Butterflies flutter to chemical warfare site

TWO WEEKS after the Porton Down chemical war research centre agreed a £3 million out-of-court settlement of damages for conducting experiments on humans, it has published photographs of butterflies taken on its grounds.

Butterflies have been thriving on the grounds of the infamous bioshock centre - the ambiguously named "Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl)" because the scientists' minions have been planting flowers.

The scientists, who dabble with things like Sarin and Anthrax, have a " conservation officer" called Stuart Corbett.

"Excitingly, more...species appeared - dingy skippers and marsh fratillaries in May and grizzled ­skippers in June," he babbled in a
statement.

"The presence of marsh fratillaries on an arable margin was totally unexpected and led to the discovery of a new population at Porton Down," he said.

One of the top secret human experiments that has landed the centre in court involved feeding unwitting servicemen with LSD to see how they reacted.

Presumably, the victims subsequently spent some time trying to catch butterflies in the surrounding grounds, which are a designated conservation area.

More seriously, the 360 Porton Down human guinea pigs who each accepted an £8,000 out of court settlement for their troubles earlier this month had been among those lucky enough to survive chemical experiments that had been conducted between 1939 and the early eighties.

An inquest in 2004 found that Ronald Madison had been killed after being exposed to Sarin gas deliberately in an experiment at the centre in 1953. Porton Down scientist Geoffrey Bacon died from the plague in 1962.

Needless to say, Porton Down is one of those establishments that have locals talking in hushed tones about evil scientists conducting depraved experiments on human beings and animals. Only, this is one of those instances where the stories are true.

So the chemwar unit was careful to point out today that the butterfly's were "thriving" on its land, "despite the floods last summer".

So rest assured, residents of Wiltshire, Kevin's psychotic episode and the new limb aunt Mable has sprouted are nothing to do with floodwaters washing Frankenstein chemicals all over your vegetable patches.

Spare a thought for the centre's "reseeding programme", which has been responsible for the pollen and nectar, grass and flower growth that attracted the butterflies.

And to be fair the Dstl is more concerned with finding ways to protect people from chemical warfare than hurting them. So any anthrax agents found after the invasion of Iraq, for example, would have been sent for safe-keeping to Porton Down, where they came from in the first place. µ