Dr. Steven J. Allen:
Theodor Rosebury and the beginning of the biological Cold War
from The Biodefense Journal 2007
At the beginning of the Cold War, a small group of
scientists were prominent in the debate over weapons of mass destruction (as
nuclear, radiological, chemical, and biological weapons were already known
collectively). This group included individuals who were known to be
Communists, and others who looked with favor on the Soviet Union or who believed
that peace was desirable with the Soviets at almost any price in terms of national sovereignty and self-determination.
In the 1940s, the first major independent report on biological
weapons was written by two distinguished scientists who would later
be blacklisted for alleged Communist ties. Their product went to a
scientific organization strongly influenced by the Communists. That
report evolved into Theodor Rosebury’s Peace or Pestilence:
Biological Warfare and How to Avoid It. The analysis in
Peace or Pestilence was so prescient that, half a century
later, the book would appear on al Qaeda’s biological weapons (BW)
reading list. This is the story of Rosebury and his book.
Rosebury steps up
Theodor Rosebury’s rich career encompasses highs from two vastly
different fields. In the first, dental science, he is so highly
regarded that a recent article called him the “grandfather of
modern oral microbiology.” The second area brought fame as a writer
of popular science books. His 1969 book about microflora on the
human body, Life on Man, received a special commendation at the
National Book Awards. In his most popular book, Microbes and Morals
– the Strange Story of Venereal Disease, he attacked the theory
that syphilis was introduced into Europe from the New World. (Rosebury,
we now know, was correct on that point. ) His significance to
the study of Biodefense rests on his 1940s analyses of the threat
of biological warfare.
In the fall of 1941, as World War II ravaged Europe, the U.S.
War Department was beginning its examination of the potential
uses and dangers of biological weapons. In February 1942, a National
Academy of Sciences group known as the WBC Committee reported
on BWs, and the report led to the creation that summer of the
War Research Service (the U.S. BW program) headed by George Merck.
But the government’s activities on BWs were unknown to the general
public, including Rosebury.
Rosebury became interested in biological weapons just as Hitler
rose to power and as the looming threat of Nazism inspired an
occasional newspaper article on the BW threat. By early 1942, Rosebury’s concern heightened as his saw no public indication
of U.S. efforts to study BWs. After discussing the issue with
fellow members of the American Association of Scientific Workers,
Rosebury and biochemist Elvin Kabat, with the aid of medical student
Martin H. Boldt, conducted their own study for AASW.
Their resulting 40,000-word
report was submitted to the government’s National Research Council
and it was immediately classified. While all three, Rosebury,
Kabat, and Boldt, were drafted to work on “essential research,” Rosebury was designated head of the airborne infections project
at Camp (now Fort) Detrick. Two years after the publication of
the Rosebury-Kabat report, Rosebury expanded the report into a
book, Peace or Pestilence.
Finally, in 1947, after the conclusion of the war, the report
was released to the public and published in the Journal of Immunology.
The degree to which Rosebury and his colleagues worked out the
issues related to BWs is astonishing. In the book, Rosebury
outlined a number of principles and concepts that should be
familiar to us today. Among those concepts:
Peace or Pestilence was among the books listed in a 1999 memo on chemical and biological warfare from Muhammed Atef, the al Qaeda military chief, to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s lieutenant. Also listed were such works as Tomorrow’s Weapons (1964) and Chemical Warfare (1921).
In a 2004 blog entry, Gene Healy of George Mason University’s History News Network took comfort from the fact that al Qaeda was studying chemical and biological warfare writings from generations ago. “Of all the things to keep us up at night, perhaps AQ's homegrown dog-poisoning arsenal shouldn't be one of them,” he wrote. But Healy missed an important point: In order for terrorists to be effective, they don’t need the latest biological weapons information or technology. They don’t need to keep microbes alive while they’re delivered by ICBMs. Terrorists need to know only the basics, such as how to create a fine-but-not-too-fine powder containing anthrax, and how to distribute it so as to do the most harm. Older books are more likely to provide terrorists what they need: guidance on the technology to which they have access today.
