Above all, do no harm

Natural History, Oct, 1998 by Stephen Jay Gould

of course, the air was all right.

In this way I learnt that

firedamp is lighter than air

and not dangerous to breathe.

(Have you ever read a testimony more faithful to the stereotype of British upper-class intellectual dottiness?)

The Haldanes, pere et fils, led a team of volunteer researchers in vitally important work (no doubt saving many thousands of lives) on the effects of noxious substances and the technology of gas masks. As always, they performed the most unpleasant and dangerous experiments on themselves. J. B. S. recalled:

We had to compare the effects on ourselves

of various quantities, with and without

respirators. It stung the eyes and produced a

tendency to gasp and cough when breathed.

. . . As each of us got sufficiently affected

by gas to render his lungs duly irritable,

another would take his place. None of us

was much the worse for the gas, or in any

real danger, as we knew where to stop, but

some had to go to bed for a jew days, and I

was very short of breath and incapable of

running for a month or so.

Thus, we cannot deny Haldane's superior knowledge or his maximal experience in the subject of chemical warfare. He therefore becomes an interesting test for the proposition that such expertise should confer special powers of forecasting--and that the technical knowledge of such people should therefore be trusted if they advocate a path of further development against the caution, the pessimism, even the defeatism of others who prefer moral restraint upon future technological progress because they fear the power of unforeseen directions and unanticipated consequences.

In 1925, as nations throughout the world signed the Geneva Protocol to ban chemical and biological warfare, J. B. S. Haldane published the most controversial of all his iconoclastic books: a slim volume of eighty-four pages, based on a lecture he had given in 1924 entitled Callinicus: A Defense of Chemical Warfare. (Callinicus, a seventh-century Jewish refugee in Constantinople, invented Greek fire, an incendiary liquid that could be shot from siphons toward enemy ships or troops. The subsequent flames, almost impossible to extinguish, helped save the Byzantine Empire from Islamic conquest for several centuries. The formula, known only to the emperor and to Callinicus's family, who held an exclusive right of manufacture, remained a state secret and still elicits controversy among scholars of warfare.)

Haldane's argument can be easily outlined. He summarized the data, including and death tolls and casuality rates, from gas attacks in World War I and proclaimed the results more humane than the consequences of conventional weaponry.

A case can be made out for gas

as a weapon on humanitarian

grounds, based on the very small

proportion of killed to casualties

from gas in the War, and

especially during its last year

[when better gas masks had

been made and well

distributed].

Haldane based this conclusion on two arguments. He first listed the chemical agents used in the war and branded most of them as not dangerous for having only transient effects (making the assumption mat temporarily insensate soldiers would be passed by or humanely captured rather than slaughtered). The few chemicals that could induce more permanent harm--mustard gas, in particular--are both hard to control and relatively easy to avoid, with proper equipment. Secondly, he called upon his own frequent experience with poison gases and stated a strong preference for these agents over his equally personal contact with bullets: