Trained in sociology and anthropology, Jeanne Guillemin has long been involved in issues regarding medicine, infectious diseases, and biological weapons. Her first book in this area was Mixed Blessing: Intensive Care for Newborns, written with Lynda Lytle Holmstrom and published in 1986 by Oxford University Press and short-listed for the C. Wright Mills award of the ASA. More recently, she is the author of Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak (University of California Press, 1999) which documents the US-Russian inquiry into the contested cause of the 1979 Sverdlvosk anthrax outbreak. Anthrax was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in 2000. Prior to her research on the Sverdlovsk outbreak, she investigated the "yellow rain" controversy of the 1980s, in which the US accused the Soviet Union of assisting in the use of mycotoxin weapons in conflict areas in Laos, Cambodia, and Afghanistan. Both the Sverdlovsk and yellow rain projects involved US allegations against the Soviet Union for treaty violations involving biological weapons.
Her latest book is Biological Weapons: From the Invention of State-sponsored Programs to Contemporary Bioterrorism (Columbia University Press, 2005). She has been a delegate to the annual Pugwash Working Group on the Chemical and Biological Weapons Conventions and a participant in the Belfer Center (Harvard University) 2000-2003 Executive Sessions on Domestic Preparedness. In 1999, Guillemin became a Senior Fellow at the Security Studies Program at the Center for International Studies at MIT, where she has taught in the course, "Confronting Bioterrorism" and organized a speaker series on issues of weapons of mass destruction. Following the anthrax postal attacks on 2001, she was a frequent commentator on television and radio. Professor Guillemin was also on the World Health Organization editorial board for its 2004 guide to public health responses to biological and chemical weapons attacks. She has also done research on the 2001 anthrax postal attacks and their consequences for US biodefense initiatives. In 2003, she was a Senior Fellow at the Dibner Institute for the study of science at MIT. During this same time, she received a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing grant to finish her book Biological Weapons.
In 2006, after 30 years of teaching in the Sociology Department and in order to pursue her writing, Professor Guillemin became a Research Professor at Boston College. Following a September 2005 trip to China, she renewed her interest in the 1934-1945 Japanese biological warfare program based in Manchuria. The program was a secret innovation responsible for the world's only modern use of biological weapons, during World War II. Its leaders, however, were protected by the United States and its allies from prosecution at the Tokyo war crimes trial in 1946-1948. In February 2007, Guillemin was featured in the film "The Living Weapon" on PBS's American Experience. Created by the film maker John Rubin, "The Living Weapon" recounts the 20th century history of the US biological warfare program.
Jeanne Guillemin also created a much-used web site for the education of the public on the issue of high-containment laboratories for research on select agents.