On June 6, 1966, a group of US Army investigators discreetly broke dozens of glass vials on the New York subway linesk. Each of them contained 175 grams of a bacteria called Bacillus subtilis; that is to say, 87 billion microorganisms per blister. Their mission was simple: smash the glass containers in places that would facilitate the spread of the bacteria.
Later, another group of researchers equipped with machinery to analyze the air would be in charge of seeing how, when and how much the microorganism was able to spread through the bowels of New York City. It was not the first time that the US Army did something like this and it would not be the last. During the decades, from 1949 to 1969, the country’s largest subway network became the world’s largest bacteriological warfare laboratory. Without anyone knowing.
More bad years will come and they will make us more blind
Victor Rodriguez —
In those two decades, 239 experiments were performed in which researchers used bacteria to simulate biological wars. Bacteria that were considered harmless at the time, but which, as pointed out Rutgers University (NJ) bioterrorism specialist Leonard Cole, “Today they are considered pathogens” and we know that they can cause health problems. The Bacillus subtilisTo use the same example, it is not usually considered a pathogen, but it tends to infect food and can lead to food poisoning.
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Cole is the author of a book, ‘Clouds of Secrecy: The Army’s Germ Warfare Tests Over Populated Areas‘, which analyzes all these experiments and in which he explains that, although the New York Subway it was not the only objective, yes it was one of the most “shocking“in terms of affected. More than one million people exposed between June 6 and 10, 1966, according to the army’s own estimates.
They are not strange figures if we look at the conclusions of the work. For example, if the blisters broke upon the arrival of the train, the study’s findings indicated that it took between four and 13 minutes to expose all passengers on the platform to the bacteria. What’s more: five minutes after the bacteria were released in a specific station, it could already be detected in neighboring stations.
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The program ended with a news tip in the early 1970s and in 1975, the United States Congress itself called on scientists to testify. It was then that he justified the study for a very simple reason: its conclusions made it clear that “A more dangerous agent would have put the city out of the game in the blink of an eye”.
This is a good example of how far we have come in terms of research ethics. It is not necessary to remember that at that same time, between 32 and 72, the ‘experimento Tuskegee‘of the United States Public Health Service kept six hundred African-American sharecroppers with syphilis untreated with the sole intention of better studying the natural progression of this disease. There were many more and much worse cases than those of the New York Subway. That is why it is good to remember that These ethical standards are not mere bureaucracy, they are a matter of humanity.
Image | Martin Adams
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