Not every aspect of Rosebury’s analysis stands the test of time. He wrote that that “the bubonic form of plague” is a poor choice for a BW. (Plague was later one of the key elements of the Soviet BW program.) He declared that “We may be reasonably safe for a while on the atomic side, for we are told that it will be many years before any other nation can hope to catch up with us in making atomic bombs.” (The USSR exploded its bomb the year the book was published.) And when he ventured outside his field of expertise to declare that, in a third world war, “Inflation would have to be held in check with drastic price ceilings, very high taxes, and forced savings,” he displayed a deep ignorance of economics.
Despite a few errors and failed predictions, Rosebury was mostly correct in his scientific analysis of BW issues – at least, correct when he stuck to matters of science. But to Rosebury, scientific analysis was a means to an end, that is, a way of making a political point.
Political analysis
In the 1947 Journal of Immunology article based on their 1942
report, Rosebury and Kabat insisted that the purpose of the report’s
release was to promote the cause of peace. “Our report tells the
world what to expect if war is not abolished.” The New York Times,
in an editorial, explained that, “As socially minded scientists,
Drs. Rosebury and Kabat are not so much concerned with teaching
the Army how to use infectious diseases as weapons as with arousing
the conscience of the world. . . . Because they can conceive no
effective control of bacteria and viruses as weapons Drs. Rosebury
and Kabat are convinced that if we are to escape mass infection
we must abolish war.”
Rosebury continued that theme in a speech at a 1947 meeting of
the Association of New York Scientists. “If an understanding of
biological warfare demonstrates the futility of an approach through
technology alone to the complex political and economic problems
of war, perhaps it will point the way to peace. We may find that
we cannot buy peace by controlling weapons alone – certainly not
by controlling one weapon, however potent. We may find it unavoidable to make a frontal
attack on the whole problem of war – on the political rivalries
of nations that lead to war. . . . If we must achieve mutual respect
and tolerance among nations as the first major objective on the
road to peace, then we must establish such relations between the
United States and the Soviet Union as the first step toward that
goal.”
In December 1947, officials of the U.S. military and the Atomic
Energy Commission denied the charge that ethical concerns over lethal
weapons were causing a shortage of natural scientists in military
research. According to the Associated Press, that denial was prompted
in part by Rosebury’s claim that “many American scientists are refusing
to work on military developments” – a claim that some people perceived
as a suggestion. In 1949, in Peace or Pestilence, Rosebury reiterated his point that
nothing short of universal peace could save the world from a devastating
biological war. “There are various ways of destroying men, and while
all of them are morally bad, some seem worse than others. Which
brings us to a consideration of BW as the ‘worst’ or ‘most horrible’
of weapons. “Some very responsible men have expressed the idea publicly. James
F. Byrnes, for example, when he was Secretary of State, considered
BW, compared with the atomic bomb, ‘an even more frightful method
of human destruction’; and Walter Lippmann, prompted by the United
States Navy release of January 4, 1946, regarded BW as ‘even more
deadly and malignant’ than the bomb.” But “there is no reason to
believe that international agreements outlawing particular weapons
have ever had the slightest effect. Today few people seem to place
any stock in them, although Mr. Gromyko [Soviet diplomat Andrei
Gromyko] has continued somewhat plaintively to suggest that what
the world now needs above all is a good convention outlawing bad
weapons. “Back in the thirteenth century the Council of Lateran declared
the cross bow illegal in war, and a couple of hundred years later
Bayard demanded that the musket be outlawed as a coward’s weapon
which could be used to kill a brave knight without engaging him
in combat.” And “There is no reason to believe that the international
prohibition of weapons has ever been effective.” Rosebury’s logic
was that atomic weapons control may be possible; he called the Acheson-Lilienthal
Report calling for an international body to control atomic power
and atomic weapons “a work of technical genius” and “a thing of
beauty,” though, like “a sailing vessel built in a basement,” it
went nowhere. But he believed that biological weapons have characteristics
that make international control, short of world government, infeasible.
