Richard Preston, Author: A biological weapon is alive. What it wants to do is survive and reproduce itself -- inside a host, the human body.
Narrator: On December 9, 1942, the U.S. government convened a secret meeting at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
Army officers had urgent questions for an elite group of scientists. America and its allies were fighting a horrific world war. Intelligence suggested that Germany might soon target Britain with a terrifying new weapon -- a bomb packed with biological agents.
The meeting was called to respond to a critical British request. Could the Americans create a large-scale biological warfare program to help their allies -- and do it virtually overnight?
Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: If you brought all that we knew about microbiology and infectious diseases, into a military context, you could develop a weapon that would be amazingly effective. It would be dangerous. It could change the course of the war.
Narrator: Only a few months before, the president of the United States had grappled with the issue of biological weapons.
"I have been loath to believe that any nation," Franklin Roosevelt said, "even our present enemies, would be willing to loose upon mankind such terrible and inhumane weapons."
Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, thought differently. "Biological warfare is ... dirty business," he wrote to Roosevelt, "but ... I think we must be prepared."
The president approved the launch of America's biological warfare program. For the first time, U.S. researchers would be trying to make weapons from the deadliest germs known to science.
Jeanne Guillemin, Sociologist: Once you're looking at a science not strictly for the benefits that it can bring, but for the damage it can inflict on an enemy, you're in a whole new world.
Narrator: Now, at the request of a desperate ally, America was entering a realm lacking clear ethical limits, where science and secrecy would go hand in hand.
As the meeting broke up, the researchers were now warned -- anyone who leaked details of the discussion would face forty years in prison and a $10,000 fine.