Word: meselson
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...been using herbicides and CS, a tear-gas riot-control agent, in Viet Nam, and there is genuine legal confusion over whether Rogers' interpretation is correct. But why should the Geneva Protocol not be considered to forbid all forms of chemical and biological warfare? Harvard Biologist Matthew Meselson, who spent six weeks in Viet Nam last summer, argues that CS has been decreasingly useful because of enemy countermeasures that range from Soviet-made gas masks to face cloths soaked in urine; even Robert Komer, who ran the pacification program under Lyndon Johnson, concedes that defoliants and crop-destroying agents...
Biologist Meselson argues that over the next few decades molecular biology will probably unlock the few remaining scientific secrets of life. The new knowledge could make the destructive capacity of chemical and biological agents immensely more horrible than it is today. Meselson insists that it would be better to be out of the business altogether, so that no war planner or procurement officer could ever be led into temptation...
Together with Robert Baughman of the Harvard Chemistry Department, Meselson is trying to develop the needed technology for detecting dioxin in food, human tissues, and other materials the HAC collected in Vietnam...
...Meselson's group surveyed the sprayed area of the valley a few days after the crop destruction operation. Their observations were exactly the opposite of the rationale given by the Chemical Corps for the spraying...
...Meselson's Herbicide Assessment Commission took detailed aerial photographs of the valley, then counted the visible dwellings in the area which was sprayed. They found a high population density throughout the target area. The spraying covered approximately 1000 acres, and within this region the HAC found more than 900 dwellings, enough for approximately 5,000 people. These dwellings were built in typical Montagnard style. The population density, then, was 180 persons per square kilometer, a high density for highland Vietnam...