Pandora's Lab: Seven Stories of Science Gone Wrong

by Paul A. Offit

The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia is home to the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial. Founded in 1824, it’s one of the oldest science education centers in the United States. In 2014, the institute featured “101 Inventions That Changed the World.” When I visited this exhibition with my son, who is a science writer, we tried to guess which inventions made the list. We got a lot of them right, but some were surprising. The top three inventions were pasteurization, paper, and controlled fire; rounding out the list were the sail, air-conditioning, and the Global Positioning System (GPS). Among others were the telephone, cloning, the alphabet, penicillin, the spinning wheel, vaccination, transistor radios, email, and aspirin. Two inventions that my son and I would never have predicted were gunpowder (number 20) and the atomic bomb (number 30)—both of which have arguably done far more harm than good.

To be fair, the list was not 'the too 100 inventions that have changed the world for the better,' it was just 'the top 100 inventions that have changed the world.' I'm reminded of Olivander in the first Harry Potter book telling Harry that great does not necessarily mean good, and that Hitler won Time's Person of the Year Award in 1938. Just the fact that something is important does not speak to it's ethical standing or implications.

In 1962, a popular naturalist—the mother of the modern environmental movement—wrote a book that led to the ban of one particular pesticide. The prohibition was hailed by environmental activists but feared by public health officials. Their fears were well founded; as a consequence of the ban, tens of millions of children died needlessly.

If this is going to be a screed about Rachel Carson is actually a mass murderer, I'm going to put this book, leave it a terrible review, return all others by this author I own, and never pick up another that he has or will published. DDT needed to be done away with, and if Carson hadn't rung the alarm bell either someone else would have or our environment would be in even worse shape than it is now. Plus, pest control isn't a one size fits all solution. There are other, safer options than going in with the mindset of kill everything (and not really succeed anyway; DDT was starting to become less effective even as Carson was raising awareness of its terrible effects because surviving organisms were resistant to it), which is not helpful in the long term. As has been pointed by other public health officials, nonprofits, and citizens, preventative measures such as better housing, better sanitation, and even bed nets can do more to prevent malaria more safely than indiscriminately spreading a dangerous poison.

Neither Hippocrates nor Galen was aware of opium’s snare. Rather, it was a relatively unknown physician named Diagoras of Melos who was the first to realize that many of his fellow Greeks had become hopelessly addicted to the drug. As a consequence, he became the first person in history to argue against its use, declaring that it was better to suffer pain than to become addicted to opium. His warnings have been ignored for the last 2,500 years.

Americans also embraced liquid opium. Louisa May Alcott and George Washington used laudanum; Mary Todd Lincoln was addicted to it. By the late 1800s, about 200,000 opium addicts lived in the United States; three-quarters were women. Unlike opium smokers in China, women in Europe and the United States who drank laudanum were considered to have a gentle, harmless addiction.

In 1909, Congress passed the Opium Exclusion Act, banning importation. But it was too late. Many Americans were already addicted to the drug. And, as reflected by a new American lexicon, people addicted to opium were no longer sympathetic figures. They were called junkies, because they often sifted through junkyards to find salable items. Or hop heads, from the Cantonese phrase ha peen, meaning “bird or cow manure.”

Dreser didn’t have to work hard to convince Bayer executives to launch the new drug. But first they had to come up with a name. Some of the workers wanted to call it wunderlich, meaning miracle. But Dreser preferred the name heroisch, meaning heroic. In 1898, Bayer launched their new drug, calling it heroin. Aspirin, which physicians worried might cause gastritis, could be obtained by prescription only. Heroin, which was believed to be much safer, could be purchased over the counter.

IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG TO REALIZE that heroin wasn’t what it was claimed to be. By 1902, at least a dozen cases of addiction and some infant deaths had been reported. By 1905, the evidence was overwhelming. Because heroin crosses the placenta, infants born to heroin addicts suffered symptoms of severe withdrawal. Traces of heroin could also be found in breast milk. In 1906, the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry stated, “The habit is readily formed and leads to the most deplorable results.” By 1910, doctors were fully aware of the dangers of heroin, and its use declined. Bayer, on the other hand, didn’t stop advertising the drug as safe until 1913. By 1918, more than 200,000 people living in New York City alone were addicted to heroin. In 1924, Congress passed the Heroin Act, making manufacture and sale of the drug illegal. As a consequence, heroin went underground.

