Dr. Don Huber talks about his career as a researcher, professor and Army officer, as well as about the many long-term dangers of glyphosate — as a mineral chelator, as an antibiotic, as a cause of plant disease, and more
Acres U.S.A. You’ve been speaking at the Acres U.S.A. conference for years, but people probably don’t know your whole background. You taught at Purdue, but where did you actually grow up?
Don Huber. I grew up in Arizona and in Idaho on dairy farms, after World War II. We wanted to expand and didn’t feel like the opportunities were there at the time in Arizona for either good land or water supply. So, we moved the dairy from Arizona to Idaho. As a freshman in high school, I rode a freight train with my father for six days, right before Christmas, to arrive in Idaho with a hundred head of heifers and four or five milk cows, to start our dairy in Idaho. I got well acquainted with those cows, being boxed up for six days with them. We had five cows milking while we were feeding calves, trying to move as much of the genetic stock as we could to start our new dairy in Idaho.
Acres U.S.A. And then where did you go to college? Did you do ROTC, or how did you get into the Army?
Huber. I enlisted in the Idaho National Guard out of high school, toward the end of the Korean War. I joined an aviation engineer unit as a private and had the opportunity to work in the shop doing maintenance on heavy equipment. Our responsibility was building emergency landing strips and facilities to support the Air Force and the Army.
I went to the University of Idaho through ROTC and got my commission and also a master’s degree at the University of Idaho. I was assigned to a special Army Reserve research and development unit that was just established at Washington State University while I was working on my master’s. Our responsibility was to develop the recovery plan in the event of a nuclear attack. That’s where I really gained an education in plant physiology and nutrient relationships. Sylvan Wittwer and all the top physiologists, MDs and veterinarians were pulled together for this special unit. I just happened to be the young person that could run errands and provide a little input.
It was more of a learning process for me at the time. It’s where I learned about the interaction between plants and fallout materials — recovery times and interactions between strontium, for example, and essential nutrients. We were trying to discover the things that we would need to do to maintain the basic functioning of a society in the event of a nuclear attack. It was a prime time in my career and a prime subject for us at the time, in the Cold War — to have the plan developed in the event that we needed to use it.
Acres U.S.A. What were some of the results from that? What is the plan for soils that are saturated in radioactive isotopes?
Huber. That’s what they’re going through with their plans in Ukraine right now. When the war’s over, how do you recover? You have contaminated soils from all the military chemicals, but in their event, they still have Chernobyl. You dig six feet down the foxhole, and you still have very high exposure to some radioactive materials in close proximity to the 1986 meltdown event.
When Chernobyl happened, one of the things USDA and State Department were concerned about was how to provide food for everybody who was contaminated downwind from the meltdown. The problem isn’t just the area of the reactor. Of course, one of the first thing you do is to get potassium iodine pills and get your level up so that you can protect against some of the adverse interactions that would come about from the fallout materials. We thought initially that those soils may be uninhabitable for up to 300 years. But that’s not realistic at all — that’s just panicking. It’s actually a very hot radioactive area for 10 or 12 years, or 20 years. But then you get out farther away from that source and it starts becoming more manageable. You look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the atomic bomb, and they’re both thriving cities now.
But you need to have that plan so that you can be prepared. It’s similar to what we’re doing now — we have a recovery plan for crops — a national plant disease recovery program. I had the privilege of chairing it for a few years, and I served on it for a number of years. We made a plan for animal diseases and also one for humans. We had a recovery plan in place for COVID — for a pandemic viral situation. It had been rehearsed. We had people lined up, and we had facilities and alternate facilities all lined up. And we still have, according to some of the people working on the human recovery plans, 63 or so million doses of hydroxychloroquine sitting in pre-staged areas so that we wouldn’t disrupt the normal medical needs of the communities and country. With COVID, all of that apparently was totally ignored, and we did exactly the opposite of all of our training and all of our experience from the swine flu epidemic, or from the concerns about an epidemic, back in the ’70s. All of that information, for some reason, was totally discarded and ignored.
But I had that privilege of working on and learning from that project and learning from some of the top physiologists and medical personnel too, spread over my military career. That in many ways paralleled my academic career. My military assignments were in the chemical and biological warfare units on a recovery defense research program.
Support authors and subscribe to content
This is premium stuff. Subscribe to read the entire article.
