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could drizzle it onto a salad along with a little vinegar and have no worries. Your body would metabolize it along with the arugula and endive without as much as a hiccup. Injecting squalene, though, was another story. To make sure it was the oils that did the damage, Beck, Whitehouse and Pearson tried injecting rats with squalene and squalane without mycobacteria in the formula. Rats injected with either squalene or squalane all developed experimental allergic encephalomyelitis—the same MS-like disease caused by Freund's. The injected animals were left hobbled, dragging their paralyzed hindquarters through the wood chips in their cages. , The UCLA team had found what it was looking for: oils that induced autoimmune disease, but with less inflammation. Between the two of them, squalene was less desirable for UCLA's purposes. "Squalene was more arthritogenic," Beck recalls, "but it also produced a greater inflammation." Risk v. Benefit Given these oils proven ability to induce autoimmune disease, the Army's decision to put either of them in its second generation anthrax vaccine only makes sense when you put it in the context of the times, and in this case, a specific location. When he cancelled America's offensive biological warfare program, President Nixon also freed up some building for a more popular research effort. Arriving by helicopter at Fort Detrick's Blue and Grey Field in October 1971, President Nixon personally announced the creation of the Frederick Cancer Research Facility of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Nixon had Fort Detrick allocate about 68 acres and 70 of its buildings as a new research campus for NCL. It was a fateful decision that would have consequences that even a president as forward-thinking as Nixon could not have foreseen. It would set in motion a series of decisions that would lead, almost inevitably, to the use of a substance that would endanger the health of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops. It is unclear how squalene first came to the attention of Army scientists at Fort Detrick, but one possibility is through the National Cancer Institute, now on its doorstep. Eliyahu Yarkoni and Herbert Rapp of NCI published a paper in 1979 that stirred national and international interest in the alleged therapeutic benefits of squalene and squalane. When combined with fragments of a particular bacterium, squalene and squalane had an astonishing effect. Yarkoni and Rapp reported complete tumor regression in mice injected with squalane, and nearly complete regression (92%) in mice injected with squalene. When they injected these oils directly into mouse tumors, the tumors either shrank or disappeared completely. The more oil in the mixture, the better it worked. Based on these early experiments, oils looked like they might hold the keys to the kingdom—a cure for cancer. There was, however, a hitch. Yarkoni and Rapp knew about the UCLA data; citing the Beck and Whitehouse paper, Yarkoni and Rapp reported that squalene and squalane both caused autoimmune disease in rats—a fact that you will not find mentioned in any Army paper concerning Fort Detrick's work with squalene emulsions in the new anthrax vaccine. Even Yarkoni and Rapp barely mentioned the problem with squalene and squalane; it was limited to a single sentence at the end of their short paper. Although causing debilitating and ultimately fatal neurological damage in animals was a big downside, their concern, after all, was cancer. Several more factors emerged in the 1980s that would affect the direction of the Army's