In the early 1950s, oxycodone made its American debut. Initial preparations were combined with a variety of other drugs. For example, there was Percodan, a combination of oxycodone and aspirin; Combunox, a combination of oxycodone and ibuprofen, a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory; and Percocet, a combination of oxycodone and acetaminophen (Tylenol). But the single most powerful, and eventually most addictive and most abused preparation, was OxyContin, pure oxycodone uncut by other drugs. OxyContin’s manufacturer, Purdue Pharma, marketed the drug as a first-line agent for arthritis. In OxyContin, Purdue Pharma had struck gold—the drug would eventually account for more than 80 percent of its business. Later, Purdue combined OxyContin with an acrylic that allowed for a slower, timed release of the drug, eliminating its need to be taken several times a day. Addicts soon found that by chewing the tablet or crushing it, they could bypass the timed-release mechanism and enjoy the immediate rush of as much as 160 milligrams of oxycodone, logarithmically greater than any other product on the market. Now addicts had the capacity to ingest a potentially lethal dose of the drug. (On a weight-by-weight basis oxycodone is actually more powerful than morphine.)

IN LATE 1995, at the same time that Russell Portenoy was urging American physicians to get over their fear of painkillers, the FDA approved Purdue Pharma’s timed-released version of OxyContin. Purdue’s sales force promoted the drug for the treatment of lower back pain, arthritis, trauma, fibromyalgia, dental procedures, broken bones, sports injuries, and pain resulting from surgery. In other words: everything. And they constantly repeated Portenoy’s mantra that less than one percent of patients would become addicted to the drug. In 1996, more than 300,000 prescriptions for OxyContin were written for a net profit to Purdue Pharma of $44 million. Realizing it had created the right drug at the right time, Purdue doubled its sales force, offered coupons for a free 7- to 30-day supply of the drug (34,000 coupons were redeemed), increased its yearly advertising budget to $200 million, and paid $40 million in incentive bonuses. In 2001, Purdue reaped $1.45 billion from the sale of OxyContin, the highest retail sale of any named pharmaceutical product, including Viagra.

Few insurance companies did much to discourage abuse. Before OxyContin burst onto the scene, chronic pain was treated with a combination of psychotherapy, biofeedback, exercise, and physical therapy. The goal was to leave the painkillers at the door. Although several studies had showed that this multidisciplinary approach to relieving pain worked just as well if not better than chronic drug use, the fact remained that the drugs were less expensive than the therapies. Unfortunately, many insurance companies encouraged the drugs. At best, this was shortsighted. Workers who took high doses of painkillers were out of work three times longer than those with similar injuries who took lower doses of the drugs.

“For the vast majority of patients with chronic pain,” he countered, “the known, serious, and far too often fatal risks far outweigh the transient benefits. We lose sight of the fact that prescription opioids are just as addictive as heroin.” Today, 80 percent of the world’s opioid prescriptions are written in the United States, even though only 5 percent of the world’s population lives there.

There is, however, one unfortunate loophole. If products contain less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, the FDA allows manufacturers to claim 0 grams of trans fats on the nutrition label. Because many products contain slightly less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, it’s still possible to consume more than the 2-gram limit of trans fats a day set by the American Heart Association. For example, crème-filled sponge cakes contain 0.46 gram of trans fats but are listed as having 0 grams on the label. And microwave popcorn, which contains 0.25 gram of trans fats, also is listed as having 0 grams. Trans fats are also still contained in some brands of margarines and coffee creamers. And they’re still contained in Berger cookies. The key to avoiding the problem of hidden trans fats is to look for the phrase “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the nutrition label.

