Jeanne Harley Guillemin (March 6, 1943 - November 15, 2019) was an American
medical anthropologist
Medical anthropology studies "human health and disease, health care systems, and biocultural adaptation". It views humans from multidimensional and ecological perspectives. It is one of the most highly developed areas of anthropology and applied ...
and author, who for 25 years taught at Boston College as a Professor of Sociology and for over ten years was a senior fellow in the Security Studies Program at
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...
. She was an authority on
biological weapons
A biological agent (also called bio-agent, biological threat agent, biological warfare agent, biological weapon, or bioweapon) is a bacterium, virus, protozoan, parasite, fungus, or toxin that can be used purposefully as a weapon in bioterrorism ...
and published four books on the topic.
Biography
Born (March 6, 1943) Jean Elizabeth Garrigan in
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
,
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
, she was raised in
Rutherford, New Jersey
Rutherford is a borough in Bergen County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2020 United States Census, the borough's population was 18,834.
Rutherford was formed as a borough by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on September 21, 1881, fr ...
and received a bachelor's degree (1968) in social psychology from
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...
. In 1973, she completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at
Brandeis University
, mottoeng = "Truth even unto its innermost parts"
, established =
, type = Private research university
, accreditation = NECHE
, president = Ronald D. Liebowitz
, ...
. She taught at
Boston College
Boston College (BC) is a private Jesuit research university in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts. Founded in 1863, the university has more than 9,300 full-time undergraduates and nearly 5,000 graduate students. Although Boston College is classifie ...
from 1972 until 2005.
While at Boston College, Guillemin did extensive research on hospital technology and medical ethics, receiving fellowships to work on the U.S. Senate Finance Committee staff and at the
Hastings Center for the Study of Ethics. She was also co-head of the
National Library of Medicine
The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.
Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the NLM is an institute within the National Institutes of Health. Its ...
's
HealthAware Project, a joint project with
Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School (HMS) is the graduate medical school of Harvard University and is located in the Longwood Medical Area of Boston, Massachusetts. Founded in 1782, HMS is one of the oldest medical schools in the United States and is consi ...
to test how the internet could be used to educate people about preventive health measures.
She married Robert Guillemin and had two sons, Robert and John. She divorced her first husband and in 1986, married
Matthew Meselson
Matthew Stanley Meselson (born May 24, 1930) is a geneticist and molecular biologist currently at Harvard University, known for his demonstration, with Franklin Stahl, of semi-conservative DNA replication. After completing his Ph.D. under Linus ...
.
In the 1980s, Guillemin became interested in the misuse of biomedical science by government weapons programs. She involved herself in two of her husband's investigations of alleged violations of international arms control agreements by the Soviet Union which involved germ weapons. The first was the "
yellow rain
Yellow rain was a 1981 political incident in which the United States Secretary of State Alexander Haig accused the Soviet Union of supplying T-2 mycotoxin to the Communist states in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia for use in counterinsurgency warfare. ...
" accusation by the United States against the USSR, to the effect that the Soviets enabled the
Laotian army to use deadly
mycotoxin
A mycotoxin (from the Greek μύκης , "fungus" and τοξίνη , "toxin") is a toxic secondary metabolite produced by organisms of kingdom Fungi and is capable of causing disease and death in both humans and other animals. The term 'mycotoxin' ...
s to attack
Hmong
Hmong may refer to:
* Hmong people, an ethnic group living mainly in Southwest China, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand
* Hmong cuisine
* Hmong customs and culture
** Hmong music
** Hmong textile art
* Hmong language, a continuum of closely related to ...
refugees allied with the US during the
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War (also known by other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam a ...
. This accusation had been disputed by Meselson in 1983 when he argued that the yellow material was actually bee feces mistaken for a biological weapon by those under attack and by certain US government scientists. (The issue remains disputed and the US government has not withdrawn the allegations, arguing that the controversy has not been fully resolved.)
