J.D. Watson Advised Government On Chemical-Biological Warfare

Nobel prize-winning biologist and author James D. Watson admitted earlier this week to having served on a secret Presidential chemical and biological warfare (CBW) advisory panel from 1961 to 1964.

The panel--previously unknown outside top military and government circles--was a six or seven member subcommittee of the President's Science Advisory Committee. PSAC is a group of 16 leading citizens--mainly scientists--which evaluates scientific problems for the Office of the President. Watson, while a full member of the CBW panel, was not a member of the PSAC.

The Harvard biologist left the panel in 1964 because he felt, "the decisions we were being asked to make were primarily political not scientific." In an interview earlier this week, Watson said that he thought the government's CBW programs should be discontinued because "they are not a good way of winning wars...Militarily they're a waste of time."

Watson's role on the secret panel is still officially classified information. But Seymour M. Hersh, author of the recently published Chemical and Biological Warfare, said yesterday Watson had admitted in an open letter to him that he had spent a great deal of time on the panel searching for a "satisfactory incapacitating agent."

The CBW program and the panel with its search for "incapacitating agents" was an important part of Secretary of Defense Robert S. Mcnamara's "flexible defense posture" of the immediate post-Eisenhower-Dulles era.

"The Pentagon had always found it very hard to get first-rate scientists," Hersh said, "but with Kennedy's glamor and the new policy of seeking alternative military responses to nuclear weapons, the government found it easier to get first-rate scientists like Watson...He could take a particular problem, suggest lines for more fruitful investigation, and save the military researchers months of work as well as a great deal of money."

In his book, Hersh quotes one former high-level Defense Department official as saying, "There's a revolution in biological sciences, just as there was in the physical sciences in the 1920's. It [genetics] is analagous to quantum theory. A huge area of science is in ferment--and it may have military implications and advantages for us."

Watson, who won the Nobel prize for his revolutionary work in genetics in the fifties, would have been a key to the genetic work the defense

official spoke about. In fact, Hersh said, "the guy who broke the security and mentioned Watson's name to me in connection with CBW cited Watson's name proudly, trying to prove how scientically legitimate the work (CBW) is."

Although the Harvard biologist indicated in the interview earlier this week that he played a minor and devil's advocate role on the CBW panel, one top PSAC official said in a slightly sarcastic tone yesterday, "it's very interesting that Professor Watson would give this view of his role."

White Watson served on the secret panel the military's CBW budget tripled to $300 million and expanded into many new research projects. Products of that period's research have been part of the U.S. arsenal in Vietnam and the new high-powered police anti-riot arsenal.

"The top people in the Department of Defense never gave a damn about it [CBW]," Watson said in the interview, "it becomes dangerous with a suspicious, hostile military who are losing a war, so will try it [CBW] to win.