The Dead Hand

To My Parents

Howard and Beverly Hoffman

“Science has brought us to a point at which we might look forward with confidence to the conquest of disease and even to a true understanding of the life that animates us. And now we have cracked the atom and released such energies as hitherto only the sun and the stars could generate. But we have used the atom’s energies to kill, and now we are fashioning weapons out of our knowledge of disease.”

—Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It, 1949