A Tangled Web

WHEN A DECEMBER 1992 purge of the South African Defence Force (SADF) thrust a top-secret Military Intelligence unit into the spotlight and implicated a phalanx of high-ranking officers in alleged Third Force activities, one man hugged the shadows. Five years later, the names of six officers placed on early pension and 16 others suspended pending further investigation had all but faded into obscurity. Ironically, the twenty-third man, whose identity had been kept a closely guarded secret, was about to become a household name.

That man was Dr Wouter Basson, a double medical specialist, former brigadier and head of the apartheid government’s ultra-secret chemical and biological warfare programme, Project Coast. From 4 October 1999 until 11 April 2002, however, this slight-built, balding man was, first and foremost, the Accused, his chequered past the leitmotif of one of the longest and costliest criminal trials in South Africa’s judicial annals.

By the time Basson walked out of the Pretoria High Court a free man, he had been the subject of diverse investigations for 10 years, and on trial for 30 months. The route followed by Judge Willie Hartzenberg in concluding that the evidence of 153 witnesses and thousands of pages of supporting documents was not enough to find Basson guilty on a single one of the 61 charges he faced, may be the subject of debate for years to come, but there is no doubt that the tale that unfolded in his courtroom is one seldom told outside the pages of fictional best-sellers: a tale of subterfuge and sophistry, politics and power, murder and mad science.

Born on 6 July 1950, Basson was the eldest son of a rugby-loving policeman and an aspiring opera singer. Shortly before matriculating from Milnerton High School in Cape Town at the end of 1967, his plans to study medicine at the University of Cape Town were dashed by his father’s transfer to Pretoria, and the news that his parents could not afford the cost of long-distance tuition. He enrolled at the University of Pretoria instead, qualifying as a medical doctor before serving a one-year internship at one of South Africa’s premier teaching hospitals, HF Verwoerd (now renamed Pretoria Academic) in 1974.

Basson’s intention was to specialise in gynaecology at Middlesex Hospital in England, but like all white South African men of his generation, he was subject to compulsory military service. He joined the SADF on 2 January 1975, switched his area of specialisation to internal medicine and, by the end of 1980, was a qualified physician also holding a master’s degree in physiology and physiological chemistry and the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

When the SADF High Command cast around for a suitable candidate to head up a proposed chemical and biological warfare (CBW) project, Basson was the man they chose. For the next 12 years, he would enjoy a freedom of movement and absence of control unprecedented in a military milieu, where chain of command is paramount and paperwork the fuel that moves the war machine along.

Basson’s immediate superior, Surgeon General Niel Knobel, would later admit that he and other members of the Coordinating Management Committee (CMC) to which Basson reported periodically, did not want to know who he was dealing with or how he was acquiring the equipment and information needed by Project Coast. As long as Basson did not exceed the annually approved budgets, and produced the required results, he was authorised to do ‘whatever he had to, even if this involved theft or bribery’, according to Knobel. Just about the only restriction placed on Basson was a standard caveat against self-enrichment at the project’s expense.

By the middle of 1992, this lack of checks and balances saw Military Intelligence steeped in what would be the first of a series of investigations into irregularities and criminal activity allegedly perpetrated under the mantle of Project Coast. But not until Basson’s arrest on 29 January 1997 for drug-dealing would these disparate probes converge, adding vivid detail to a picture of securocratic South Africa that was coming to resemble nothing so closely as a Hieronymus Bosch landscape.

Shortly after PW Botha was deposed as head of state in 1989, Almond Nofomela, a former policeman, sentenced to death for the murder of a farmer, made a shocking confession on the eve of his execution: he had been a member of a Security Police hit squad operating from a farm called Vlakplaas, south-west of Pretoria. When his erstwhile commanding officer, Dirk Coetzee, confirmed the claim, the lid was lifted on a can of worms so foetid that no one in apartheid’s corridors of power could escape the stench.