“The production of atomic bombs might be controlled through international
inspection and policing because large-scale development of fissionable
products requires installations of a unique sort which offer only
limited opportunities for disguise. But the facilities required
for BW differ hardly at all from those used all over the world in
peacetime research and industry; the possibilities for disguise
and subterfuge, for hiding military activity under a cloak of normal
science and production, are legion. For a system of inspection and
policing to be effective in controlling BW it would see, unavoidable
that it enter intimately into the medical, public-health, industrial,
and related activities upon which the daily life and welfare of
nations depend. Such control, it seems to me, would have to reach
down so deeply into the personal lives of individuals throughout
the world as to be possible only with the most highly centralized
kind of world state – far more tightly organized, to be sure, than
any world government suggested by present-day theorists. Quite aside
from the practicability or impracticability of achieving such a
state, it appears plain that it would be undesirable because the
resulting scrutiny would not be worth its cost in sacrifice of personal
freedom, however this moot word may be defined.”
I believe that
Rosebury’s position is correct, that international control of biological
weapons is impossible or nearly so. It is the next step in his logic
that reveals his overriding political motivation.
Why destroy the world over nothing important?
Throughout the post-World War II aftermath of atomic bombs to end the war, political activists have argued that universal destruction is fast approaching, and that only this policy or that policy can save us. A variation of this argument is the main thrust in Peace or Pestilence. Nuclear war can destroy our cities, turn our children or their children into monsters, or worse, put the world into a winter so dark that civilization and perhaps our species could come to an end. These horrors must be prevented – even if it means establishing world government, or surrendering to our adversaries.
“The power of destruction is now so great on both sides that, once we let loose in the inexorable chain reaction of war, the clock of civilization may be turned back centuries, if not millennia. Perhaps we will leave the world to the rats and the cockroaches . . . We can choose to save the world for ourselves and our children, with science as our servant . . . Or we can choose the easier road, the road of hate and fear that would lead us to destroy our neighbors because we don’t like the way they live and because we are sure they are threatening to destroy us.”
To Rosebury, the Cold War was “two great nations, each slightly
swollen with pride, [that] seem to be striving to divide the world
between them; and in both men prepare for another and even bloodier
war. . . . To many the threat of a new conflict seems to have
a fabricated quality, like that of a fight between the local bully
and the new boy.”
He wrote, “World War II had submerged all but two contenders for
global hegemony; and these two, in militarily muscle-bound pugnacity,
were proceeding to divide the earth into two training camps for
the greatest championship finish fight of all time. The smaller
countries, finding the prospect of getting out of the way uncomfortably
gloomy in the newly contracted spherical geography, hastened to
plan loyalty to one camp or the other.”
He thought the Soviet Union was a kind of experiment in living.
“It never seemed to me necessary to approach the subject of Russia
with any great warmth either of affection or of aversion. I have
found fascination in what seems to me to be a gigantic experiment
in new social and political forms; and whether ultimately the
experiment succeeds or fails I feel sure that we can learn important
lessons from it if we wish to, just as, beyond doubt, the Russians
can learn from us. But having built neither my hopes nor my fears
upon the Soviet experiment it has been possible for me to watch
its successes and its failures, its accomplishments and its transgressions
– and there have of course been both – with neither vindictiveness
nor disillusionment. I believe that the Soviet system is going
to remain in the world for a while, although doubtless it will
be modified as time passes. And today it seems to me that the
so-called ‘menace’ of Soviet Communism is vastly overrated.”
Rosebury found “a clear indication of the fundamental dissimilarity
of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia in the low estate to which
science fell in the former country, despite its earlier preeminence,
and the flourishing state of science in the Soviet Union.” In
fact, the Nazis considered themselves leaders in basing public
policy on biology – especially on eugenics, which the scientific
community had foolishly embraced – while, during this period,
Soviet biological science was dominated by the anti-geneticist
Trofim Lysenko.
Rosebury’s attitude toward the Soviet Union led him to write approvingly
of the effort by atomic scientists in Chicago to prevent the use
of the atomic bomb against Japan. They sought, Rosebury noted,
to persuade government officials to “withhold it or explode it
publicly and with due warning in an inhabited spot.” He quoted
Albert Einstein and the British physicist P.M.S. Blackett to suggest
that the real reason for dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
was to stymie the Soviet Union.
