Chemist With A Conscience

Matthew Meselson is catalyzed whenever he sees ‘misguided’ national policies CAMBRIDGE, MASS--At age 19, future Harvard biochemist and noted activist Matthew Meselson dropped out of college, went to live in Paris, and pondered forging a career as a Freudian analyst ot na- tions. With youthful hubris, he thought he might be able to explain the genesis of wars and other avoidable human catastrophes by scrutinizing the actions of governments past and present through the prism of modern psychiatry. When he resumed what was to become a peripatetic path through higher education a year later, Meselson chose chemistry over psychiatry. He had decided, he says, that it is easier to "establish truth in chemistry than [in] psychiatry." But he remained convinced that all governments, the United States notably included, display certain kinds of perverse behavior that are predictable, given the foibles of human nature. As an example, he says: "It occurred to me that looking back over 2,000 years of recorded history, I haven’t found a single government that, while still in office, says ‘we were wrong about anything important." Meselson still has the hubris to tell governments that they are, indeed, occasionally wrong. For he is one of a unique breed of scientist— an activist who is willing to put his name and reputation on the line to tilt against what he sees as misguided policies. He was one of the first scientists to speak out against the Vietnam War. He has been a persistent and powerful critic of the U.S. government’s recent positions on biological weapons. And in his most famous battle, he proved to almost everyone except Reagan administration officials that allegations of biological warfare in the Far East are nothing more than a load of, well, bee feces. His motivation is simple. As a scientist, he says, he has a responsibility to seek out the truth. "It’s very dangerous to make policy on the basis of incorrect data." Meselson activism has earned him the enmity of many in the Reagan administration, who deride his theory that alleged biological weapons are simply bee feces as "the great bee caper." But he has won praise from fellow scientists, both for his willingness to speak out and for the quality of the research he conducts to back up his claims. Meselson "stuck his neck out" on the bee feces flap, says Harvard biochemist John Edsall, "but I think he’s established his case quite decisively." Last month, the dapper and indefatigable Meselson was at it again, hosting a series of meetings with three top-ranking Soviet scientists from a biological weapons plant who challenged the Reagan administration’s view of an anthrax outbreak nine years ago in the Soviet city of Sverdlosk. The Soviets say that 64 people died and 30 others became seriously ill in the incident, which they blame on contaminated food. The U.S. government puts the toll much higher and fingers an accidental release of anthrax spores from the plant as the culprit. The outbreak, the government says, proves that the Soviets have been violating the 1972 ban on biological weapons. But Meselson doesn’t buy the U.S. accusations. The Harvard scientist had been invited to act as an outside consultant to the CIA’s investigation of the incident; while he remains concerned about the plant, Meselson is skeptical of the administration’s view of the incident itself. He brought over the three Soviet scientists so they could offer the first detailed explanations in this country of who got sick and why. In meetings in Washington and Cambridge, the Soviets said that none of the victims contracted pulmonary anthrax, which would have resulted from inhaling spores. Instead, 79 people suffered from an intestinal form of anthrax and 17 others developed the disease on their skin. Nothing more sinister then the butchering of anthrax contaminated animals, and the subsequent sale of the meat on the black market—lay behind the outbreak, the Soviets said. Meselson is satisfied with the Soviet explanation, and other U.S. researchers who attended the briefings said they felt likewise. But the government—naturally, Meselson would say—has not admitted that it could be wrong. "As long as Dr. Meselson wants to bring Soviet scientists to the U.S. to talk about the bad-meat theory, he will continue to make headlines," grumbles State Department spokesman David Lambert. But the Soviet explanation, he says, "just doesn’t conform to what we’ve learned." How so? Lambert says he can’t say, since what he knows is based on classified intelligence data. To Meselson such references to secret inside information are all too familiar—and frustrating. He notes that in the name of secrecy, the government failed for two years to report the results of an internal investigation that cast doubt on its accusations of Soviet biological warfare. During a recent discussion of the anthrax affair one night with a group of Harvard undergraduates, he castigated the tendency to take a "we know things you don’t approach to controversies. Calling for less secrecy, he observed wryly, As Socrates said, ‘There are those of us who know and then there’s the rest of us.' References to Socrates, Plato, and Homer frequently creep into Meselson’s conversations, evidence of a wide ranging mind that helps make the biochemist such a potent political force. They trace back to a classical education in the humanities that Meselson received as an undergraduate at the University of Chicago in the late 1940s. He arrived there intending to study science but discovered that the school offered no undergraduate science degree. "I guess I didn’t read the catalog very well," he recalls. But he doesn’t regret it. After three years, Meselson left Chicago for Paris, then attended Caltech briefly before getting his liberal arts degree from Chicago in 1951. Following a year as a physics graduate student at Berkeley, Meselson was poised to return to Chicago again when fate intervened in the form of Linus Pauling. Meselson met the eminent chemist through a friendship with Pauling’s son Peter. One day, during a pool party at the Pauling home, Meselson had a conversation that would change his life. "I told Pauling I was going to the University of Chicago to study biophysics," he recalls. "He looked astonished and said, ‘But that’s a lot of baloney. Why don’t you come to Caltech and be my graduate student?" Pauling helped shape the young Meselson, both as a scientist and as a political activist. The elder chemist once noticed that his graduate student was spending more time trying to arrange a conference on the effects of nuclear radiation than he was on his research. "Liam looked over his glasses at me and said he had two stories to tell," says Meselson. The first was about Socrates. "He said Socrates was once asked, ‘What is the right activity for an old men?’ and Socrates said, ‘Politics.’ Then he was asked ‘What is the right activity for a young man?’ Socrates said, "Science." The second story. was about the mathematician Carl Gauss. Pauling told the young Meselson that Gauss was once asked why he was so good at mathematics. "And Gauss replied, ‘Because I never do anything but mathematics,’ Pauling said. "Then Linus pushed his glasses back up," Meselson recalls, still bemused by the gesture, and said, ‘Well, Matt, it’s been nice talking to you.’ Meselson took the lesson to heart. Since he was a comparative youngster, he buried himself in science, thesis work in x-ray crystallography, and got his Ph.D. in 1957, after which he collaborated with biologist Frank Stahl on a number of pioneering molecular biology experiments. And by 1963, he was a tenured faculty member at Harvard with the kind of academic credentials that gained him entree into the world of government and high-level security clearances. At 33 he was also, he decided, finally old enough for politics. Hired as a summer consultant to the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, he shared an office with Princeton physicist Freeman Dyson. Meselson chose to concentrate on biological warfare, then an area in which the U.S. was waging a research and development contest with the Soviet Union. According to Dyson’s written remembrances, Meselson’s experiences led him to vow to expose the, idiocy, of U.S. politics on biological warfare. Three things needed to be done, Meselson decided. The U.S. had to abolish its own biological warfare program; it had to build up an international attitude that you do not use the life sciences for hostile purposes; and it had to push hard for a treaty to ban biological weapons. Meselson tirelessly lobbied McGeorge Bundy and other White House officials. He and Harvard colleague John Edsall circulated a petition signed by 5,000 scientists urging President Lyndon Johnson to end the development and stockpiling of biological and chemical weapons. When Nixon became president, Meselson prepared a key position paper. The efforts helped lead to Nixon’s 1969 decision to renounce biological weapons; they also figured in the signing and ratification of the Biological Weapons Convention in 1972. Gadfly and iconoclast though he was, and still is, Meselson had until this time worked within the system, functioning as a consultant to a succession of administrations and maintaining his top security clearance along the way. But he was thrust into a new role after September 13, 1981, when then Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviets of using biological weapons—poisonous substances named mycotoxins, in Southeast Asia. At the time, Meselson’s only knowledge of the issue came from a CIA telephone call inviting him to attend a briefing to be held later that month on yellow rain. He did not know that the evidence consisted of one leaf and stem. But he did know that mycotoxins are produced naturally around the world by fungi—and he told that to NBC News when asked to comment on Haig's charges. After the interview aired, Meselson’s invitation to the briefing was canceled—and his finely tuned detector of government idiocy was aroused. "I felt that they had taken a long step down a tunnel," he says, from which it would be hard to retreat. The result was a big step for Meselson himself, a headlong plunge into a dispute over yellow rain that would consume much of his attention for the next few years, make him into a media figure, and cost him his security clearance. After Haig’s speech, various laboratories that analyzed samples of yellow rain found little mycotoxins in areas supposedly attacked by the Soviets, but lots of pollen. Why pollen? His curiosity piqued, Meselson organized a conference in Cambridge. The discussion led one participant to contact Yale honeybee expert Thomas Seeley. From the government’s description of yellow rain, Seeley said, it sounded remarkably similar to the pollen-filled feces that bees drop during periodic “cleansing flights." A month later, Seeley and Meselson unveiled the bee feces hypothesis at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The response of government officials was scathing. But Meselson and Seeley were undaunted. With the help of a grant from the MacArthur Foundation, they traveled through Thailand with a Thai bee researcher in March 1984, collecting bee feces. They were even caught in a shower of the stuff in the northern village of Khua Moong. In addition, Meselson acquired declassified reports of government investigators through the Freedom of Information Act. The documents, described by Meselson, British researcher Julian Robin- son, and Boston college sociology professor Jeanne Guillemin (Meselson’s wife), in Foreign Policy last September, showed that many “eyewitness” accounts of yellow rain attacks were contradictory, unreliable, or based on hearsay. There has been "massive withholding" of evidence contrary to the government’s position, Meselson concludes. These days, Meselson has the air of a man whose cause has been vindicated. After a strenuous battle, he has even won his security clearance back. "I’m sorry that I’ve been seen as such a critic, because I really do have a lot of love for our system," he says. "But a government becomes corrupt if it is allowed to decide first what it wants to do and then has some scientist justify it." He also realizes that his path isn’t for everyone. "I don’t think every scientist has a responsibility to do what I’ve done," he says. But for those who do take up causes, he has a word of caution. "I think all that a scientist can really do is present his data, be willing to change his own view, and realize that, in arguments with political authorities, it’s very different from a scientific debate." Karen Klinger is a freelance science writer based in Cambridge, Mass.

Chemist With A Conscience

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