Botha’s successor, FW de Klerk, appointed no fewer than three commissions of inquiry in a bid to redeem and reform the security forces at the heart of one shocking revelation after another. In 1990, the Harms Commission probed both the Security Police covert unit operating from Vlakplaas and the SADF’s equivalent, the Civil Cooperation Bureau (CCB). In August 1992, recommendations by the Kahn Commission resulted in the cutting off of the liberal flow of secret funds for clandestine security force operations. Significantly, Project Coast was never among the projects laid before Kahn, and it emerged from the probe unscathed. Towards the end of 1991, allegations of security force complicity in the violence wracking vast tracts of South Africa led to the appointment of Judge Richard Goldstone as head of an ongoing commission of inquiry with an open-ended brief that encompassed township massacres in the dead of night, a bloody campaign of attacks on train commuters and minibus taxis, and the supply of arms to members of the Inkatha Freedom Party.

By November 1992, when the Goldstone Commission raided the front company in Lynnwood, Pretoria, that hid Military Intelligence’s Directorate Covert Collection (DCC), the civilian National Intelligence Service (NIS – now Agency (NIA)) had already spent two years on a top-secret investigation launched on De Klerk’s instructions into burgeoning allegations that a Third Force made up of elements of the security forces was not only stoking but in fact igniting the fires that threatened to engulf South Africa before a negotiated settlement could be reached between the two major political players, the ruling National Party and the African National Congress (ANC).

The DCC raid would have far-reaching implications. Five top-secret dossiers filed under the code-name Baboon contributed to the successful prosecution of former CCB killer Ferdi Barnard in June 1998, when he was sentenced to life behind bars for the May 1989 murder of anti-apartheid activist and anthropologist Dr David Webster in Johannesburg. Crucially, in the wake of the widespread media coverage following the Goldstone raid, the NIS decided to pool its resources with the commission, and by the end of November, Lieutenant-General Pierre Steyn, the SADF’s Chief of Staff, had been designated the unfortunate bearer of bad tidings to the head of state.

In his autobiography The Last Trek, published in 1999, De Klerk wrote that he was ‘deeply shocked’ by what Steyn reported to him. At a hurriedly convened Cabinet meeting, wrote De Klerk, ‘we listened dumbfounded, while General Steyn unravelled a complex web of unauthorised, illegal and criminal activities within some units of the Defence Force’. The report was a combination of the findings to date of the NIS, the SADF’s own counter-intelligence section and the Goldstone Commission. Amid allegations of widespread subversive activity, arms and drug smuggling, cross-border vehicle theft syndicates and murders committed with poison, there were also the first references to abuse of a chemical and biological warfare programme. Although Steyn made no specific recommendations, the information was so dangerous that he urged De Klerk to act sooner rather than later.

De Klerk lost no time, consulting with three top military officers – SADF chief General AJ ‘Kat’ Liebenberg, Army chief Lieutenant-General Georg Meiring and Chief of Staff Intelligence Lieutenant-General Joffel van der Westhuizen – before announcing, two days before Christmas, that 23 senior SADF officers up to the rank of major-general were being axed with immediate effect. Within a fortnight, a team of detectives began gathering the hard evidence needed if any of the allegations were ever going to lead to criminal charges being laid. Simultaneously, but as part of an entirely independent investigation, the Office for Serious Economic Offences (OSEO) began unravelling the labyrinthine financial affairs of Project Coast, armed with the names of companies in South Africa and abroad that appeared nowhere in the SADF’s records as approved front companies. OSEO’s probe was an extension of Military Intelligence’s earlier attempt – which included the tapping of 47 telephone lines – to establish the links between Basson and the multi-million-rand refurbishment of a luxurious three-storey house in Pretoria’s diplomatic belt, as well as a number of companies in which he appeared to have a personal stake.

With sleuths combing every possible avenue for witnesses willing to state under oath what had previously been confined to ‘raw’ intelligence, the Goldstone Commission made a major breakthrough. Former Vlakplaas operator Chappies Klopper indicated that he was ready to talk – in exchange for protection, and only in a foreign country. For the first time in the history of South African law and order, a witness protection programme was hastily conceived. Though not in the league of the well-established American system, where witnesses in major cases are even supplied with new identities and lives, the South African programme does make use of various ‘safe houses’, while witnesses relinquish their existing jobs and are paid an allowance until their presence is required in court, after which they are helped to find new employment.

