Biological agents that cause disease have a long and terrible
history in human warfare. During the crusades, a common tactic
to break a seige was to toss the rotten corpses of animals into
the starving populace to spread disease. Much of the army that
Napoleon marched into Russia was struck down by typhus, which
ground his offensive to a halt and caused him to retreat. Even
more recently in World War 2, the Japanese were very interested
in the use of biological and chemical agents. Projects conducted
by the Japanese included dropping plague infected fleas onto
Chinese cities and experiments with anthrax. Anthrax was
considered as a last resort biological weapon by the British
military, with an island off the coast of Scotland being
rendered completely uninhabitable by various tests. Today,
unlike in the previous examples the threat of biological weapons
is much greater, because technology has advanced to the point
where we can simply design our own pathogens to be more
effective weapons. Indeed, there has bee