In 1992, Guillemin became part of Meselson's investigation into another Cold War controversy, the
1979 outbreak of anthrax in
Sverdlovsk, a closed Soviet city in the
Ural Mountains
The Ural Mountains ( ; rus, Ура́льские го́ры, r=Uralskiye gory, p=ʊˈralʲskʲɪjə ˈɡorɨ; ba, Урал тауҙары) or simply the Urals, are a mountain range that runs approximately from north to south through western ...
. The Soviet government claimed the cause was infected meat. Guillemin's interviews with the families of victims (64 people were recorded as dying) resulted in an epidemiological map showing the source to be an air-borne release of anthrax spores from a military facility where, in violation of the 1972
Biological Weapons Convention
The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), or Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC), is a disarmament treaty that effectively bans biological and toxin weapons by prohibiting their development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpil ...
, the testing of anthrax weapons had been in process. In 1994, the results of this research were published in ''
Science
Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.
Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...
'' and in 1999 her book on this research was published (''Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak'', U of California Press).
After 9/11, with the advent of the anthrax letter attacks, Guillemin was frequently asked by the media to explain the disease, based on her experience in Russia. In 2005 she published ''Biological Weapons: From State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterorism'', Columbia U Press) which offers a concise, comprehensive history of how anthrax and other microbes were developed as weapons over the course of the 20th century, resulting in potential bioterrorism. She turned her attention to the 2001 anthrax letter attacks after the 2008 suicide of the FBI's prime suspect, an anthrax scientist who worked for the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Her third book on biological weapons is about the letters and their impact on victims and government organizations. It is called ''American Anthrax: Fear, Crime, and the Investigation of the Nation's Deadliest Bioterror Attack'', (Macmillan/Holt/Times, 2011).
Guillemin joined the
MIT Center for International Studies
The MIT Center for International Studies (CIS) is an academic research center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It sponsors work focusing on international relations, security studies, international migration, human rights and justi ...
in 2006 as a research associate and senior advisor. In October 2019, she established an endowed fund to provide financial support to female PhD candidates studying international affairs.
Guillemin died on November 15, 2019 at the age of 76.
Books
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''Urban Renegades: The Cultural Strategy of American Indians'', Columbia University Press, 19?? (New edition, 1975).
*Guillemin, Jeanne Harley and Lynda Lytle Holmstrom, ''Mixed Blessings: Intensive Care for Newborns'', Oxford University Press, 1986.
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak'',
Berkeley
Berkeley most often refers to:
*Berkeley, California, a city in the United States
**University of California, Berkeley, a public university in Berkeley, California
* George Berkeley (1685–1753), Anglo-Irish philosopher
Berkeley may also refer ...
,
University of California Press
The University of California Press, otherwise known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. It was founded in 1893 to publish scholarly and scientific works by facult ...
, 1999.
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''Anthrax and Smallpox: Comparison of Two Outbreaks'',
National Technical Information Service
The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) is an agency within the U.S. Department of Commerce. The primary mission of NTIS is to collect and organize scientific, technical, engineering, and business information generated by U.S. Gove ...
, 2002.
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism'', Columbia University Press, 2005.
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''American Anthrax'', Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 2011.
*Guillemin, Jeanne, ''Hidden Atrocities: Japanese Germ Warfare and American Obstruction of Justice at the Tokyo Trial'', Columbia University Press, 2017.
''Guillemin wrote introductions to new editions of:''
*
Mead, Margaret, ''Kinship in the Admiralty Islands'', In Anthropological Papers of the
American Museum of Natural History, Volume 34, Issue 2 pages 181-358;
American Museum of Natural History ( AMNH ), New York, 1934
ransaction Publishers edition, 2001
*Brown, Fredric Joseph, ''Chemical Warfare: A Study in Restraints'',
Princeton University Press
Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large.
The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial su ...
, 1968;
ransaction Publishers edition, 2005
''Guillemin edited:''
*Guillemin, Jeanne (ed.), ''Anthropological Realities: Readings in the Science of Culture'', Transaction Publishers, 1980.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Guillemin, Jeanne
People from Brooklyn
American women anthropologists
Medical anthropologists
Boston College faculty
People related to biological warfare
Bioethics
1943 births
2019 deaths
Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni
American social sciences writers
Brandeis University alumni
Harvard College alumni
People from Rutherford, New Jersey