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House
    1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
    Washington, D.C.
    Dear Mr. President:
    Recent theoretical considerations suggest that sterilization procedures of returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee sterile reentry to this planet’s atmosphere. The consequence of this is the potential introduction of virulent organisms into the present terrestrial ecologic framework.
    It is our belief that sterilization for reentry probes and manned capsules can never be wholly satisfactory. Our calculations suggest that even if capsules received sterilizing procedures in space, the probability of contamination would still remain one in ten thousand, and perhaps much more. These estimates are based upon organized life as we know it; other forms of life may be entirely resistant to our sterilizing methods.
    We therefore urge the establishment of a facility designed to deal with an extraterrestrial life form, should one inadvertently be introduced to the earth. The purpose of this facility would be two-fold: to limit dissemination of the life form, and to provide laboratories for its investigation and analysis, with a view to protecting earth life forms from its influence.
    We recommend that such a facility be located in an uninhabited region of the United States; that it be constructed underground; that it incorporate all known isolation techniques; and that it be eguipped with a nuclear device for self-destruction in the eventuality of an emergency. So far as we know, no form of life can survive the two million degrees of heat which accompany an atomic nuclear detonation.
Yours very truly,
Jeremy Stone
John Black
Samuel Holden
Terence Lisset
Andrew Weiss
    Response to the letter was gratifyingly prompt. Twenty-four hours later, Stone received a call from one of the President’s advisers, and the following day he flew to Washington to confer with the President and members of the National Security Council. Two weeks after that, he flew to Houston to discuss further plans with NASA officials.
    Although Stone recalls one or two cracks about “the goddam penitentiary for bugs,” most scientists he talked with regarded the project favorably. Within a month, Stone’s informal team was hardened into an official committee to study problems of contamination and draw up recommendations.
    This committee was put on the Defense Department’s Advance Research Projects List and funded through the Defense Department. At that time, the ARPL was heavily invested in chemistry and physics—ion sprays, reversal duplication, pimeson substrates—but there was growing interest in biologic problems. Thus one ARPL group was concerned with electronic pacing of brain function (a euphemism for mind control); a second had prepared a study of biosynergics, the future possible combinations of man and machines implanted inside the body; still another was evaluating Project Ozma, the search for extraterrestrial life conducted in 1961–4. A fourth group was engaged in preliminary design of a machine that would carry out all human functions and would be self-duplicating.
    All these projects were highly theoretical, and all were staffed by prestigious scientists. Admission to the ARPL was a mark of considerable status, and it ensured future funds for implementation and development.
    Therefore, when Stone’s committee submitted an early draft of the Life Analysis Protocol, which detailed the way any living thing could be studied, the Defense Department responded with an outright appropriation of $22,000,000 for the construction of a special isolated laboratory. (This rather large sum was felt to be justified since the project had application to other studies already under way. In 1965, the whole field of sterility and contamination was one of major importance. For example, NASA was building a Lunar Receiving Laboratory, a high-security facility for Apollo astronauts returning from the moon and possibly carrying bacteria or viruses harmful to man. Every astronaut