Klopper was the key that unlocked the door to the secrets of Vlakplaas, home of the Security Police’s Unit C10, under command of Colonel Eugene de Kock – known to both his colleagues and his men as ‘Prime Evil’. After Klopper talked, the Vlakplaas squad fell like dominoes, and several of them spent months living in Denmark before De Kock’s trial began in February 1995. The prosecutors were Anton Ackermann, SC, and Dr Torie Pretorius, who had moved over from the Goldstone Commission to the Special Investigation Unit (SIU) set up by Transvaal Attorney-General Dr Jan D’Oliveira in 1993 to focus on Third Force cases. De Kock was sentenced to more than 200 years in prison after being convicted by Judge Willem van der Merwe in the Pretoria High Court in October 1996. Ackermann’s next success was the conviction of Barnard, by Judge Johan Els, in June 1998. The SIU also investigated half a dozen more serious cases linked to Third Force activities, including the death of three Eastern Cape security policemen in what became known as the Motherwell bomb incident, the reign of terror waged by the Black Cats gang in the Ermelo area and the so-called ‘Red Mercury’ murders of several individuals with close links to the arms and chemical industries. They had also revisited the crash of the Helderberg, a South African Airways Boeing 747 that went down in the sea off Mauritius in November 1987, and the air crash that killed Mozambican president Samora Machel in 1986.

By the end of 1996, three major investigations centred on Basson were in progress – those of National Intelligence, OSEO and the SIU. But on the morning of Wednesday, 29 January 1997, it was detectives from the Narcotics Bureau who laid a trap in Magnolia Dell, the pretty park opposite Basson’s home where mothers and child-minders take toddlers to feed the ducks and see the statue of Peter Pan. They saw Basson hand a black plastic bag (later found to contain 1 040 capsules of the popular rave drug Ecstasy) to a business acquaintance, who in turn placed R60 000 in cash on Basson’s car seat. As the policemen emerged from the bushes, firearms drawn, the soldier-doctor fled, stumbling into the shallow stream that meanders through the park and emerging dripping wet. Basson would later deny all knowledge of the drugs in the bag, saying he ran because he believed agents of the Israeli secret service, Mossad, were about to kill him.

If the most senior detective on the scene, Giel Ehlers, was bemused by Basson’s apparent relief when he identified himself as a member of the SA Police, he was totally flabbergasted by a slew of calls ‘from all sorts of generals’ to his cellular phone shortly after formally arresting Basson and walking across the road to search his house. Telephone lines throughout Pretoria were ringing frantically that day. National Intelligence wanted to know from the SIU whether they had nabbed Basson. SIU thought OSEO might have struck. SADF generals and some of Pretoria’s top lawyers wanted to know from everyone involved what was going on. It would be another 36 hours before the picture came into focus.

That night, with Basson behind bars pending a bail appeal on the drug charges, two agents from National Intelligence trailed a car driven by a woman from his home to an apartment block several suburbs away. They watched as she removed a black refuse bag from her boot and placed it on the ground next to another parked vehicle before driving off. Shortly afterwards, a man emerged from the building, placed the bag in his car and was followed by one of the agents to a house in the suburb of Wonderboom, north of Pretoria. The next day, detectives returned to the house, and when they left, they carried with them a veritable treasure trove of documents, stored in two securely locked blue steel trunks, which would not only form the basis of several criminal charges subsequently brought against Basson, but would also provide invaluable information on chemical and biological research conducted under the aegis of Project Coast.

Among the thousands of pages retrieved from these and two additional trunks, handed over to investigators in May 1997, were extremely sensitive and classified documents which had supposedly been destroyed after details of the CBW programme had been captured on 16 compact discs, stored under stringent security measures in a vault at the Surgeon General’s office and accessible only by presidential order. As a signatory to international treaties governing weapons of mass destruction, South Africa is bound not to disclose any information that could lead to the proliferation of CBW. Consequently, the contents of numerous documents found in the trunks will never be made public. However, a considerable number of documents have entered the public domain after being used by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) during its mid-1998 hearings on CBW, and by prosecutors in the Basson trial. As for the mysterious black bag that led investigators to the trunks, Sam Bosch would testify that it contained nothing more sinister than a selection of succulent plants.

On 22 October Basson was arrested again – this time by investigators from OSEO, who had formulated the first of the fraud charges he would face. As with his initial bail hearing, the second was closed to the media, on the grounds that information that had a direct bearing on national security was likely to be disclosed. By the time a 300-page indictment had been drawn up by Ackermann and Pretorius in March 1999, hardened journalists and an unsuspecting public alike had become almost inured to the shocking revelations made about bizarre experiments conducted by Project Coast scientists who testified before the TRC. But nothing could have prepared ordinary South Africans for the harrowing testimony presented during the criminal trial by self-confessed military hit men, or the convoluted nature of financial transactions that formed the basis of the fraud charges.

