The Deadly Dust: The Unhappy History Of DDT (February 1971 | Volume: 22, Issue: 2)

The Deadly Dust: The Unhappy History Of DDT

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Authors: Kenneth S. Davis

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February 1971 | Volume 22, Issue 2

Everyone knows a little about the rise and fall of DDT—how it was once hailed as a great boon to mankind; how useful it was in field and garden, house and yard; and how at last to our dismay it was unmasked as a killer, the chemical Al Capone, a threat to our environment and possibly our very existence. Everyone knows that the federal and state governments are acting to end the DDT menace, saving us, if narrowly, from disaster. We can breathe easy again. . . . Or can we?

The history of DDT is well worth pondering, for its fatal implications extend to the whole of our civilization. The central character of the story is, of course, the chemical compound itself. But there are also two human protagonists—a chemist in Switzerland and a marine biologist in the United States—and our story begins in 1936, a year of crucial career decision for each of them.

The chemist, Dr. Paul Herman Mûller, was thirty-seven years old that year, an employee of the great dye-manufacturing firm of J. R. Geigy, S.A., of Basel. As a remarkably skillful and creative laboratory technologist, he had developed a number of synthetic tanning substances; by 1936 he had turned his attention to pesticide research.

Also in 1936 a short, slender, solemn-faced woman, twenty-nine years old and single, was teaching in the zoology department of the University of Maryland. In her student years she had majored in English composition as well as biology, followed by postgraduate work at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. Now her desire to write moved her to accept a position in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (soon to be the Fish and Wildlife Service) offered her that year. When the school year ended, her name was listed on the U.S. civil service rolls: "(Miss) Rachel Carson, aquatic biologist. …”

Meanwhile, Dr. Müller’s pesticide research was leading to quick results. Within a few years he had invented two new insecticides, trade-named Gesarol and Neocid; their specific toxic ingredient, however, remained mysterious to him. In 1939, in search of this specific, he synthesized a chlorinated hydrocarbon whose unabbreviated chemical name is dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane. Müller soon dubbed it DDT. He also soon learned that he was not the first man to make it. Back in 1874 a German student named Othmar Zeidler, working toward a doctor’s degree, had synthesized it as an exercise in pure chemistry. But Zeidler had no notion how, if at all, the new compound could be used.

Not until Müller took some of it home with him one day and tried it out on houseflies did anyone realize that DDT kills insects. It was, indeed, the toxic ingredient of the two earlier insecticides Müller had compounded. And he soon found ways to make it even more potent.

By that time World War II had begun, and during its opening months Müller, having already proved DDT’s effectiveness in controlling Colorado