No country knew how important it was to solve the riddle of synthetic fertilizer more than Germany. At the turn of the 20th century, 58 million people lived in Germany, most in densely populated urban centers. German farmers did what they could with what they had, meticulously recycling decaying plants and animal manure. But it wasn’t nearly enough. Germany had to import another source of natural fertilizer; without it, the country wouldn’t have survived. To get it, German sailors had to cross an ocean. In South America, the Atacama Desert is rich in natural nitrogen in the form of nitrates. (Nitrates, which are a combination of one nitrogen atom with three oxygen atoms, are an excellent source of natural nitrogen.) Chile owned it. By 1900, Chile was responsible for two-thirds of all the natural fertilizer used on the planet; Germany used a third of that. So great was its need that, by the turn of the century, Germany had imported more than 350,000 tons of nitrates; by 1912, the number rose to 900,000 tons. As a consequence of its reliance on Chilean nitrates, Germany was particularly vulnerable during war—and WWI was just around the corner. Foreign navies could prevent German ships from traveling to Chile, essentially starving German citizens.

N2 is described in chemistry books as odorless, colorless, nonflammable, nonexplosive, nontoxic, and nonreactive. The key word is “nonreactive.” N2 is inert, unavailable, dead. If it is to have any biological use—like forming the amino acids, proteins, enzymes, DNA, and RNA of life—then it has to be broken down into two separate atoms. Only then can nitrogen link to hydrogen to form ammonia (NH3) or to oxygen to form nitrates (NO3). Either of these forms can be used in soil to provide nitrogen to crops.

IN 1924, FIVE YEARS AFTER he had won the Nobel Prize for this discovery, Fritz Haber spoke at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, extolling the virtues of science. “The banker and the lawyer, the industrialist and the merchant, despite their leading positions in life, are only administrative officials,” he said. “The sovereign is natural science. Its progress determines the measure of prosperity of man; its cultivation is the seed from which the welfare of future generations grow.”

The Gulf of Mexico, located next to the Louisiana ammonia plant, is a perfect example of what can happen when no one is watching. Every year about 1.5 million tons of nitrogen are dumped into the Gulf. This excess nitrogen has caused an overgrowth of algae that clouds the water and chokes off oxygen and sunlight to other species, like fish and mollusks. Algal overgrowth has killed streams, lakes, and coastal ecosystems across the Northern Hemisphere. And it’s not just the fish that are dying. The birds that eat the fish are dying, too. The dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is now the size of New Jersey and is growing. Worse, more than a 150 smaller dead zones have been identified throughout the world. The Baltic Sea north of Germany is one of the most polluted marine ecosystems on the planet; in the 1990s, the Baltic cod industry collapsed. The Thames, Rhine, Meuse, and Elbe Rivers in Europe also contain more than a hundred times the amount of synthetic nitrogen that is considered safe. Similar problems are occurring in the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and China’s two largest rivers: the Huang He and Yangtze. Algae-producing harmful toxins have also been found in the Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound, and San Francisco Bay. In fairness, all this excess nitrogen doesn’t come solely from nitrogen fertilizer placed on land. It also comes from manure generated from food animals. But those animals are invariably fed with crops g...

German soldiers were stopped cold at the Marne River near Paris. German military officials now realized that this was going to be a different kind of war. One slugged out in the trenches. And one that would require massive amounts of one of the world’s most powerful explosives: ammonium nitrate. (In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used ammonium nitrate purchased from a fertilizer company to blow up a federal building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, including many children; injuring 680 others; and destroying or damaging more than 300 buildings within a one-mile radius. All caused by a single, ammonium nitrate-containing truck bomb.) As the war came to a standstill, the German military became desperate for more explosives. Haber saw an opening. He convinced Carl Bosch that it was possible to convert ammonia into ammonium nitrate using a commercially feasible, one-step process and that the facility at Oppau was the perfect place to do it. Although Bosch initially disagreed, he eventually yielded. By May 1915, the Oppau plant was producing more than 150 tons of ammonium nitrate a day. BASF was no longer just a chemical company; it was an instrument of war. Whereas workers at Oppau had been working round the clock to feed people, now they were working round the clock to kill them. Brot aus luft, “bread from air,” had become blut aus luft, “blood from air.”