The TRC hearings, more than a year before the start of the criminal trial, had not been able to canvass the allegations of murder and financial malfeasance that eventually formed the basis of the 60 most serious charges against Basson – and indeed, had it not been for a single amnesty application, the subject of the CBW programme might never have come before the TRC at all. The TRC was set up by the Government of National Unity after the 1994 election and mandated to investigate conflict and abuse during the apartheid years. It was hoped that by exploring South Africa’s bloody past, the foundation would be laid for peace and tolerance in the future. Particular emphasis was placed on gross human rights abuses, with both victims and perpetrators being afforded the opportunity to tell their personal stories and come to terms with the suffering they had either endured or inflicted. Those guilty of abuse, including murder, were granted amnesty from prosecution, provided the commissioners believed they had disclosed the full truth about crimes motivated by political conviction. The TRC was chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former head of the Anglican Church in South Africa and an ardent opponent of apartheid, and the first public hearings took place in April 1996.

Scorned and largely spurned by serving and former members of the SADF, not least thanks to a highly effective campaign spearheaded by a group of former generals, the TRC was impotent to pierce the shield protecting military operations during the apartheid era.

The amnesty application by one Jan Lourens was an exception, the act of a man who had chosen to turn his back on his former colleagues and bosses in the organisation that had been his bread and butter for more than a decade. The application was short and vague. Lourens identified himself as having worked within a chemical and biological warfare programme that few in the TRC even knew had existed. He described James Bond-type assassination weapons that he had designed, and listed the names of his former colleagues.

By the time TRC investigators debriefed Lourens in January 1998, investigative journalists had begun to scratch the surface of something that the average person had never before encountered. The concept of germ warfare is difficult enough to grasp – but what unsuspecting South Africans were suddenly confronted with was a tale so bizarre that it defied even the most fertile imagination. Amid allegations of gross misuse of public funds poured into a project so secret that at any given time, only a handful of the most senior SADF officers even knew of its existence, stories began to emerge of cruel animal experiments, plans to breed a super wolf-dog, the search for the ultimate murder weapon – a substance impossible to detect during autopsy – and sinister research on a contraceptive aimed specifically at South Africa’s black population.

Inevitably, comparisons were drawn between Project Coast and the heinous human experiments conducted in Nazi Germany under the leadership of Dr Josef Mengele, and in the absence of hard facts, speculation made for sensational headlines. As a former confidant of Basson, Lourens was able to provide an insider’s view of the programme. He had visited the chemical and biological front companies, even overseen construction of one of them, and had managed several support companies associated with the programme. What he told the TRC made it clear that both South African taxpayers and the international community were owed an explanation for the SADF’s foray into CBW. But the TRC was running out of time: the final deadline for completion of its task was rapidly approaching, leaving only three months in which to uncover a programme that had remained hidden for almost two decades.

The TRC had been given access to the documents found in the four trunks retrieved after Basson’s arrest, but, while party to the cataloguing of the documents by the National Intelligence Agency, TRC officials had not studied the contents before the documents were secured in an NIA strongroom. However, they did elicit the assurance that access could be obtained, should the need arise. When the time came for TRC investigators to start studying the documents, investigators were told they would have to hold off until a meeting could be held with Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. Weeks passed without any progress being made. Letters to Mbeki’s office remained unanswered; investigators were told he was too busy to meet with them. The meeting never did take place.

Meanwhile, NIA representatives informed the deputy head of the TRC, Dr Alex Boraine, and the head of the Investigative Unit, Dumisa Ntsebeza, that the proposed investigation could jeopardise major probes already being conducted by OSEO and the Transvaal Attorney-General into the alleged criminal activities of Basson and his associates. The TRC was warned that exposing the scientists who had been the backbone of the programme could threaten their lives, or worse, expose them to possible recruitment by countries wanting to develop CBW programmes of their own. The TRC made it clear that it was under an obligation to proceed with the investigation in order to provide answers to those who might have been victims of the programme, as well as to the public. The NIA introduced stalling tactics, refusing to allow access to the documents on the grounds that the TRC investigators did not have security clearance. It was OSEO that finally broke the deadlock. Having had its own investigation frustrated for so long, it was sympathetic towards the plight of the TRC, and made its own set of documents available at its Pretoria offices. In the light of this, the NIA eventually relented, agreeing that the TRC could have access to all the documents, subject to stringent security measures.

