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4 The American University Experimental Station Captain James Conant received the baton for lewisite’s development from Lewis. Although Conant did not participate in the discovery of lewisite, he eventually had as much to do with its becoming a weapon as Nieuwland and Lewis. Conant was born to Jennett and James Scott Conant on March 26, 1893, in Boston. He was a precocious child with a great interest in chemistry. His high school yearbook said, “This year he has practically lived in the laboratory , concocting every kind of condition of smell. We sincerely hope he will not blow up the laboratory at Harvard.”1 Conant graduated from Harvard in 1913, in 1916 received his doctoral degree from that institution, and became a chemistry instructor there. Although he enjoyed teaching, Conant, like Lewis, wished to contribute to the war effort. He decided to enlist in the army as a noncommissioned of¤cer in 1917 to work on the development of gas masks at the front lines. But his friend Colonel James Norris, who directed the Bureau of Mines chemical warfare research unit at the American University Experimental Station, told him “You’re crazy,” because he believed Conant could do much more for the war effort by synthesizing new offensive poisons than by working on gas masks. Norris convinced Conant to accept the position of Chief of Organic Research for the Chemical Warfare Service, with his laboratory at the AUES. One of Conant’s ¤rst tasks in his new position was to create a CWS code for lewisite. Some of the codes that already existed were HS and G-34 for mustard gas, CG for phosgene and PS for chloropicrin. As part of their effort to maintain secrecy about lewisite, Conant and his superiors decided to use one of the mustard codes, G-34, for lewisite. Thus, beginning about July 1918 G-34 referred to lewisite,whereas all references to G-34 before that time referred to mustard. As further confusion, sometimes M-1 (or MI [mustard imitator]) was also used to refer to lewisite, although this desig- ...

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