Haber knew that his weapon had created not only a technological but also a psychological advantage. “Every new weapon is capable of winning a war,” he recalled. “Every war is a war against the soul of the soldier, not the body. New weapons break the morale because they are something new, something that he has not experienced, and, therefore, something that he fears. The artillery did not do much harm to morale, but the smell of gas upset everybody.” Not everyone in Germany was applauding. “The higher civilization rises,” wrote one German commander, “the viler man becomes.”

To Haber, a dead soldier was a dead soldier. It didn’t matter how they died. It only mattered that they died. Poison gas worked to the advantage of technologically advanced societies, so why shouldn’t Germany use its assets? “The disapproval that the knight felt for the man with a gun,” said Haber, “is repeated by the soldier who shoots bullets [at] a man with chemical weapons.” Haber’s goal was to turn warfare into a competition among scientists; the winner would make the deadliest poison gases, distribute them most efficiently, and create the best protective gear, including gas masks. “Gas weapons and gas defense turn warfare into chess,” he said, dispassionately.

Spoken like someone who's certain they'll never have to face their own weapon on a battlefield.

In truth, Fritz Haber was enormously proud of what he’d done. Proud that science had advanced beyond shooting and shelling to something far more devastating. Something that, according to Haber, had turned “soldiers from a sword in the hand of their leader into a heap of helpless people.”

*retch*

IN THE DEUTSCHES MUSEUM in Munich, separated from onlookers by a small barrier, stands the tabletop device Fritz Haber and Robert Le Rossignol built to fix nitrogen from the air. Onlookers occasionally stop, stare for a few seconds, and walk past, thinking little of this machine that launched the worldwide manufacture of synthetic fertilizer, a process that has given so many people their lives and—due to ongoing contamination of the environment with excess nitrogen—a process that has probably started the clock on their eventual destruction. — FRITZ HABER HAS ALLOWED three billion more people to live on the face of the Earth than would ever have been possible. His accomplishment is nothing short of phenomenal. The price tag for Haber’s invention, however, has been the gradual death of streams, lakes, waterways, and oceans. The lesson here is this: Everything has a price; the only question is how big.

IN THE EARLY 1900s, a French psychologist named Alfred Binet created an intelligence test. A few years later, the test was modified by a Stanford researcher and renamed the Stanford-Binet test. Now the eugenicists had a hard and fast number they could rely on: 70. They determined that anyone with an intelligence quotient (or IQ) score of less than 70 was unfit for procreation. To celebrate the moment, they created a new word: “moron,” from the Greek moros meaning “stupid” or “foolish.” Not everyone was celebrating. Walter Lippmann, a syndicated columnist, wrote in the New Republic that the IQ test represented “a new chance for quackery in a field where quacks breed like rabbits.” Most Americans, however, were excited about the chance to eliminate the least among them. And the IQ test was clear and objective, a good place to start. Lippmann’s comments were ignored. Eugenicists had completely bastardized Mendel’s laws. Although it was true that physical characteristics like eye color could be mapped to single genes, such was not the case with traits like criminality, alcoholism, epilepsy, deafness, or susceptibility to venereal diseases. Not everything could be accounted for by strict Mendelian genetics. Nonetheless, the false notion that selective breeding could make for a better society would soon allow Americans to cloak some of their worst prejudices in the gilded robes of science.

Grant’s book ended with a plea for his kind of America: “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals, which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian in the age of Pericles and the Viking in the days of Rollo.” Grant’s lament was in direct contradiction to the poem emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, an American Jew. Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. ALTHOUGH MADISON GRANT’S BOOK swept a nation, not everyone bought into his deception. Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on chromosomes, noted that there was no such thing as the Nordic race or the Aryan race. Biologically speaking, all humans were products of an intermixture of many genetic backgrounds. There was only one race: the human race.

Perhaps the most withering dissent came from the pen of G. K. Chesterton, a British author and poet. Regarding pending immigration laws, Chesterton drove a wedge between the science of Gregor Mendel and the pseudoscience of Madison Grant: “One does not need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch burning.”