Einstein, according to Rosebury, said “he was sure that President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate.” Blackett, Rosebury wrote, concluded in Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy – which appeared while Peace or Pestilence was about to go to press – “that the dropping of the atomic bombs was not so much the last military act of the second world war, as the first act of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”
Killing all those people, simply to prevent the advance of the Soviets, was unacceptable to Rosebury. Rosebury’s political analysis, first in the Rosebury-Kabat report and then in Peace or Pestilence, made him a star in leftwing political circles. He became the sort of person who is called an intellectual, gets invited to meetings of intellectuals, and who is sought out to sign petitions put forth by people who consider themselves intellectuals.The politics of Rosebury & his associates
In 1947, Harry R. Rudin wrote, in a letter to The New York Times, that Rosebury and Kabat’s political motives may have tainted their research. The two men “let themselves get involved in ‘value judgments,’ the bogy of all real scientists,” Rudin wrote. “. . . It should be obvious to any critical reader that such so-called moral values give an indelible taint to any scientific work, like the one these men undertook to do.”
There are several events that suggest Rosebury and Kabat were heavily influenced by individuals who were inclined toward the Soviet point of view on Cold War issues.
- Rosebury signed a November 3, 1947 New York Times advertisement supporting “PR” (proportional representation) election of the New York City Council. The issue is obscure today, but at the time was a major test of New Yorkers’ attitude toward Communist Party representation on the council. Under Proportional Representation, political parties received council seats in rough proportion to their number of votes, with a seat guaranteed if a party received 75,000 votes. Proportional representation was understood to be a path through which Communist candidates could win elective office, and with office, respectability and power, and the campaign over PR repeal was waged entirely over the issue of CP representation. City leaders, who had supported the switch to PR in the mid-1930s, campaigned to abolish it after the Communists used it to win two seats on the council in the early 1940s. Historians Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson note that, “Although [Communist Party] candidates ran in hundreds of elections, the highest office ever won by open party members was two seats on the New York City Council, and that was only under a proportional representation system that allowed minority parties to maximize their support. When New York changed its electoral policy to a more typical plurality system, the Communist council members lost their seats.”
- In 1948 Cuthbert Daniel, former Oak Ridge atomic bomb project scientist, wrote Nobel Prize-winner Harold Urey about the rising influence of Rosebury and his associates. In the letter, Daniel complained that Rosebury and other AASW activists had become too influential in the Association of New York Scientists. He noted that Rosebury and his likeminded associates, who “vote the party line on all issues,” held seven of the 15 seats on the ANYS executive council, and that an eighth member usually voted with them, giving them a majority. By 1950, the conflict – between ANYS members who were pro-Soviet and those who were not – led to the collapse of the organization, which was the state affiliate of the Federation of American Scientists.
- In 1948, Rosebury was one of “40 leading intellectuals” (as the meeting’s call described them) who were brought together to discuss the cause of and cure for the Cold War. At the time, Rosebury was described in the Chicago Daily Tribune as a “biological warfare expert from Columbia University.” During the meeting, a letter from Albert Einstein was read aloud – a letter in which Einstein accused the U.S. of embarking on a preventive war against the Soviet Union and urged intellectuals to plan counter-action.
- That year, Rosebury publicly backed the Progressive Party presidential campaign of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace. According to historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., radical journalist (and Wallace supporter) I.F. Stone wrote in 1950, “The Communists have been the dominant influence in the Progressive Party. . . . If it had not been for the Communists, there would have been no Progressive Party.”
- In 1950, Rosebury was terminated as a U.S. employee of the United Nations due to what the State Department called “adverse comment” – he had been accused of Communist Party membership or other Communist affiliation. According to a report from the Senate Internal Security Committee, Rosebury and others were “believed to be Communists or under Communist discipline.”
- In 1955, Rosebury was one of 73 “American intellectuals, consisting mainly of university scholars and clergymen,” as The New York Times put it, who signed a petition asking President Eisenhower to reconsider the prosecution of alleged Communists for mere membership in the Communist Party.
- Kabat, Rosebury’s partner on the biological warfare paper, was blacklisted at one point. For example, a National Institutes of Health grant was cancelled due to concerns over “loyalty” – though the National Science Foundation made a point to provide grants to Kabat and other scientists blacklisted by NIH, provided they had not admitted being Communist or been proven disloyal in a judicial proceeding.
