American Experience

Weapons Pioneer Ira Baldwin

Safety Measures

Baldwin worked to develop safety procedures that are now standard: his laboratories were equipped with blowers to maintain negative air pressure, keeping all microorganisms within the lab and incinerators to sterilize the contaminated air before it was recirculated. But despite his efforts, at least four men are reported to have died during his experimentation, though all within the confines of the lab, and not in public.

Ira Baldwin: You could do it safely. We had a few accidents in the laboratories of the project, but the accidents all occurred in laboratories.

Interviewer: Not in the mass production.

*We didn’t have a single accident in the pilot plant, which again bore out my statement that you could do it as safely or safer, I thought than you could do it in the laboratory.

We demonstrated very definitely some of the hazards of handling microorganisms that nobody had ever thought about. For example, you have pipetted material in a pipette from a test tube over to a Petri dish, and thought you were doing it perfectly safely. We found in careful studies that there were microscopic droplets popping up from the Petri dish all over the surroundings, and getting into the air and so forth. So we developed many new techniques to handle things much more safely than bacteriologists had ever done before. For example, for all of the laboratories we incinerated all of the outgoing air. We put the room under pressure, air pressure, and then the air going out was heated to the point where it killed anything that went out, and that was standard all over, not only in the laboratories but in the pilot plants, too, and so forth.

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Ira Baldwin: Now, some of these we have immunizing agents for, many of them we do not. I think today sometimes it’s difficult to realize that we didn’t know how to immunize against a good many of the diseases which we were thinking about in World War II. But we did actually develop new immunizing agents for a number of organisms in the program, which had not been in existence before. So we did have a greater supply then. We developed ties with drug companies to produce these immunizing agents. A few of them were actually put into use with selected troops of soldiers. Most of them were not.

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Ira Baldwin: The masks which had been developed for chemical warfare were not effective against bacterial agents. We had to develop new masks for that. And we were successful in developing a mask that’s reasonably comfortable to wear, and which is effective in filtering out microorganisms. We worked at the process of trying to develop an early-warning system, and this was not as successful as we’d have liked for it to have been. I well remember one navy captain who was with us, who used to insist that he was not going to be satisfied until you had a signal that would ring a bell when a single pathogenic organism came into the room [laughter] — well we all wanted it, but we didn’t get that far.