Lab 257: Michael Christopher Carroll

TERRIFING BOOK. There is an island of the Eastern coast near NY that was owned by the government and used for Biological testing, of germs and their effect on life. It is believed that Lyme disease was a result of the testing and released either deliberately to test the effects or accidently spread through animal migration. It's also believed that West Nile and the Peking duck disaster were results from the biological testing on the island. It wasn't until years later when the island had a noticeable virus outbreak that the realized the ovens they burned the animals in were faulty and had been constructed improperly. I was confused that the vets were upset when the feral cats on the island were executed, (when they shouldn't have been roaming around anyway near viruses) yet the vets killed millions of “test” animals every year. The hard core evidence of testing human subjects and animals people relied on for a living is almost unbelievable, but when reading the section where unleashing disease and letting it do its thing rather than starving people and then having to feed them when you conquer them- explained everything perfectly. I can't believe the haphazardness with which catastrophes were dealt with once Plum Island was privatized- and that they shredded all the tests from the start of the island and destroyed the specimens in the refrigerator. All that work and all the dead animals, people, and livelihoods gone. It sounded like within the last decade anyone could get on the island and there were a lot of suspicious characters. The ending spoke on future terrorism attempts to destroy the US by targeting the food. Between reading this book and the National Geographic one is left with no hope for the future...