Inside Job: Secret Histories in the National Museum

October 2, 1962
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The United States Army Chemical Corps Biological Laboratories, Fort Detrick, Maryland, have asked that I submit a proposal for the study of the distribution, ecology, and migrations of Pacific birds and mammals …
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— Philip S. Humphrey Curator of the Division of Birds National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution

Adapted from This Is Not An Artifact: Selections from the Center for PostNatural History (Berlin: K. Verlag, 2023), pp. 186-205.

“Where would you like your home base to be?” came the question from my liaison at the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship. It was 2010, and I had been awarded the extraordinary privilege of having 60 non-consecutive days to rummage through the collections of one of the world’s largest museums. Because the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History operates out of several different buildings, each with its own research staff, I had to choose where to situate myself. I decided to go with something I had known since my childhood.

“I want to be in the one with the big elephant,” I replied. “Okay. That is the building housing the Rodent Range. How does that sound?” “Perfect.”

The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History houses one of the preeminent natural history collections in the world. As the name indicates, it forms part of the National Museum of the United States, which has been acquiring specimens since 1846 and is now home to over 126 million biological specimens in total. It has the reputation of being “God’s attic,” but as I would soon discover, it’s more like Uncle Sam’s storage unit. Little did I know, at the start of my fellowship, that I’d find not only model organisms — like mice and flies — collected from around the world, but also declassified photographs of a top-secret bioweapons test from 1965, called Operation Shady Grove.

According to the mission statement, “The museum’s collections … are a record of human interaction with the environment and one another.” This sounded ideal for my purposes, since I was in the process of opening a museum, called the Center for PostNatural History, dedicated to cataloging living organisms that have been altered by people through domestication, breeding, or engineering. I hoped to use this famously large natural history collection to investigate the origins of the organisms scientists study in the lab, the subset of plants and animals that biologists refer to as “model organisms.”

Scientists have chosen certain species to serve as models of much larger branches of the evolutionary tree. They inbreed a population of such species to be as identical as possible, with the goal that scientists all over the world can then share data on them and feel reasonably sure that all researchers are starting from the same baseline. Some of these models might be familiar: the fruit fly (from which chromosomes were first isolated), white mouse (the first non-human animal to express a human gene), E. coli bacteria (the first genetically modified organism), or brewer’s yeast (the first living organism to be patented), while others are less well-known outside of the lab.

I imagined my search for all the model organisms was a sufficiently scientific goal so as not to threaten the stately sensibilities of the curators; it also felt like a reasonably doable project. Armed with their scientific names, I would simply comb through the Smithsonian database. If I found a match, I would request to see it and make an appointment with the curator of its respective section of the museum, hauling my camera gear along to capture it for posterity.

I quickly learned that there was nothing special about being able to search their database. In fact, it’s all online.¹ Literally anyone can dive in for whatever they want, starting with places, dates, or keywords. For instance, I learned that searching for words like “accidental” might yield a specimen or two that met peculiar ends.

One could also search geographically for specimens collected all over the globe. It may be an old habit from my years as a computer hacker, but whenever I’m presented with a system that is designed to do one thing, I always find myself trying to make it do something different. If I can search any location in the world, how about the one where I am sitting right now? I looked up the address of the museum and keyed it into the location field. What returned was a list of all the specimens that had ever been captured and cataloged inside the actual building that houses the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History during the century and a half of its existence.

These specimens had practically volunteered to join the collection. There was a mouse collected in a trap in 1943 that had been discovered, then measured, and finally entered into the collection by the future Secretary of the Smithsonian, Alexander Whetmore. There was a bird that died from crashing into a window, collected by forensic ornithologist Roxie Laybourne, the initiator of a federal program in single-feather bird identification used by the Federal Aviation Administration to identify which birds fly into plane engines. Another bird had crashed into the bulletproof glass of the security booth outside and was credited as having been collected by “Museum Guard Barnes.” These specimens provided unexpected introductions to the human beings who inhabit the museum.