In the end, Madison Grant’s theories were refuted by history. Grant had predicted that it would “take centuries” for immigrants to assimilate into the American culture. It took one generation. European immigrants quickly lost their accents, earned their degrees, and rose to prominent positions in business, medicine, and the law. Environment, as it turned out, mattered.

MADISON GRANT DIED ON May 30, 1937, at the age of 72. As famous as he was in his time, his name has virtually disappeared. But it hasn’t completely disappeared. Grant’s name is still prominently displayed on a plaque at the base of the world’s tallest living tree: the Founders’ Tree in Redwood National Park. In 1991, the park’s director, Donald Murphy, received an angry letter from a visitor, demanding that the plaque be removed and that the park stop honoring this loathsome man. Murphy wrote back: “[Madison] Grant was a creature of the nineteenth century and, as with many of his life contemporaries, he held beliefs that most of us, hopefully, find both absurd and abhorrent today. The sad truth is that [Grant] probably did not think too differently than many others who have been ‘honored’ for some historical role unrelated to the issue of race. I’m not sure that society can or should conduct a wholesale revision of history because the people of the past did not have a late-twentieth century vision of fairness and equality. As director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, I don’t ordinarily wear my ethnicity on my sleeve, so to speak, but in responding to your concerns I feel compelled to note that as an African American I think I have a personal perspective on the pain and suffering, the hurt and disappointment of racism.” Donald Murphy ended his letter with a statement that could itself have been put onto a plaque and nailed to the base of that tree. “Har...

When Lillian Hellman refused to participate in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt in the 1950s, her letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee contained a now famous quote: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Lobotomies now share a shelf in the dusty cabinet of medical sideshows next to whips, chains, snake pits, truth serums, phrenology machines, and trephining, the ancient ritual of drilling holes in the brain to loose the evil spirits. So why were lobotomies so readily accepted, indeed sought after, in the late 1930s through the early 1970s? Three reasons. First, psychiatrists, families, and patients were desperate to do something, anything to treat untreatable mental disorders, most commonly schizophrenia. And there weren’t any other good options. Second, state mental hospitals were bursting at the seams. The number of patients rose from 159,000 in 1909 to 480,000 in 1940, a rate twice the growth rate of the general population. Indeed, in the 1940s and 1950s, as many people were hospitalized with mental disorders in the United States as for all other diseases combined. Lobotomies provided a seductive way out of an unmanageable situation. Third, conditions in state hospitals were hideous. In May 1946, an article written in Life magazine titled “Bedlam 1946” described just how badly things had deteriorated. Patients were beaten, abandoned, provided little clothing, put in dark, damp, padded dungeons, restrained in straitjackets for weeks, and forced to lie in their own excrement. Facilities resembled “concentration camps on the Belsen pattern.” The staff—which was often composed of uneducated transients who were plucked from local jails—raped, sodomized, and occasionally murd...

THE LESSON FROM LOBOTOMIES IS far easier to make than to follow: Beware the quick fix. When Joseph P. Kennedy wanted to cure his daughter’s mild developmental delay, he sought the counsel of Walter Freeman, who told Kennedy that a simple fix was at hand. The procedure would take only a few minutes, wouldn’t require general anesthesia, and would restore his daughter to a level of emotional maturity similar to her brothers and sisters. All the money and time Kennedy had spent on tutors and private schools trying to get Rosemary up to speed hadn’t been necessary. All she really needed was one carefully placed surgical knife in her brain. Even though a noted surgeon had recommended Rosemary’s lobotomy, the reason that it sounded too good to be true was that it was too good to be true. A healthy skepticism by Kennedy could have spared his daughter a life of severe physical and mental disability. All Kennedy had to do was ask to see others who had been lobotomized. But he didn’t want to see them. He wanted to believe in the magic. And for that, his daughter paid an enormous price. As did the thousands of other patients and their families who wanted to believe that complex psychiatric disorders could be treated with a five-minute surgery.

Although the U.S. Department of Agriculture had placed some restrictions on DDT a few years before the publication of Silent Spring (because of stream pollution), Carson’s book ignited a movement that would eventually eliminate the pesticide from the face of the earth.

No, it didn't. There are still companies that make it and people that use it.

Some of the criticism came from writers. Time magazine decried Carson’s penchant for overstatement: “Scientists, physicians and other technically informed people will also be shocked by Silent Spring—but for a different reason. They recognize Miss Carson’s skill in building her frightening case; but they consider that case unfair, one-sided, and hysterically overemphatic. Many of the scary generalizations—and there are lots of them—are patently unsound.” Other criticisms came, not unexpectedly, from the chemical industry. Velsicol, at the time one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pesticides such as chlordane, heptachlor, and endrin, threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin, the publisher of Silent Spring, for libel. A few months later, however, Velsicol’s attention was diverted when five million fish turned belly up in the lower Mississippi River, a consequence of a massive endrin contamination from one of its treatment plants.

I've read Silent Spring. I can say for sure it does not have a 'hysterically overemphatic' tone. What it does have? A urgent tone, which is what one would expect from a book, published for general audiences, meant to galvanize people into caring that pesticides which aren't working are damaging the environmet and those who live in it. Also, following this up with dead fish due to environmental contamination isn't making the point you seem to think it's making.

Luther Terry, the surgeon general of the United States. Terry was worried that by making DDT synonymous with poison, the world was about to lose a powerful weapon in the fight against some of its biggest killers. He had reason for concern.

Ummm...pesticides are poisons. That's why there's warning labels on literally every single pesticide you will ever buy. It's why there's a running joke at my hardware store that the pesticide aisle is the chemical warfare department. Pesticides work at killing things BECAUSE they are poisonous. The public tends to not think of them as poisons because doses for people are usually small enough to have no apparent or few effects, but that mental disconnect not make them poisons.

In 1939, Paul Müller, an employee of the J. R. Geigy Company in Basel, Switzerland, was working on a method to kill clothes moths without damaging clothes. Müller stumbled upon Zeidler’s formula. What he found surprised him. Not only did DDT kill the moths, it also killed flies, mosquitoes, lice, and ticks—insects responsible for transmitting some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Better still, DDT’s killing power seemed to last for months.

And over those months you think it's doing nothing else to anything else?

ENVIRONMENTALISTS HAVE ARGUED that when it came to DDT, it was pick your poison. If DDT was banned, more people would die from malaria. But if DDT wasn’t banned, then people would suffer and die from a variety of other diseases, not the least of which were leukemia and other cancers. There was one problem with this line of reasoning: Despite Carson’s warnings in Silent Spring, studies in Europe, Canada, and the United States showed that DDT didn’t cause liver disease, premature births, congenital defects, leukemia, or any of the other diseases she had claimed. Indeed, the only type of cancer that had increased in the United States during the DDT era was lung cancer, which was caused by cigarette smoking. DDT was arguably the safest insect repellent ever invented—far safer than many of the other pesticides that have since taken its place. Still, environmentalists argued that we aren’t alone on this planet. We share it with many other species. Aren’t we responsible for them, too? The final irony of Silent Spring was that Rachel Carson hadn’t only overstated DDT’s effects on human health; she had overstated its effects on animal health.

In research contemporaneous with Carson and recently published, DDT has been shown to have negative impacts on human health, animal health, and the overall health of environments. Her book - the kindle version, at least, which is the copy I own - has 46 pages of citations, most of which reference studies and journals and are linked to in-text citations. More recently, a PSA from the Pesticide Action Network - a nonprofit coalition of 600 people and groups - on DDT (published in 2012), the pesticide has been linked to neurological effects in babies due to intrauterine exposure (2006 study published in Pediatrics) and was found in the milk of cows exposed to DDT (1996 study published in the Archives of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology), among other deleterious effects. I'm also more inclined to believe the information compiled by Carson herself and the more recent information cited by PAN, as they provide cited information leading back to peer reviewed scientific articles rather than a bunch of books and blog posts, especially as BOTH of the bloggers cited in the bibliography for this chapter disagree with your point and cite reputable sources (such as the World Health organization) that disagree with your supposed data. Also, even if DDT didn't harm human health, we would still have to worry about it for its environmental ramifications. There is no planet B. Just like issues with climate change, if we trash Earth to the point where it's uninhabitable for humans, then that's just tough for us and every other species we'll take down the road to extinction with us.

