discovered that these widely used, artificial compounds—eventually extracted, at scale, from coal tar—were first engineered by chemists as isolates from gases rendered out of whale oil. This was during the era when whales were a global commodity and a proto-energy industry—their fat sheared off by whalers and distilled to light lamps, grease machines, process textiles, and fuel the late stages of the industrial revolution. What a cruel and intimate historical loop: whale bodies provided the base chemistry from which the precursors to PCBs were extracted, and now, so many decades later, the
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