Enzymes fight chemical weapons

Zbynek Prokop, Frantisek Oplustil, Joseph DeFrank and Jiri Damborsky, Loschmidt Laboratories, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic Military Technical Institute of Protection, Brno, Czech Republic U.S. Army Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD, USA ---- Chemical weapons have been used for millennia, with evidence found for the existence of advanced forms of chemical weapons in ancient and classical times (Fig. 1). Poisons were mainly derived from animal venom or poisonous plants at that period. The Chinese used irritant and poisonous smokes as early as 1000 B.C. Burning wax, pitch, and sulfur were used in wars between the Athenians and Spartans. During the 7th century A.D., Kallinikos, an architect from Heliopolis in Syria, invented Greek fire, probably a combination of rosin, sulfur, naphtha, quicklime and saltpeter. It could continue burning under almost any conditions, even floated on water, which was particularly effective in naval operations. During the Renaissance, people again considered using chemical warfare. Powder of sulfide and arsenic, verdigris and several toxic smokes and fumes were used for warfare in the 16th and 17th century. In the 19th century several proposals were made to initiate chemical warfare, most of them were never put into practice. Nevertheless, the Brussels Convention of 1874 attempted for the first time to prohibit the use of poisons in war. The modern chemical warfare era began during World War I when the first chemical agent to be used was chlorine gas, which was released into the wind by the Germans against the Allies on April 1915 near the Belgian village of Ypres. The attack produced heavy casualties, including 600 deaths. But this was not the only chemical weapons attack during World War I. Both the British and German forces used chlorine gas, mustard gas and phosgene heavily before the war ended. Overall about 51 000 tons of chemical weapons were used in World War I, killing around 85 000 and causing a total of 1.2 million casualties. After World War I, many governments wished to ban chemical weapons because of the horrendous means by which they killed and injured people. In 1925, the Geneva protocol for the prohibition of the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases and of bacteriological methods of warfare was signed by the League of Nations, and has since been signed by over 130 nations. However, the protocol does not prohibit the manufacture and threat of use of chemical weapons, and the protocol has no provisions for the punishment of countries that use such chemical weapons. Between the wars, chemical agents were used by Spain in Spanish Morocco, by Italy in the invasion of Abyssinia, and by Japan in Manchuria and China. During World War II, even though no chemical weapons were used in battle, large amounts of a new chemical weapons developed by the Germans were later discovered. These new chemical weapons were known as nerve agents. During 1950s and 1960s, the United Kingdom and the United States developed and produced in large scale a chemical agent many times greater in lethal properties than any other known chemical agent known under the codename VX. Due to the secrecy of the Soviet Union’s government, very little information was available about the direction and progress of the Soviet chemical weapons until relatively recently. Several highly toxic agents were developed during the mid 1980s by Soviet chemists. During the 1980s, many accounts of the use of chemical warfare agents occurred in Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan. Iraq used chemical weapons against Iran and also against its own people and killed about 5000 Kurdish citizens in Halabja, in March 1988. In 1992, after a decade of long and painstaking negotiations, the Conference on Disarmament agreed to the text of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The whole article "http://loschmidt.chemi.muni.cz":[ http://loschmidt.chemi.muni.cz/peg/pdf/btj06b.pdf]

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