Masterson - The malaria project : the u.s. governments secret mission to find a miracle cure

A decade ago I knew as much about malaria as I did about professional footballthat is to say almost nothing.

This killer disease occupied little of my thinking as I chased down U.S. senators and congressional leaders and wrote daily political stories from Capitol Hill for the Houston Chronicle. Little did I know that I would soon cross the globe, go back to school, and spend hours in reading rooms flipping through archived boxes of moldy records. (One box at the National Archives smelled so strongly of ammonia I closed it and returned it to the counter unread.) I did all this to understand why malaria is still around. It is probably the most studied disease of all time, and yet it persists, even in the face of the hottest new science in Western medicine. Its both preventable and curable. Weve even deciphered its genetic codes. Still, it remains among the top killers of African childrenat a rate of two per minute.

By a fluke, malaria crept into my intellectual pursuits. I had quit my job as a national reporter to explore my interests in science and medical writing, both of which I had done before coming to Washington. I accepted a teaching fellowship at Johns Hopkins University, where I studied the history of medicine, and I took a course in mining the National Archives to learn how to find its buried historical treasures.

There, in a hushed reading room of the agencys annex in College Park, Maryland, I learned how to call up records from the buildings two million cubic feet of storage space. As an exercise, I searched for archived records on World War II blood plasma replacement studies involving Linus Paulingtwo-time Nobel laureate for chemistry and peace activism. My call slips came back with a box marked with the correct record group number and bearing the letter P, for Pauling. But the contents were all wrong. Thinking his papers were mixed in under other headings, I thumbed through the entire box, reading through random letters.

One turned my blood cold.

The 1943 letter was to the Massachusetts surgeon general from a physician named George Carden. In it, Carden laid out what sounded like a sinister plan: Federal researchers would use blood transfusions and lab-raised mosquitoes to give malaria to brain-damaged syphilitics and schizophrenics held at Boston Psychopathic Hospital so new drugs could be tested against the resulting infections. No less than the wars outcome was at stake, he wrote, explaining that the military desperately needed a new drug to counter malarias devastating attacks on U.S. forces in the South Pacific.

I reread the letter a dozen times before my blood warmed to the possibility that I had just stumbled onto a fascinating, if horrifying story. That night I went home and ran Google searches, which, back in 2004, turned up very little. The next day I returned to the archives and met with a specialist in World War II medical research. She helped me navigate the Byzantine reference catalogs used to pinpoint exact call numbers for relevant records. Over the next three days, I retrieved a dozen boxes from the bowels of the archives, each filled with letters, reports, and data sheets on the wars antimalaria programinformation that had been classified during and after the war, and, as far as I could tell, hadnt been touched in decades. I also tracked down historian of medicine Leo Slater, who, at the time, was working at the National Institutes of Health. He had an unpublished manuscript on the wars malaria-related work that tracked the involvement of American pharmaceutical companiesa history that has since been published by Rutgers University Press.

With Leos help, I slowly pieced together a fairly clear picture of what had gone on. The War Department and White House had launched a Manhattan Projectstyle program to find a cure for malaria, born out of wartime necessity and run by a small army of well-intentioned scientists, many of whom knew precious little about the tricky parasites they studied. All they knew for sure was that U.S. military leaders feared this one disease would force them to surrender to the Japanesean unacceptable outcome in a war destined to determine the fate of the world.

I hunted for a published history or popular narrative on the subject, and found nothing. The more I searched the more I realized I was in uncharted territory. But to know whether this was something worth pursuing, I needed context and content. When I got to Hopkins that fall, I wrote my schedule to include public health courses that covered the epidemiology and medical history of malaria. I continued my treks to the National Archivesunearthing more and more documentsand took a microbiology course to understand the nature of microbial diseases.

Needing more background, I sought and was awarded a Knight Foundation public health journalism fellowship that funded me to work for three months in the Malaria Branch of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In CDCs labs just outside of Atlanta, I dissected mosquitoes, studied their salivary glands, and watched under a microscope the sticklike germs that enter the human body when a female anopheles mosquito bites for blood.

My teacher was Bill Collins, a seventy-six-year-old icon in malaria research who, at the time, was the only federally employed malariologist who had been at it long enough to remember what it was like to infect madmen with the disease. He did it in the 1950s and early 1960s for the Public Health Service at the South Carolina State Hospital, where drug experiments begun during World War II were continued.