Tracking down and interviewing the scientists of Project Coast was no easy matter either. Some proved willing participants in the process, relieved at being given the chance to share the secrets they had kept for so long, even from their closest family members. Others remained tight-lipped and wholly uncooperative, or went to ground. Basson himself, Dr Wynand Swanepoel (former managing director of the biological facility, Roodeplaat Research Laboratories) and Dr Philip Mijburgh (former managing director of the chemical facility, Delta G Scientific) were unhelpful and refused all requests for interviews.

Some of those who came forward voluntarily did so out of feelings of betrayal. Dr Schalk van Rensburg, who had previously approached the TRC with his story, returned from his Free State farm to Cape Town to tell it again. A former director at Roodeplaat Research Laboratories (RRL), Van Rensburg felt betrayed by both the system and the people with whom he had worked. He had left the front company without being able to capitalise on any of the shares he believed he was entitled to, while his former colleagues, Swanepoel and Dr André Immelman, had walked away millionaires. Dr Daan Goosen, too, felt aggrieved. After having headed RRL for three years, he was dismissed from his position on charges of breaching security.

When the front companies were privatised in the early 1990s, both Goosen and Van Rensburg had launched personal campaigns to expose the secrets of their work and the corruption they believed was involved. They were the first to break the silence, albeit anonymously, telling their stories to selected journalists, OSEO and, in at least one instance, the Minister of Justice. Meetings with the scientists confirmed the information provided by Lourens and filled in some of the gaps, but the TRC was constrained by its mandate to investigate only human rights violations, and thus was able to do little more than scratch the surface of the programme in its entirety.

Two weeks before the public hearings into chemical and biological warfare were scheduled to begin, TRC commissioners and investigators were summoned to an urgent, high-level meeting with the Deputy Minister of Defence, representatives of the Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Surgeon General, the National Intelligence Agency and others who had an interest in preventing public exposure of the programme. The TRC was given a new warning. The proposed hearing posed a threat to the government’s international relations. Details of visits by British and American diplomats to South Africa in 1993, 1994 and 1995 were among the documents found in the trunks, and the government feared that exposure of these secret meetings would compromise their relationship of trust with the two countries. The government representatives tried repeatedly to convince the TRC to proceed with caution, to hold the hearings in camera.

In retrospect, the greatest concern of government representatives may have been that revelations about the CBW programme could reveal that South Africa had not honoured its commitment to the Biological Weapons Convention, which had been signed in 1972 and which banned production of biological weapons and biological agents for anything other than peaceful means. Furthermore, it is now clear that the politicians did not know what would emerge when the scientists testified. Although Knobel, as Surgeon General, had briefed President Nelson Mandela when he took office, notes from that meeting show that Mandela was not told the full extent of the programme. Nor had the NIA briefed Mandela or Mbeki about the contents of the documents that had been found. During the TRC investigation, Knobel insisted that Project Coast was nothing more than a defensive programme aimed at providing protection against what the military perceived as a real threat of chemical attack against its troops in Angola. He prided himself on having represented his country at the 1993 signing of the Chemical Weapons Convention and disclaimed all knowledge of the assassination weapons that Lourens and others had developed.

Initially, Knobel was more than willing to appear at the TRC hearings, from which he believed he would emerge as the capable leader of an important military project. But, as he began to realise that the investigators had uncovered serious aberrations within the project, his attitude shifted. On Friday, 5 June, three days before the hearing, Knobel called the investigators to an urgent private meeting where he proclaimed his innocence, saying that he had not known about any of the offensive research done by Project Coast, and handed over a new set of documents that revealed the workings of the SADF’s Coordinating Management Committee. When the hearings began on Monday, 8 June 1998, the government, represented by its legal advisor Fink Haysom, made a last-ditch attempt at keeping the CBW programme secret. Arguing that the hearings should be held in camera, a position supported by legal representatives from the Department of Foreign Affairs and the head of the Council for the Non-Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction, Abdul Minty, the government again drew attention to the dangers that revelations of the programme could pose. But the TRC refused to be swayed, making it quite clear, yet again, that the hearings would be open to the public.

