Science, Secrecy, and the Smithsonian. The Strange History of the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program

During the 1960s, the Smithsonian Institution undertook a large-scale biological survey of a group of uninhabited tropical islands in the Pacific; however, the survey was initiated, funded, and overseen by the US Biological Laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland—home of the American biological warfare program. It was one of the largest and most sweeping biological survey programs ever conducted, a seven-year enterprise during which Smithsonian personnel banded 1.8 million birds; captured live specimens and took blood samples; and cataloged the avian, mammalian, reptile, and plant life of forty-eight Pacific islands. But the twist was that in contracting to perform the survey, the Smithsonian became a literal subcontractor to a secret biological warfare project , and allied itself with secrecy-shrouded government agencies such as Dugway Proving Ground and the Deseret Test Center. Critics charged the Smithsonian with having entered into a Faustian bargain that made the institution complicit in the sordid business of biological warfare, a form of combat that, if ever put into practice against human populations, could cause mass disease, suffering, and death. The Smithsonian had no proper role in any such activities, said critics, and should never have undertaken the survey. The book tells the story of the survey program, its origins in the military’s Project 112, places it in its historical context, describes the biological warfare tests that followed, and evaluates the critical objections to the Smithsonian’s participation in the Pacific Ocean Biological Survey Program (POBSP), also known as the Pacific Project.