When I first arrived at the top secret Porton Down laboratory, I was aware of very little about its activities. I knew it was the UK’s chemical defence research centre and that over the years it had conducted tests with chemical agents on humans.
But what really happened there was shrouded in mystery. This made it a place which was by turns fascinating and scary. Its association with the cold war, reinforced by images of gas mask-wearing soldiers and reports of dangerous (and in one case fatal) experiments, also made it seem a little sinister.
The shroud of secrecy resulted in it being the subject of some lively fiction, such as The Satan Bug by Alistair MacLean, which revolves around the theft of two deadly germ warfare agents from a secret research facility and in the “Hounds of Baskerville” episode of the BBC drama Sherlock in which the hero uncovers a sinister plot involving animals experiments.
