Social anthropologist who studied anthrax and bioterror
JEANNE GUILLEMIN, who has died aged 76, was a social anthropologist and the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (2000), an account of a horrific accident at a secret Soviet biological warfare lab in 1979.
Both sides in the Cold War undertook biological weapons research: the US at a secret laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and the Soviets at Compound 19 in the Russian Urals industrial town of Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), among other places.
On April 2 1979 an anthrax epidemic swept through Sverdlovsk, killing at least 64 people and making scores of others violently ill. For 13 years Soviet officials blamed contaminated meat sold on the black market; it was true that anthrax spores occurred naturally in the Sverdlovsk region, and outbreaks had been recorded since before the 1917 revolution. But western scientists had their doubts, and Soviet defectors soon began talking about an “explosion” at Compound 19.
Finally, in 1992, the new Russian government under Boris Yeltsin allowed a small team of researchers led by the Harvard biochemist Matthew Meselson to investigate. Before they left the US Yeltsin, who had been the Party chief for Sverdlovsk in Soviet days, told a Russian newspaper that “the KGB admitted that our military developments were the cause” of the outbreak. Many questions remained, however.
Jeanne Guillemin, Meselson’s wife, spearheaded the fieldwork, tramping from door to door to interview survivors and the families of dead victims. She found Russian pathologists who had conducted autopsies on most of the victims and had made hastily hidden, handwritten duplicates of their official autopsy notes when the KGB confiscated the originals.
The notes revealed that almost all the victims had died from breathing airborne anthrax spores, and not from ingesting them.
Crucially, her findings and weather records made it possible to compile a map comparing the victims’ whereabouts to the likely course of an anthrax leak.
From Compound 19, where six died, the team found a narrow corridor of death stretching south-east through the city.
Meteorological records showed that there had been a south-easterly wind blowing that day.
“All the data … now fit, like pieces of a puzzle. What we know proves a lethal plume of anthrax came from Compound 19,” Jeanne Guillemin wrote. The leak was probably due to faulty filters in the laboratory.
Jean Elizabeth Garrigan – she later changed the spelling of her first name to Jeanne – was born in Brooklyn on March 6 1943. Her family moved to Rutherford, New Jersey, where she was educated by Dominican nuns.
After taking a degree in Social Psychology from Harvard in 1968 she took a PHD in Sociology and Anthropology from Brandeis University in 1973. From 1972 to 2005 she taught at Boston College, where she became a Professor of Sociology.
Her first marriage, to Robert Guillemin, ended in divorce. She turned her attention to biological weapons after her second marriage, in 1986, to Matthew Meselson.
Her other books included Biological Weapons: From the Invention of Statesponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (2005) and American Anthrax: Fear, Crime, and the Investigation of the Nation’s Deadliest Bioterror Attack (2011), an account of the period after 9/11, when letters containing anthrax were sent to prominent US figures.
In Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial (2017), she examined the failure of the post-second World War military tribunal to investigate the use of biological weapons by the Japanese in China.
She is survived by her husband, by two sons from her first marriage, and a stepdaughter. Another stepdaughter predeceased her.