Science, Secrecy, and the Smithsonian

This is the story of how the Smithsonian Institute became intertwined in a secret biological warfare project.

During the 1960s, the Smithsonian Institution undertook a large-scale biological survey of a group of uninhabited tropical islands in the Pacific. It was one of the largest and most sweeping biological survey programs of all time, a six-year-long enterprise during which Smithsonian personne...