Entomology had not yet uploaded its database, so I had to go there in person. I told them I was looking for any specimens that had been captured in the building. “Oh,” came the reply, “you want the Pest Drawer.” Not only do they dedicate a specific part of their collection to the “pests,” they have a word for it. The Pest Drawer offered up specimens of every bug, spider, ant, moth, and creepy crawly thing that might surface in a mid-Atlantic basement.

There was a collection of butterflies that looked at first as though they had been attacked by a hoard of tiny marauding insurrectionists. Then I realized they had been. The collection had become colonized by dermestid beetle larva, who had eaten most of the lepidoptera before they were discovered. The wreckage of butterfly wings and beetle shit were a stark contrast to the orderly grids of labeled pins in the neighboring boxes. Their mangled remains were now a part of the “Pests” collection as an example of damage to future collection managers.

As I was wrapping up, I noticed the label on a set of pinned moths: “Nat. Archives … V. P. Al Gore’s saddle & blanket.” I read it a few more times, like I was watching a Polaroid develop. It was definitely referring to Vice President Al Gore. The date, 17 March 1995, would have been midway through his first term. Could these be moths discovered eating the Vice President’s saddle in the National Archives? Yes, exactly. The National Archives exhibited artifacts from the Clinton inauguration parade, and when the show came down, the moths came with it. I was reminded that I was not in just any natural history collection: as the national collection, the presence of Uncle Sam would never be far away.

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I returned to my main mission of finding all the model organisms only to quickly learn this was something of a disappointment for most of the collections’ curators. I had come to one of the world’s largest collections of biological diversity, and I was asking to study some of the most well researched and easily accessible organisms in the world. I began to doubt my project.

Early on during the fellowship, I was invited to a morning coffee with all of the researchers in the Division of Mammals. Visiting artists are a bit of a curiosity in the hard sciences, so there was interest in finding out what I was up to. When I explained that I had come to look at specimens of animals raised in captivity or somehow related to the inbred animals studied in the laboratory, there was an awkward silence. It was eventually broken by one of the senior researchers, who simply said, “Well, that sounds boring.” Ouch.

One day I found a specimen of the same species as the model organism fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) collected on the Island of Pitcairn, about halfway between South America and New Zealand. I picked it because I had once read that the island was populated entirely by the descendants of pirates stranded there sometime in the nineteenth century. There it was, suspended on the end of a pin. I used my fanciest macro lens to snap a photo. It’s a pretty good photo of a dead fruit fly, but what I wanted was a more complicated story about people and their desire to collect. I was getting closer to an interesting project, but wasn’t there yet.

Next I visited some cousins of the model organism lab mouse (Mus musculus) and lab rat (Rattus norvegicus), both stored in the museum’s Rodent Range. The Rodent Range houses upwards of 50,000 rodents. The specimens are arranged first by species, from cabinet to cabinet. Then by place, from drawer to drawer. And, lastly, chronologically by collection date. At the end of all of that, was the drawer I’d come to see: “Locality Unknown.” This held the mice that had lived in captivity.

In Locality Unknown, a patch of snow white mice interrupted the variations on dirt-brown rodents that uniformly populated the other drawers. One label read: “Naval Lab.”² The reverse side stated, “6 miles [9.7 km] north of Washington D.C.” The collection date was coincidentally the day that Japan surrendered following the nuclear attacks at the end of World War II. Could it be a coincidence, or something more?

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The curator for rodents, where my fellowship was officially located, was similarly perplexed by my mission, but took enough of a liking to me that after a few weeks I was allowed to look at the specimens unsupervised. This allowed me to spend long hours, often in the dead of night when the museum was empty, sifting through the drawers for anything that caught my eye.

There was something odd about the place names on many of the drawers that I couldn’t put my finger on. I knew them, but not from geography class; all seemed to have a connection to the atomic bomb. There was Bikini Atoll, the site of the first atomic bomb test after the end of World War II; the Nevada Test Site, where over a thousand nuclear detonations took place; and Johnston Atoll, an even more obscure and remote militarized island from which the U.S. twice launched nuclear bombs into the upper atmosphere and detonated them, just to see what would happen.

