Above all, do no harm

But what was the good baron, an aristocrat of German, Swedish, and Finnish extraction, doing in this forsaken area of northeastern Norway in the middle of winter? Clearly up to no good, but to what form of no good? The authors continue:

When the Sheriff of Kautokeino, who was

present at the group's arrest, derisively

suggested that he should prepare soup from

the contents of the tin cans labeled "Svea

kott" (Swedish meat), the baron felt

obliged to admit that each can actually

contained between 2 and 4 kilograms of

dynamite.

The baron's luggage also yielded some bottles of curare, various microbial cultures, and nineteen sugar cubes, each containing anthrax. The two cubes in Trondheim are, apparently, the only survivors of this old incident. The baron claimed that he was only an honorable activist for Finnish independence, out to destroy supply lines to Russian-controlled areas. (Finland had been under loose control of the Russian czar and did win independence after the Bolshevik revolution.) Most historians suspect that he was actually working for the Germans, who had authorized a program for infecting horses and reindeer with anthrax to disrupt the transport of British arms (on sleds pulled by these animals) through northern Norway.

The baron, expelled after a few weeks in custody, never carried out his harebrained scheme. The authors of the Nature letter, Caroline Redmond, Martin J. Pearce, Richard J. Manchee, and Bjorn R Berdal, have inferred his intent:

The grinding of the sugar and its glass

insert between the molar teeth of horses

would probably result in a lethal injection

as the anthrax spores entered the body,

eventually facilitated through the small

lesions produced in the wall of the

alimentary tract by the broken glass. It is

not known whether reindeer eat sugar

lumps but presumably the baron never had

the chance to carry out this piece

of research.

As anthrax cannot be transmitted directly from animal to animal, the scheme probably would not have worked without a large supply of sugar cubes and very sweet teeth in the intended victims. But the authors do cite a potential danger to other participants: "However, if the meat from a dying animal had been consumed without adequate cooking, it is likely that human fatalities from gastrointestinal anthrax would have followed." The authors end their letter with a frank admission:

This small but relatively important episode

in the history of biological warfare is one of

the few instances where there is

confirmation of the intent to use a lethal

microorganism as a weapon, albeit 80 years

after the event. It did not, however, make

any significant difference to the course of the

Great War.

We may treat this botched experiment in biological warfare as light relief in a dark time, but the greatest evils often begin as farcical and apparently harmless escapades, while an old motto cites eternal vigilance as the price of liberty. If Hitler had been quietly terminated after his ragtag band failed to seize local power in their Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 in Munich--even the name of this incident marks the derision then heaped on the protagonists--the history of our century might have unfolded in a much different, and almost surely happier, manner. Instead, Hitler spent a mere nine months in jail, where he wrote Mein Kampf and worked out his grisly plans.