Biologist I. L. Baldwin sounded a similar theme: “Modern agriculture and modern public health, indeed, modern civilization could not exist without a relentless war against the return of a true balance of nature.” Carson never saw it that way, insisting on a world that had never existed: “Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems,” she wrote, ignoring that fact that early farming societies were riddled with insect-borne diseases and insect-induced famines.

To be fair, there have been studies done comparing pest control problems in organic gardening (which is, I think, the closest model we can get to to primitive agricultural methods) with monoculture farming (the way most medium-large farms operate today, and certainly the only way large scale agricultural operations are able to operate). One, Variability in Plant Nutrients Refuces Insect Herbivore Performance (published in Nature in 2016), basically found that plants pests thrive in monocultures because the plant they feed on is available in abundance. If you have, for instance, an insect that really likes corn, that insect would love nothing more than to be on a corn farm where there's nothing but acres upon acres of corn stalks. Humans were nice enough to lay out and all you can eat buffett! However, that same insect would be somewhat less pleased to be at a more traditional mixed farm, where fields of different crops effectively limit its available food supply and make it harder for it to travel. One finding was that large-scale monoculture operations have to use more pesticides and use them more aggressively to bring thier rate of infection/loss DOWN to that of more traditional agricultural methods. Even organic farmers don't eschew pesticides entirely - because they do still have to control pests, just not on a large monoculture scale - but are able to do so in smaller rates, with pesticides that have been used throughout human agricultural history, and with naturally occuring pesticides whose uses/effects are fairly well documented and understood.

Although there were alternatives, and some of those alternatives were used, no chemical was as cheap, long lasting, or effective as DDT.

Why deal with your poverty and santitation problems when you can spray a poison and disclaim any responsibility for the results?

“THE QUESTION IS WHETHER any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized,” wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Roger Meiners, co-author of Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, countered, “This rhetorical question suggests another: whether any civilization that hobbles new technology that could reduce hunger and disease, on the chance that the new technology might have negative consequences—essentially giving up a real bird in hand for a hypothetical bird in the bush—should lose the right to be called civilized.”

Isn't that what this whole book is about: unintended consequnces of then-new technologies/practices that should have been foregone, thus giving up potential benefits and saving the world of negative outcomes? It seems ironic that you're citing this, THIS, as if it's it's aome sort of indictment.

Carson’s basic premise—that man-made activities were destroying the environment—was correct. Thanks to Rachel Carson, we are now far more attentive to our impact on the planet. Unfortunately, Carson also gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance—the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely. If large quantities of DDT (like those used in agriculture) were potentially harmful, then even small quantities (like those used to prevent mosquitoes from biting) should be avoided.

You're ignoring established science regarding the buildup of toxic chemicals in the environment and thise animals higher up the food chain, called biomagnification. For example, it is widely advised that people - especially pregnant women and children - not eat too much of certain fish, such as swordfish. Why? Because swordfish are apex predators that prey on smaller fish, many of whom are contaminated with anthropogenic environmental mercury. Due to health concerns, it's recommended that people eat medium sized fish (such as tuna) only a couple times a week and large fish (such as swordfish). Just because something is a small dose when you're initially using it doesn't mean it will stay small and not dangerous, it doesn't mean that it will not accumulate and become harmful.

In 1951, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “The Structure of Proteins.” Taking yet another Einsteinian leap, Pauling showed that proteins folded upon themselves in recognizable patterns. At the time of publication, scientists knew that proteins were made of a series of linked amino acids. But they hadn’t envisioned what proteins looked like in three dimensions. Pauling did. One of the protein structures Pauling described was called the alpha helix, a finding that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to solve the structure of DNA: nature’s blueprint.

They didn't 'solve' anything; they found Rosalind Franklin's notes.

“Linus Pauling is a classic example of a person who loves humanity but doesn’t care much for people,” wrote biographers Ted and Ben Goertzel.

“Linus Pauling paid for his extraordinary gifts with his failure to appreciate where they rightfully ended,” wrote historian Algis Valiunas.