What happened was the blocking of radio signals and the disruption of electrical equipment from Hawaii to the Samoan Islands.³

There also seemed to be a lot of mice specimens originating from places where the U.S. had fought wars. Countries like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam seemed overrepresented. This geographical peculiarity was stuck in my head for the next several days and became an obsession for the rest of my time at the Smithsonian.

I brought my questions about the specimens' origin stories to the end-of-week social gathering held deep in the invertebrate collections. The event was a long-standing tradition that allowed everyone to loosen up, have a few drinks, and talk across sections of the museum. This was much more my scene than the stifled atmosphere of the morning coffee crowd. Here I had access to the semi-lubricated brain trust of the Smithsonian.

I ended up getting into a riveting conversation with the Curator Emeritus of Whales, Dr. James Mead. The man had a full white beard, bulging eyes, and the slow drawl of someone who had indeed been out to sea for a long time. He took an immediate interest in my questions about domesticated animals and was quick to point out that whales share close common ancestry with the ungulates that populate our farms today. When it seemed the right moment, I popped my question: “Why is it that so many specimens in the collection come from countries the U.S. has fought wars with?”

There was a pause, then a nod. I was given two reasons: First, when the U.S. goes to war, it is often with a country that U.S. researchers have not had any access to for political reasons, usually for a fairly long time. Second, in the underfunded world of ecological research, the U.S. military would sometimes sponsor Smithsonian scientists to conduct biological assessments.

I thanked him for the insight. Later that night, I searched the database of locally sourced specimens for his name. Sure enough, in the early 1990s, the Curator of Whales had discovered a wee bat that had perished in the basement of the museum. He measured it, cataloged it, and added it to the collection.

I went on browsing the drawers trying to wrap my head around what James Mead had told me. One two-drawer set from Sand Island, Johnston Atoll, caught my attention. A quick peek at Google Earth revealed Sand Island to be a parking lot-sized island just off of the military base at Johnston Atoll in the center of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike the neighboring drawers, filled with row after row of stuffed brown rodent skins, these contained several hundred rodent skulls each packaged in its own glass vial. They were labeled “Pacific Project,” and they were all collected during a single six-month period in 1965. I wandered across the Washington Mall to the Smithsonian Archives in order to find out what I could about the project.

Through letters in the archives belonging to the Director of the Smithsonian at the time, I learned that it had been commissioned by the U.S. Navy, with all correspondence going to Fort Detrick, home to the U.S. Army Chemical and Biological Weapons Lab. They were offering to hire some Smithsonian researchers to live on Sand Island to capture and tag migratory birds, remove any ticks on them, and send the ticks to Fort Detrick. For the Smithsonian, this would be the largest study of migratory birds ever conducted in the region. For its part, the Navy was referring to this research as Project SHAD (Shipboard Hazard And Defense). The mouse skull collection appears to have been a side endeavor, though the researchers also collected blood and ticks from the rodents for the same purpose.

Finding the name, Project SHAD, eventually led me to other documents that had only been declassified in the early 2000s. The documents detailed some of the largest operational tests of chemical and biological weapons ever conducted by the U.S.⁴ It turns out that Project SHAD was one small part of a much larger effort, Project 112, a system-wide attempt to measure and quantify U.S. military capabilities from top to bottom.

In the case of Project SHAD, the tests were live trials of the best chemical and biological weapons strategies the U.S. could imagineer into existence. One ship, the U.S. Granville Hall (YAG-40), served as the laboratory ship, while another ship, the U.S. George Eastman, would be the target. During tests, a voice over the radio would announce “Code Zebra,” and the sailors would don gas masks until receiving the all clear. Between tests, the gas masks would come off and the soldiers would sterilize the ship from top to bottom by washing it in formalin, a dilute solution of formaldehyde. It is suspected that the long-term lung conditions developed by many of the Project SHAD veterans were due to this process and not from their exposure to agents themselves.

