Germs of Untruth

Into U.S. medical libraries each week pours a flood of technical journals in a score of languages. Some are more reliable than others, but essentially all have one characteristic in common: their learned articles are penned by specialists who describe in detail only the experiments which they have personally conducted, report results personally observed.

Among the latest batch of publications was a sleeper: a special issue of the Chinese Medical Journal, now subtitled "the official organ of the Chinese Medical Association." Printed in English in Peking, the special issue is nothing but an assemblage of the Communist charges that the U.S. Air Force has waged germ warfare against North Korea and China. But this time, in an effort to camouflage their propaganda as "science," the Reds have persuaded five Western scientists to endorse their germ-war "evidence."The endorsement made a striking example of how five experts, each of high repute in his own field, can forget all about scientific method. The five: ANDREA ANDREEN (Sweden), biochemist.

JEAN MALTERRE (France), animal physiologist.

JOSEPH NEEDHAM (Britain), biochemist and embryologist.

OLIVIERO OLIVO (Italy), anatomist.

SAMUEL PESSOA (Brazil), parasitologist.

Of the five, only Pessoa is an avowed Communist, but the rest, with strong pro-Communist leanings, have repeatedly fronted for the Reds. None had any special knowledge of bacteriology, entomology or epidemiology--which should have been essential for an investigation of Communist charges that the U.S. was waging war with flea-borne and fly-borne germs.

Yet the five joined a U.S.S.R. bacteriologist, "investigated" the charges as a six-man commission, and found them "true." Shiniest button on the Reds' false front was Cambridge University's Professor Needham, whose summary of achievements fills 5 1/2 in. in the British Who's Who, and who reads and writes Chinese (he was once attached as a scientist to the British embassy in Chungking). But Needham himself has admitted that the commission operated unscientifically.

Specifically, he acknowledged that: None of the commission's members themselves ever saw anything--test tube or receptacle--being dropped by a U.S.

plane. They made no investigations at points where germ bombs were alleged to have been dropped; when they asked to go to such places, the Chinese and North Koreans fobbed them off with vague excuses. They made no bacteriological tests themselves, and they did no on-the-spot laboratory work on infected insects supposed to have been airdropped. They did not examine a single patient of the many who, the Reds said, had been made ill by airborne bacteria.

What proof had they of any of the Reds' charges? Sweden's Dr. Andreen was frank. Said she: "We felt so sure of the integrity of our Chinese hosts that we entirely trusted [their] statements."Asked what proof he had of any specific charge of germ-dropping, Cambridge's Needham answered: "None. We accepted the word of the Chinese scientists." Clearly, despite its long and deliberate self-exposure to the virus of Communism, Needham's system has developed no protective antibodies. Yet in a 1948 book, he wrote: "In China, as much as if not more than anywhere else, it is impossible to judge from hearsay."

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