- When Kabat received the National Medal of Science in 1991, Nature reported, “he valued this honour greatly, particularly because of the difficulties he had in the 1950s when the NIH cravenly terminated his grants as a fallout of the politics of the McCarthy era. Fortunately, the Office of Naval Research and National Science Foundation continued to support him. Kabat saw the medal as recognition of a career-long record of accomplishment, and as a personal vindication.” The Boston Globe in 2000 noted: “During the McCarthy era, he was blacklisted after an associate alleged to the FBI that he had been a communist. Mr. Kabat made several appearances before loyalty boards, and his research grants were canceled. His right to travel abroad was restricted.”
Do these facts necessarily discredit Rosebury or his close
associates? No. Some
people opposed the prosecution of individuals for mere Community
Party membership because they felt it was a violation of the First
Amendment. Many people joined
the Communist Party, or developed favorable views of the Party or
of the Soviet Union, because of the party’s position on anti-lynching
laws and other aspects of what was called “social justice.”
Many people
simply refused to believe accusations of Soviet atrocities and of
Soviet control of the Communist Party USA. Many joined the Party
out of naiveté and later came to regret it. In addition, it is
entirely possible that Rosebury and Kabat’s blacklisting was based on
false charges.
Even if Rosebury had Communist sympathies, or Party membership, one
cannot say that he deliberately tailored his scientific analysis to
achieve the Party’s goals.
Nonetheless, the evidence is strong that Rosebury harbored certain
pro-Soviet biases that had a significant impact on his analysis of
biological weapons issues.
Scientists as political experts
Throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union sought to manipulate Western attitudes and beliefs regarding biological and chemical weapons. Sometimes, this manipulation was aimed at stigmatizing U.S. weapons research, frightening the public about such research, or publicizing false charges that the U.S. was conducting biological warfare. Sometimes, the manipulation involved the promotion of innocent explanations for evidence of Soviet biological weapons and of Soviet preparations for biological warfare. Sometimes, the possibility of biological warfare was used as part of a larger campaign to induce in Western elites the idea that war with the USSR would not be worth fighting – that, after an all-out war, the living would envy the dead, and therefore Westerners should consider themselves, in the famous slogan of British pacifists, “Better Red than dead.”
During the protracted struggle between the U.S. and the USSR, the Soviets, the Communist Party and other supporters of Soviet foreign policy, along with many Americans who were desperate for peace with the Soviets, became involved in one controversy after another involving biological or chemical weapons. They insisted that Yellow Rain could be explained as bee excrement; that the Sverdlovsk anthrax outbreak was the result of tainted meat; that the U.S. had little to fear from possible Soviet violations of the Biological Weapons Convention because such weapons are infeasible; that more than 6,000 sheep that died suddenly in Utah in 1968 were killed as a result of a U.S. nerve gas test; and that the American position on BWs was morally tainted because the U.S. practiced biological warfare during both the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Each of those claims is highly questionable or known today to be false, yet each claim affected public perception of the BW issue to the advantage of the Soviets.
In Peace or Pestilence, Rosebury seemed to be of two minds: He suggested that scientists are no more qualified than anyone else to analyze public policy, then fell back on the argument that scientists have problem-solving skills that are absent in others. “A scientist is no better than other men and usually no worse,” Rosebury wrote. “His opinions on matters within his own sphere merit the respect of those who have fewer facts that he; but in all other areas they are like the opinions of other men. A scientist may nevertheless have one kind of skill that need not be limited to his own specialty. He may know how to frame a problem and thus take the first purposeful step toward solving it.”
But, of course, it is in the framing of a problem that a person’s bias has most effect, and it is the scientist who – because he comes from a profession uniquely dependent on openness and trust – is easiest to deceive. Throughout the past century, scientists, even (especially?) great ones like Rosebury, have fallen for one con after another, from phrenology to eugenics to “scientific socialism” to the “population bomb” to various pseudoscientific fads currently embraced by the scientific community.
