Abstract

The Scope of Biological Warfare

The article presents information about the scope of biological warfare. The biological warfare obtains weapons from the whole of medicine and biology. It is, so to speak, medicine and biology stood on their heads. Thus, medicine studies disease epidemics for the purpose of minimizing their damage and halting their spread; the same data show the biological warfare researcher how to make epidemics more virulent and widespread. At the time scholars Theodor Rosebury and Elvin A. Kabat prepared their report, systematic experiments in biological warfare had not been conducted, so far as is known, anywhere in the world. But already, at least half a dozen of the possible disease weapons listed by the Columbia bacteriologists have been brought into practicable form.