Planarians

World Health Organization launched the most ambitious and expensive international programme in history to eradicate smallpox once and for all. After many vicissitudes and no little heroism on the part of the workers sent into remote and hostile territories, the objective was accomplished amidst much jubilation. September of 1977 saw the last recorded case of naturally transmitted smallpox on the planet. But the Glynns’ invigorating story ends on a sombre note: just as smallpox had been viewed as a weapon thrust by providence into the hands of colonialists to exterminate indigenous peoples — instructions for its dissemination even appear in official documents — so the cold-warriors of the twentieth century were not slow to spot its possibilities. In a laboratory at Zagorsk, only fifty miles from Moscow, were stored 20 tons of a particularly virulent strain of the smallpox agent, and there is evidence that the work of preparation and testing did not proceed without accidents. (In Kirov, further east, a like quantity of the plague bacillus was amassed.) Genetic engineering offered the even more alluring prospect of a hybrid virus of smallpox and Ebola, and many other clever innovations. The stocks in Zagorsk were reportedly destroyed after the collapse of the Soviet imperium, but who knows what cultures are even now being brewed in clandestine laboratories around the world? Certainly smallpox vaccine is being stockpiled in the West against a day of reckoning. All this and a great deal more is absorbingly related in this fine book, which encapsulates so much of man's intellectual lustre, self-sacrifice and physical heroism, and his folly, obduracy and villainy — a very microcosm of human history.