Matthew Meselson

Matthew S. Meselson waited quietly in the car while female associates handled the delicate work of questioning families of people who had died of anthrax. The scientist had charmed, wrangled, and nagged politicians on two continents from 1979 to 1992 for permission to probe a strange outbreak of the disease in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk 1979. But just days before Meselson boarded a plane for Moscow to conduct the interviews, former President Boris Yeltsin, a Sverdlovsk official during the out

Written byPeg Brickley

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Meselson, now Thomas Dudley Cabot professor of the natural sciences at Harvard University, persisted in investigating the largest-known epidemic of deadly human inhalational anthrax. "We had no idea what would happen when we knocked on the door and said we want to talk about anthrax," he says. "Would [the female investigators] be kicked out? Nobody kicked them out. Everybody gave them tea and cake." The Meselson team members published their findings in 1994: The Soviet government had accidentally triggered the outbreak while developing biological weapons at a military microbiology facility in violation of an international agreement.

Now a trim, energetic man of 71, Meselson recounts the Sverdlovsk history as he fields phone calls from U.S. News and World Report, The New York Times, and from television news reporters from Germany and Switzerland. All seek scientific explanations of Bacillus anthracis. With British chemist and activist Julian Perry Robinson, Meselson cochairs the ...

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