APPENDIX I.-THE DOOMSDAY BUG? (Psychologically induced inhibition of free discussion provides a cloak of security for biological warfare.)1 The recent petition, sponsored by seven Nobel Prizewinners with the backing of other eminent American scientists, calling on President. Johnson to review U.S. policy on chemical and biological warfare is a grim and salutary warning. It should be accompanied by the impressive and disturbing article which appears in this issue. Reading them the petition and the article-one is reminded of a lecture given by Frederic Joliot-Curie 20 years ago. He was still "in the dog-house" because in 1940 he had refused for scientific (not, as his detractors suggested, ideological) reasons to suppress nuclear research findings. British and American scientists, by a self-imposed censorship, had proposed a moratorium on the publication of papers on nuclear fission and chain-reaction because it would help the Germans to produce the atom bomb. Joliot-Curie alone demurred. France fell. He remained behind as a leader of resistance to the Nazis. The Allies, behind sky-high walls of secrecy, produced the bomb and dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On this postwar occasion Joliot-Curie extended the logic of nuclear security to biological security in a frightening paper called "The Secret War". He pointed out that such a war need never be declared. It could go. on insidiously for years with only the hidden aggressors knowing what was happening. Then gradually the successive crop failures, human epidemics (unexplained because the organisms were not "in the books") and a catastrophic fall in the birthrate (because women were being sterilized through the water supply) would reveal the takeover bid. The French Nobel Prizewinner was arguing for full scientific disclosure to alert mankind. In the Orwellian double-think of military security, however, his arguments are used to justify something quite different. "Ah, yes," the modern argument runs, "the Enemy is scheming up all kinds of horrors. We have to think what he may be thinking, carry out researches to find out what he may be finding out to get the antidotes, of course. And, in the process, we will find out things he has not found out but that is Top Secret because we might have to use them in a pre-emptive biological strike. That would not be aggression because we, as the Goodies, would just be acting in anticipatory self-defence against the Baddy . . ." Dr. Brock Chisholm, who had been major-general in the Royal Canadian Medical Corps, was nearly black-balled from the post of Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) because at the Waldorf-Astoria, New York, before his appointment, he made a speech disclosing and denouncing biological warfare. He gave chapter and verse for botulin and how it was proposed to use it during World War 2, and cited defoliants, sterilants and other agents. He was attacked for breaking security. 1 Guest editorial by Lord Ritchie Calder in Science Journal, November 1966, p. 3. Most of the general principles and possibilities in biological warfare are coffee-table conversation pieces among scientists. They know the implications of DNA, molecular biology and gene manipulation, but they know also that intensive work on the practical applications of such knowledge is going on in the "defence" laboratories or under contract. A curious inhibition sets in at this point. Their own academic thinking is not classified. They can only guess at the military applications, but a shrewd inquirer will deduce these applications from the areas of discussion which scientists avoid. This is psychologically induced censorship. It goes further than that. In disarmament conferences scientists talk intensively, if frustratingly, about nuclear weapons but only rarely about chemical and biological weapons. Recently, at a world congress, I was asked to cut from my paper a whole section on biological warfare, not on grounds of security but because "we have enough to worry us without that". That is true but this sleep o' nights is a dangerous attitude. A WHO study group once defined apathy as "the fear of being afraid". That way lies neuroses. It is better to have rational fears than to have irrational fears. Moreover, while discussion is being suppressed or evaded the Sorcerer's Apprentices are brewing up unspeakable mischief. I once asked an American scientist in "defence biology" what they were looking for. He said, "A cure for metabolism." The nuclear secrecy exploded with the cataclysmic violence of The Bomb. The ultimate biological weapon is still under wraps. The Doomsday Bug? 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