Adriana Fraser is a PhD Candidate at the University of Pennsylvania and a 2024-2025 Consortium Research Fellow.
In recent years, scholars have turned towards microbes as a generative site for interrogating human-nonhuman (or more-than-human) relations. Microbes are things that live in us, on us, and they are particularly vital to our food systems. This scholarly turn has followed a general cultural embrace of the probiotic and of home fermentation practices, from sourdough bread to kimchi. These scholars have done a great deal of work in “rehabilitating” microbes; prior to this turn, most work on microbes centered around public health history, where the goal of human action was the eradication of microbes. I take the insights of microbe studies in a different direction. If, as scholars have convincingly argued, humans and microbes make-with each other in complex multispecies relationships, must that relationship always produce something pleasant? Is there such a thing as making-with pathogens?
I contend that there is, and it is biological weapons work. Rather than baking delicious sourdough loaves, biological weapons actors use microbes to facilitate harm. Nevertheless, it is still a process of making-with—a collaborative exercise that relies upon both human and microbial action. You cannot have a biological weapon without the biological. My project, Making Danger: Biological Weapons, Biological safety, and the Management of Microbial Life, interrogates the ways that humans have made-with pathogenic microorganisms. The project focuses on American biological weapons work and its antecedents between 1940 and approximately 1990. I also address Canadian and British biological weapons work, which has always been deeply tied to the American project. Though I look to several sites for this project, Fort Detrick, the headquarters of the American biological weapons program, is the most prominent.
During my Research Fellowship, I visited four member institutions: Cold Spring Harbor Labs, the National Library of Medicine, the Smithsonian (specifically, the National Museum of American History Library), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Most of my fellowship-supported visits were spent tracing individual scientists linked to biological weapons work and/or anti-biological weapons activism. My goal in seeking out these sources was to ask: what do scientists think about the human-microbe relations at work here? Of course, I am working with archival sources that precede the recent microbial turn, so my actors are not thinking about microbes in such relational terms (at least, not explicitly). However, I found I was able to access this question by following activism and involvement with biological weapons post-World War II. What did these see as an appropriate use of microbes and microbiology? Did that change over time? Activism, I suggest, can be understood as a form of managing microbes, since it is a way of bounding which kinds of human-microbe relations are acceptable and which are not.
At Cold Spring Harbor, I examined the papers of Matthew Meselson, a scientist-activist who was a leading voice in activism against biological weapons. Meselson’s papers capture a critical moment for science and scientists in the 1960s. No longer content to “just do science” and let the politics be handled by politicians, Meselson and his cohort insisted that scientists could and should be heard on how science should be used. Meselson did not work at Detrick during the war; he was 11 when the United States joined World War II. However, later in his career, he became deeply committed to anti-biological weapons activism. His activism, and the activism of others, contributed to President Nixon’s 1969 decision to end American biological weapons work, and sign the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Meselson’s papers reveal the complex nature of being a scientist-activist during this period. Many scientists believed in disarmament, but many also received funding through defense department contracts. Additionally, microbiologists at Detrick were leading figures in their disciplines. Meselson’s papers demonstrate that scientists with all of these entanglements managed to meet together to discuss peace. Such inclusive discussions seem almost mythical in 2025.
At the National Library of Medicine, I examined the papers of several scientists including Joshua Lederberg and Theodor Rosebury. Both were involved in biological weapons activism, although in different ways. Rosebury represents an earlier generation of anti-biological weapons activist-scientists. Rosebury was heavily involved in the biological weapons project during the Second World War. Like most prominent microbiologists of the time, he directed a project at Detrick (the “Cloud Chamber Project,” to be specific) during the war years. However, very soon after the war, Rosebury published on the dangers of biological weapons and the need to prevent their development and use. At NLM, I viewed papers related to the Pugwash Conferences which illuminated Rosebury’s involvement in the group and his changing views on biological weapons. Historians have written about physicists who left or later regretted their work on with the Manhattan Project, but parallel consideration of biological weapons scientists is sparse. These papers allow me to fill in that gap.