There are those in the public policy arena who know little about
science, and there are scientists who know little about public
policy. That will continue until there is a cadre of individuals
competent in both science and public policy. How do we create
such a cadre? Biodefense programs that crosstrain people in intelligence
analysis and microbiology, law enforcement and biochemistry, counterterrorism and epidemiology
– well, they’re a start.
[NOTE: Due to Web formatting problems, footnote markers do not appear in the article above. We will fix that as soon as possible.]
Footnotes:
Daniel H. Fine, “Dr. Theodor Rosebury: Grandfather
of Modern Oral Microbiology,” Journal of Dental Research, November
2006, p. 990.
Thomas W. Ennis, “Theodor Rosebury Is Dead at 72; Bacteriologist
Wrote on Disease,” The New York Times, November 28, 1976, p. 44.
Robert Barr, “Excavations cast doubt on belief that syphilis came
from New World,” Associated Press, August 28, 2000.
Theodor Rosebury, Peace or Pestilence: Biological Warfare and
How to Avoid It, New York: Whittlesey House/McGraw-Hill Book Company,
1949, p. 6-7.
“U.S. Strips Secrecy Wraps From Germ-Warfare Report,”
The Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 1947, p. 9.
Alan ison, “Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive,” The
Atlantic Monthly, September 2004.
Gene Healy, “Al Qaeda at the Office,” August 12, 2004, posted at
http://hnn.us/blogs/comments/6753.html,
accessed 11/20/06.
Waldemar Kaempffert, “Deadly Germs Described,” The New York Times,
May 19, 1947, p. 11.
“Bacterial Warfare,” The New York Times, May 20, 1947, p. 24.
“U.S., Russia Termed Key to Peace Aims,” The New
York Times, August 6, 1947, p. 4.
“Lack of Experts Reported For Military Research Jobs,” Christian
Science Monitor, December 22, 1947, p. 11.
Harry R. din, “Letters to the Times,” The New
York Times, May 26, 1947, p. 20.
“To Save PR – Vote No,” display advertisement, The New York Times,
November 3, 1947, p. 14.
New York University Web site, http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/history/public_history/PR, accessed 11/22/06.
Harvey Klehr, John Earl Haynes, and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet
World of American Communism, New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998, p. 354.
Cuthbert Daniel to Harold Urey, June 6, 1948, cited by Jessica Wang,
American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism,
and the Cold War, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999, p. 53.
Wang, p. 54.
“How Reds Lure Intellectuals to their Side,” The Chicago Daily Tribune,
July 6, 1948, p. 11.
“WE are for Wallace,” display advertisement, The New York Times,
October 20, 1948, p. 32.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “Who Was Henry A. Wallace?,” Los Angeles
Times, March 12, 2000, posted at http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/
schlesinger_wallace_bio.html,accessed 11/20/2006.
“11 in U.N. Accused of Communist Ties,” The New York Times, January
2, 1953, p.1; “Red Quiz Names 38 U.S. Employees in U.N.,” Los Angeles
Times, January 2, 1953, p.1; “Senators List 38 in U.N. Reds Inquiry,”
The Washington Post, January 2, 1953, p. 1.
“73 Ask New View in Trials of Reds,” The New York Times, August
8, 1955, p. 9.
Tom Long, “Elvin A. Kabat, at 85; Researcher received National Science
Medal,” The Boston Globe, June 21, 2000, p. B7; James E. Strick,
“Formative effects of federal funding,” Science, vol. 293 iss. 5532,
August 10, 2001, p. 1052.
William E. Paul and Rose G. Mage, “Elvin Kabat (1914-2000),” Nature,
vol. 407, September 21, 2000, p. 316.
Dr. Allen's dissertation, on President Nixon's decision to shut down the
U.S. biological weapons program, is posted
here.
His e-mail "Why science policy should not be made by scientists" is
posted here.
His article "Raising color-blind kids in a country with a
color-obsessed government" is posted here. Dr. Allen's articles written with
Richard Viguerie include
Sliming conservatives: A short history (The American Thinker);
Politicians earned the distrust of the American people
(The Washington Times); and
Whose side are you on -- the populists or the elitists? (The
Washington Examiner). Dr. Allen is available for
weddings, birthdays, and Bar Mitzvahs. In other words, he's
looking for work. His resume is
here.