The next hurdle lay just ahead. Lawyers for Basson, Swanepoel and Mijburgh argued that they could not be expected to testify, since there were indications that all three were facing indictment by the Attorney-General, and that forcing them to appear would be a violation of their constitutional right to remain silent. The TRC rejected their arguments, but it was not until Basson had taken his objections to the Cape High Court, significantly delaying the hearings, that he finally faced the commissioners on 31 July, the very last day the TRC’s Human Rights Violations Committee could legally convene. Having previously attended the hearings wearing an African print shirt and clutching a little black handbag, Basson reverted to a conventional business suit on the day he testified, and appeared supremely confident. Before taking his seat at the table he smilingly shook the hand of each commissioner. Not even the barrage of media photographers distracted him, and he continued to smile and wink at the cameras.

Whatever faint hope the commissioners might have fostered that Basson would be amenable to their questions was destroyed in the very first minutes, when he declined to place even his military rank on record. The rest of the session was marked by constant objections from his advocate, Jaap Cilliers, protracted legal bickering between Cilliers and the TRC’s legal adviser, Hanif Vally, and vague and argumentative responses from Basson. Asked by Vally at one point whether he had ever been in the least bit tempted to profit from the large quantities of Ecstasy and Mandrax manufactured at Delta G Scientific, Basson responded: ‘Mr Vally, for the last three days I was tempted by the girl behind me. We’re all subject to temptations. The fact that the temptation was there does not mean that I succumbed to it.’ When Ntsebeza admonished him, pointing out that ‘You are making that lady blush, Doctor, she’s blushing, she’s crimson red with blushing, please,’ Basson retorted: ‘I was hoping to achieve more than that, Mr Chairman,’ at which commissioner Dr Wendy Orr became so disgusted that she walked out of the proceedings. During a brief recess, Basson went down to the coffee shop in the TRC building. Encountering Vally and some of his colleagues having a cup of coffee, he walked over and kissed the legal adviser on the forehead. It was a deliberate gesture, calculated to upset Vally, and it worked. Shortly afterwards, Basson scrawled graffiti on the wall of the same coffee shop, signing himself ‘Dr Death’ with a flourish.

Swanepoel and Mijburgh were of little help either, claiming loss of memory not only on salient points about the project, but even on such personal details as their salaries while attached to Project Coast. Using monosyllables as far as possible, Swanepoel’s answers were simply laughable at times. The one thing he could remember clearly was that for an initial investment of R50 000, he received R4,5 million in return when RRL was privatised.

Knobel’s testimony left no doubt that the management of Project Coast was so lax that one of the TRC’s findings was that ‘the military command, and pre-eminently the Surgeon General, Dr DP Knobel, were grossly negligent in approving programmes and allocating large sums of money for activities of which they had no understanding, and which they made no effort to understand’. In an even more damning finding, the TRC said the testimony of the scientists had shown that Knobel ‘did know of the production of murder weapons but refused to address the concerns that were raised with him, on the grounds that they did not fall under his authority; that he did not understand, by his own admission, the medical, chemical and technical aspects and implications of a programme that cost tens, if not hundreds of millions of rands and made no effort to come to grips with these issues, notwithstanding the fact that he was the highest-ranking medical professional in the military and that others in the military were wholly dependent on his judgment and discretion.’ At the time of the hearing Knobel had the support of the head of the Non-Proliferation Council, who regarded him as a vital consultant. The TRC findings resulted in him losing this position, although he continued to advise and report to the Health Professionals Council of South Africa and serve on their executive body.

The TRC hearings, closely followed by the international media, marked the first time that a CBW programme had been publicly exposed to this extent, or that the managers, scientists and architects of any CBW programme had been called to account, in an open forum, for their actions. The process offered the scientists an opportunity to talk about and question their involvement in the programme, and many of them found this cathartic, expressing a tremendous sense of relief afterwards. Some of them subsequently pledged to support processes designed to prevent other scientists from finding themselves trapped in similar circumstances. The scientists have, however, found themselves thrust into the glare of media attention, an experience some have weathered better than others. After all, by the nature of their task, scientists are accustomed to working well out of the public eye, and media demands have added to the professional and personal stress caused by the work they did not only becoming public knowledge, but being revealed for the first time to their loved ones.