From prevention to infection: Intramural aerobiology, biomedical technology, and the origins of biological warfare research in the United States, 1910--1955 (William Firth Wells)

The success during the late 1930s of civilian and industrial researchers to identify the existence of airborne bacteria and viruses and to develop instrumentation and practices to halt the spread of disease bearing germs within the built environment had enormous and yet unforeseen ethical, scientific, and military ramifications. The construction of disease-free hospital wards through the creation of artificial mechanical and energetic barriers for the spread of airborne contagion provided military researchers during World War II and the early Cold War with the instrumental and theoretical means to create the first generation of airborne biological weapons.; Research carried out on the nature of tuberculosis by Professor William Firth Wells of the Harvard School of Public Health from 1930--1937, and later at the Henry Phipps Institute, at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School from 1937--1944, produced experimental evidence for the existence of droplet nuclei as a method for airborne contagion. Wells simultaneously developed increasingly sophisticated ultraviolet radiation based technological instruments to understand and contain the movement of airborne disease. Industrial researchers led by Dr. Harvey C. Rentschler, director of the Westinghouse Lamp Division from 1917--1947, carried out additional work in aerobiology through the development and commercial release of the Westinghouse Sterilamp, an integrated ultraviolet instrumental containment system. The inherent flexibility of airborne containment technologies led to applications outside of public health and medicine.; Beginning during the late 1930s, Wells collaborated with Professor James A. Reyniers, the founder of the Laboratory of Bacteriology at the University of Notre Dame (LOBUND). During World War II, Reyniers volunteered his services to the top secret United States Biological Warfare Research Program where both Army and Navy researchers used his mechanical isolator technology to begin sustained research programs on airborne biological weapons development that lasted throughout the Cold War. Analysis of scientific and technological modifications made to the pathogen Francisella tularensis, the etiological agent of rabbit fever (or tularemia), one of the first airborne biological weapons mass produced by the United States, is an exemplar of the militarization of aerobiological research. This research began at the Airborne Pathogen Laboratory at Fort Detrick Maryland, during World War II under the guidance of Dr. Theodore Rosebury.