Blood serum samples of twenty-seven calves, seven cows, ten bulls, and thirty-eight steers were set out in dishes and then injected with brucellosis bacteria and foot-and-mouth disease virus to test immune actions and reactions. They had to be extra careful with the brucellosis, because it caused an ailment of fevers, sweating, weakness, headaches, malaise, anorexia, abdominal pain, constipation, rigors, enlargement of the spleen, and coughing— and lasted from four to eight weeks.[16] Wary after the FW incident, the scientists escaped harm by wiping down surfaces and glassware constantly with a generous helping of Roccal solution, a chemical that kills microbes on contact.
The experiments yielded the type of results Doc Shahan and the Army could only have dreamed of.
5
The Age of Science
Germs just don't have a chance!
Boundless optimism. No other phrase captures the feeling of 1950s America. The United States had saved the world from totalitarianism, and its mainland shores had not suffered the physical wreckage of war. Eisenhower, the revered general who had led the Normandy invasion and crushed Hitler and Nazi Germany, was now in the White House. Thousands of returning GIs were lured by the clean air, winding roads, free-standing homes, and manicured lawns of suburban communities, typified by Levittown, built on the wide potato flats of Long Island. Automobile sales skyrocketed and families drove in newfangled cars over freshly paved six-lane interstate roads, pit-stopping at newly constructed drive-ins and burger joints. Television, that new miracle device, entertained and informed a swelling middle class, unshackled from the poverty of the Great Depression. The future had arrived. The jet age brought people to exotic lands and beaches in hours, communication advances made it possible to telephone Europe from their homes instead of wiring telegrams, and men were being launched into space — and they came back alive!
Throughout the medical world, scientists were taming germ infections with revolutionary chemicals called antibiotics, developed during the war by pioneers like chemist George W. Merck. Vaccinations were becoming available, miracle injections that prevented those infections from even starting. While rocket scientists were trying to put a man on the moon, biologists and virologists were fervently exploring the eradication of disease. Polio virus, not long ago a terribly crippling disease, was being eradicated from the United States by Dr. Jonas Salk's new vaccine, and the spread of deadly tuberculosis was being controlled for the first time in history.
Unbridled economic expansion brought on a voracious American appetite: consumption of beef sharply surpassed that of pork, and the demand for all foods grew exponentially. And like the NASA scientists, the USDA also promised the people the moon — a moon not only of cheese, but of milk, vegetables, grains, and meats. The total integration of scientific knowledge would be forcefully applied to agriculture, resulting in tremendously increased productivity of crops and animal products.
Healthy animals were needed to produce wholesome food, to support America's high standard of living. The elimination of animal diseases not only meant a greater abundance of food, it prevented those diseases from jumping to man. Like Salk's success with polio, a massive outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease virus in Mexico in 1948 was triumphantly overcome, contained just miles from the U.S. border before harming America's food supply. Veteran USDA scientist Doc Shahan, assisted by Army Colonel Mace, led a ten-thousand-man campaign through the arid Mexican terrain to combat the outbreak there.
Tall, lean, and tan, Doc Shahan had thick furrowed eyebrows and a black crew cut streaked with gray. Wherever he went, he carried with him a carved wood pipe and a pocketful of fresh tobacco. His talents, according to his friends, lay in his charm. Doc's demeanor was more gentleman country doctor than egg-headed scientist, and his suave charisma proved perfect for the task. Like the Allied generals who had slain totalitarianism in Europe three years earlier, Shahan and his men of modern science vanquished the disease and saved North America. They corralled the infected animals of Mexican peasants, quarantined the beasts of burden, and then either vaccinated or destroyed them en masse. Within eighteen months they wiped the scourge clear off the continent, sparing America from outbreak and famine. But victory did not come without human cost — twenty-four Americans and hundreds of Mexicans died in the cause, in armed uprisings and brutal reprisals by Mexican villagers against the men of science.[17] Proud of their victory, Doc Shahan and Colonel Mace returned to the States, yearning for a lab where they could continue to wage war against other virulent germs.
Advanced science applied to food production would aid America's worldwide struggle of democracy over godless communism. "History has indelibly written that revolution, anarchy, and tyranny are fellow travelers of hunger and malnutrition," one USDA scientist said. "Our plans for the future must include an ever-abundant supply of these foods if we want our people to be strong and our nation to endure."[18] Science would make the difference in the battle between Good and Evil.
The crown jewel of this blossoming, futuristic agricultural empire would be Plum Island.
We meet today on the site of an old fortress. This island today is again an outpost of defense, against an enemy more menacing by far than the fleets of 1898.
The enemy is real and the victory we seek is a victory for every human being in every farm, village, town, and city of the Earth. Our grandparents built this country with the help of their animals. That was yesterday. Today, our farm economy pivots on animal agriculture.
I firmly believe America is on the threshold of the most challenging and most prosperous decade the world has ever seen. This is the age of science and technology. The frontiers of the mind have replaced the frontiers of geography. Organized and imaginative research… will push the scientific frontier beyond limits we scarcely dare dream today.
Brains will continue to replace brawn in American agriculture and industry! Man will direct power rather than supply it! Brainpower will be more important than horsepower!
It was dedication day, and Ezra Taft Benson had the crowd on its feet. For years, Plum Island had been off limits to the curious public, under the heavily armed guard of Army soldiers and uniformed federal officers. The mysterious nature of the island lair, once a popular summer paradise, began when the U.S. War Department closed its shores and chained its piers at the end of the nineteenth century. "Tourists that float through Long Island Sound each summer," wrote the Suffolk Sun in 1895, "in whose fancy there seem to be enchanted islands in ideal regions, ask a thousand questions — What are they? Who dwells thereon? They gaze at it wistfully as if they would like to know more about it." Now, half a century later, feelings about Plum Island were no different. But today, on this sunny autumn morning, the gates were finally being flung open.
Visitors came from near and far to walk the plank onto the 11:00 a.m. ferry to Plum Island on September 26, 1956. The laboratories had been washed down and polished up, the weeds pulled, the signs freshly painted. The employee union readied its outdoor table with cakes, cookies, and coffee. The island smelled of freshly cut grass mingled with sea salt. The germs had been locked away in vials in the vault drawers for three weeks now.
Days before, Greenporters had noticed an uncommon buzz along Main Street — strangers darting in and out of shops, eating and drinking heartily at Claudio's and the clam bar out on the pier. Some had distinctive southern and western accents. Others spoke in foreign tongues. But all wore expressions of great anticipation. Locals opened their spare rooms, recently vacated at summer's end, to welcome them. A special ferry was arranged with the New London Freight Lines; the massive LSM transport craft that landed amphibious battalions on the shores of Okinawa during World War II a decade earlier would now land on Plum Island an excited throng of general public and VIPs. Plum Island scientists wearing patriotic red, white, and blue badges pinned to their lapels escorted local residents around the island and inside the heralded chalk-white laboratory. Members of local civic organizations came, too, from the Rotary Club, the Minnepaug Club, and the Southold Tuesday Morning Club, as did national agricultural associations and high school science teachers with their classes in tow.
16
In fact, this strain was a fancy of Fort Detrick. President Eisenhower had previously approved the development of "incapacitating agents," germs that severely sickened but did not kill. For that reason, brucellosis and Rift Valley fever virus, both with low mortality rates, were heavily researched at Fort Detrick.
17
The Mexican people regarded the Americans as intruding "conquistadores." They called them