In contrast to Rosebury, Lederberg represents a later generation of scientist-activists. Despite his later famous work on microbial genetics, Lederberg did not work at Detrick during WWII. At the time, he was an undergraduate and intended to pursue an MD, so his wartime work was in a medical laboratory. This makes Lederberg an unusual figure in the history of microbiology; as I found in his papers, he was well aware that most prominent scientists in his field had worked at Detrick during the war. However, his papers show just how clearly he was opposed to biological weapons, giving speeches, lectures, talks, and advising policymakers on the danger of their development and use.
At UW-Madison I examined the Ira Baldwin collection. A bacteriologist by training, Baldwin was the scientific director of the American biological weapons program from its creation in 1943 until the end of the Second World War in 1945. Prior to 1943, Baldwin held a faculty position in UW-Madison’s College of Agriculture. Baldwin returned to UW-Madison in 1945 and had a long career in the university’s administration. His papers at UW Madison revealed that despite leaving the biological weapons program in 1945, Baldwin remained intimately connected to the program for the rest of his career in an advisory capacity. Part of my project examines the scholarly networks that enabled biological weapons work in the 1940s and the ongoing entanglement of the academy with the project in subsequent decades. Baldwin’s papers provide excellent support for these topics. In fact, these are the richest sources I have for an individual scientist’s continued involvement with biological weapons after ostensibly leaving the program in 1945. I was surprised to find Baldwin facilitated the assignment of several drafted “young scientists” (usually master’s or doctoral students) to Detrick in the 1950s. These assignments came at the request of the drafted men and were usually mediated through a letter to Baldwin by their academic supervisor.
Held together, the Meselson, Rosebury, Lederberg, and Baldwin papers illuminate how scientists’ relationship to their involvement with biological weapons changed over time. It was rarely classically trained microbiologists or those who worked at Detrick who became and- biological weapons activists. For the most part, it was the next generation of elite scientists who took on this mantle (Rosebury is, of course, an interesting exception to this rule), and often scientists who worked not in microbiology but in closely related disciplines like genetics. The Detrick generation were usually silent, or, in Baldwin’s case, still convinced that biological weapons work was important and necessary for the United States. Indeed, it is telling that despite Rosebury’s involvement with the famous Pugwash conferences, he seems to have been one of the only microbiologists of his era to engage deeply with anti-biological weapons activism. The silence of most of his cohort likely reflected several factors: complex feelings about their wartime activities, a tendency to believe that scientists were not and should not be responsible for science policy, and, to some degree, a belief that biological weapons work was actually an appropriate use of their science. After all, the physicists had made the bomb. What was so unacceptable about microbiologists attempting to do the same?
My visit to the Smithsonian aligned with a different aspect of my project. As the title of my project suggests, biological safety is a significant focus of my work. I approach biological safety as set of practices and equipment that mediate the relationship between humans and pathogens. As such, they are a crucial interlocutor in that relationship; perhaps they even define it. At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History Library I examined trade materials from several lab supply companies. These included companies that manufactured labware or lab equipment throughout the twentieth century. For instance, NMAH holds trade literature from S Blickman Inc., a stainless-steel manufacturer that made biological safety cabinets for the biological weapons program labs at Fort Detrick. These cabinets are a central character in one of my chapters, where I explore their origins within biological weapons and eventual diffusion to mainstream microbiology. Blickman’s 1961 trade materials are remarkably frank about their work for Detrick and include several photos of the cabinets and descriptions of their key specifications and use. Additionally, I used NMAH’s trade materials to interrogate the emergence of lab plastics, particularly the transition from reusable to disposable labware. As with many safety-related developments in microbiology, the American biological weapons program was an early adopter of disposable plastic labware. The NMAH materials illustrate the period of transition from glass to disposable plastic; early catalogues include only glass Petri dishes, later ones glass and autoclavable plastic, and finally, almost entirely disposable plastic. This material enriched the paper I presented on this topic at the HSS Annual Meeting in 2024 (“Regimes of sterility: material transformations and the conceptualization of sterility in the mid- century microbiology lab”). I was also able to determine when small but important labware first appeared on the commercial market. This included Shaar & Co.’s “Propipette,” an early pipetting device that provided scientists and technicians an alternative to mouth pipetting.
These insights would not have been possible without my Consortium Research Fellowship. Supported by the Fellowship, I was able to access collections that would have otherwise been out of reach. Those collections provided valuable answers to some of my most key research questions.