I went back to the Archives and pulled all the photographs that had been taken by the Smithsonian researchers during the Pacific Project. In one, a cardboard sign stands amidst a flock of Great Frigate seabirds. It reads: “March 12, 1965 12:30PM.” According to declassified documents, this day marked the largest of the Project SHAD tests, known as Operation Shady Grove. In this test, a laboratory ship released the bacterium that causes tularemia, or “rabbit fever.” The disease vector carrying the bacteria is not disclosed, but some suspect it was ticks attached to captured sea birds.⁵

I stared at the photograph with a newfound understanding: this was not only taken at the same location as a major bioweapons experiment but during the experiment, and was likely a functional piece of data for researchers assessing its outcome. I scanned the photo for any details that could shed light on the nature of the experiment. My eyes wandered from the birds in the foreground to the ships on the horizon. Too small for me to make out the details, I scanned the photo into my computer and zoomed in. A ship just off of Johnston Atoll in the background to the left was emblazoned in large letters: 40. I checked this against the now declassified inventory of ships that participated in Project SHAD, and there she was: YAG-40. The U.S. Granville Hall — the laboratory ship.

Was this an accidentally declassified photo of Operation Shady Grove in action? My research already confirmed that no public photos exist. It felt like I’d found Uncle Sam’s secret stash; it was exhilarating, but also a bit too on the nose. Was I somehow conjuring this? And yet, I had all the receipts.

The facts of the American biological weapons program have to some extent escaped popular awareness and scrutiny; this is due, in large part, to the lack of visual records. Whereas the anti-nuclear proliferation movement was able to catalyze around the terrifying imagery of atmospheric atomic explosions in the American West and on Pacific islands, the chemical and biological weapons program managed to keep a much lower profile. Was this by design? Or, was it simply because a cloud of bacteria is visually less spectacular than a mushroom cloud?

I was reminded that many of the subjects I came here to study are superficially viewed as boring. In the scientists' defense, I can see how one who is concerned purely with the infinite complexity of ecology and the deep-time of evolution could assume that anything involving human beings is going to be of limited interest. Yet, I have also grown skeptical any time I hear someone call something “boring”. Too often the term functions as a kind of mis-direction to discourage closer looking. Yet, these humble specimens of natural history, when viewed closely, are actually spilling state secrets.

As the end of my residency approached, I noticed a new batch of jars in the room housing newly arrived specimens. They brimmed with all manner of small dead animals floating in fluid. By this time I had become laser focused on any subtle indication of subtext that might connect a biological specimen to historic actions of the United States. In this case, the subtext didn’t seem so subtle. One set of shelves was labeled “Iraq” and the other “Afghanistan.” Were these specimens simply new acquisitions conveniently collected in the wake of U.S. military interventions? Or, were some actually tiny whistleblowers, if only we knew how to hear them? Only time and archival curiosity could find the answer, but sadly my 60-day all-access pass to “America’s Attic” had come to an end.

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Rich Pell is an Associate Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University and the founder and executive director of the Center for PostNatural History, the world’s first museum dedicated to exploring and challenging public understanding of our postnatural world. Pell’s work has been exhibited in the Wellcome Collection, Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and LA Co. NHM, and has been featured in publications such as National Geography, Nature, American Scientist, and New Scientist. His first book, “This Is NOT An Artifact”, was published by K-Verlag Press in 2024.

Cite: Pell, Rich. “Inside Job: Secret Histories in the National Museum.” Asimov Press (2024). DOI: 10.62211/47eu-44kt

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Footnotes

1. See collections.nmnh.si.edu/search.
2. NMNH Catalog SI #279454
3. Peter Kuran, Nukes In Space: The Rainbow Bombs (Visual Concept Engineering, 2000) is an excellent introduction.
4. US Department of Veteran Affairs, “Project 112/Project SHAD,” publichealth.va.gov/exposures/shad.
5. Kris Newby, Bitten: The Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons (New York: Harper Wave, 2019).