In 2010, two years after he won the Nobel Prize, Montagnier—like Linus Pauling and Peter Duesberg before him—made a series of embarrassing public declarations. First, Montagnier said that DNA molecules could be teleported from one test tube to another (presumably, in a manner similar to the way people were teleported in the television series Star Trek). Then, Montagnier claimed that homeopathy made sense. Homeopathy is based on the now disproved belief that if you dilute a substance to the point that not a single molecule remains, the water in which it was diluted will remember that the substance was there. “I can’t say homeopathy is right in everything,” said Montagnier. “What I can say now is that high dilutions are right. High dilutions of something are not nothing. They are water structures which mimic the original molecules.” (Given that there is a limited amount of water on Earth, you don’t want it to remember where it’s been.) Finally, Montagnier joined the long list of those claiming a cure for autism. Montagnier said that when he took the blood of patients with autism—and diluted it to the point that not a single molecule of the original blood remained—he could detect electromagnetic waves indicating the presence of bacterial DNA. Autism, it appeared, was a bacterial infection. And it wasn’t just autism that was caused by bacteria. Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and chronic fatigue syndrome were bacterial infect...

Yeah, you can see whatever you want when there's nothing actually there.

THE LESSON IN THE LINUS PAULING STORY can be found in the movie The Wizard of Oz: Pay attention to the little man behind the curtain. When first encountered, the Wizard of Oz was exactly as advertised: great and powerful. His voice was booming; his manner, intimidating; and his head, large, green, and oddly cerebral. But the Wizard wasn’t what he appeared to be. When Toto pulled back the curtain, the Wizard was just a rumpled old man with a high-pitched, irritatingly nasal voice. Exposed, the Wizard said, “Pay no attention to that little man behind the curtain.” But Toto’s revelation was impossible to ignore. Dorothy was appalled. “You’re a very bad man,” she said. “No, my dear,” replied the Wizard. “I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.” In the end, the Wizard of Oz was successful because he was a good psychologist, not a good magician. The same applies to science: Don’t be blinded by reputation. Every claim, independent of a scientist’s reputation, should stand on a mountain of evidence. No one should get a free pass.

1. It’s all about the data. Truths emerge when studies performed by different scientists working in different environments using different methods find similar results. Ignoring these truths can have disastrous consequences.

(“The trouble with the world is not that people know too little,” wrote Mark Twain, “it’s that they know so many things that ain’t so.”)

2. Everything has a price; the only question is how big. Even the most dramatic, lifesaving, groundbreaking, universally acclaimed scientific and medical breakthroughs—like antibiotics and sanitation programs—have come with a price. Nothing, as it turns out, is exempt.

3. Beware the zeitgeist. Three current technologies have been victims of the current culture: e-cigarettes, because no one likes the image of a teenager smoking, even if it’s not actually smoke; GMOs, because the technology smacks of hubris, our attempt to alter the natural order; and bisphenol A (BPA), because it is a chemical resin that can leach out of plastic baby bottles. All three technologies have been the victims of scientific studies purporting harm. And all three have suffered at the hands of the media. Negative press, however, shouldn’t blind us to the evidence.

4. Beware the quick fix.

Although it might seem far-fetched, imagine the following scenario: A group of unscrupulous doctors opens a clinic in Switzerland that performs lobotomies for the treatment of autism. The doctors who run the clinic don’t call the procedure a lobotomy (that ship has sailed); they call it something else, like the “Fresh Start” procedure. The doctors put up an attractive website that explains how the outpatient procedure takes only a few minutes to perform and involves severing the nerve fibers in the brain that cause autism. They include a few parent testimonials stating that after the procedure their children’s language doubled, and then they open their doors. If a man claiming to be a billion-year-old god from another galaxy can get people to line up for a therapy that crosses the line into child abuse, then doctors in some European clinic should expect at least equal success with a quick-fix surgical procedure. It hasn’t happened yet, but there is no reason to believe that it couldn’t. Desperate to do something, anything, to cure the incurable, we continue to punish the afflicted.

5. The dose makes the poison.