sick and one person died, all from bacteria they thought to be harmless at the time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea-Spray