Banned
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Audiences at a wide range of conferences and workshops have responded to presentations drawn from this research. These include the American Society for Environmental History, the History of Science Society, the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany, Cermes3—INSERM/CNRS, RiTME—INRA with support from the French National Research Program for Endocrine Disruptors, the Agricultural History Society, Department of Biology at Washington University, Lyman Briggs College at Michigan State University, and the College of Life Sciences at University of Missouri. Conversations with authorities too numerous to list have shaped my thinking about pesticides and toxicology as well as Silent Spring. This is a partial list: Roland Clement, John Doull, Linda Lear, Mark Lytle, Michelle Mart, Gary Mormino, and Richard Pough.
Numerous erudite scholars read versions of the manuscript or sections thereof. I am very grateful for the detailed comments of Mark Barrow, Mark Borello, David Hecht, Frederic Holmes, Dan Kevles, Nancy Langston, Michael Ruse, John Wargo, and Judith and Dan Davis, as well as anonymous reviewers. I hasten to note that any remaining errors of fact or judgment are mine alone. At Yale University Press, I thank Jean Thomson Black, Samantha Ostrowski, and Eliza Childs.
Family and friends have supported me in countless way. Again, I am grateful to my sister and brothers and their families. The imminent birth of my son Spenser Lake Davis provided the impetus to finish the first draft, and in what seems like the blink of an eye, I can discuss the book with him in detail. Spenser also devised the most alliterative suggested title. Words cannot express the gratitude I feel for my parents. Better than any other source, my father’s boyhood recollections captured the wonder of DDT to millions of American farmers, and my mother shared her love of environmental literature. My parents have always supported and shared my passion for birds and the environment. I cherish our collective memories of many spring mornings spent in search of warblers and other migratory birds. Here’s to next spring, Mom, Dad, and Spenser!
ABBREVIATIONS
AEC
Atomic Energy Commission (AEC)
AMA
American Medical Association
AOAC
Association of Official Agricultural Chemists
BEPQ
Bureau of Entomology and Plant Quarantine
BHC
benzene hexachloride
CMR
Committee on Medical Research
DDT
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane
DFP
diisopropyl fluorophosphate
EPA
Environmental Protection Agency
FDA
Food and Drug Administration
FEPCA
Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act
FFDCA
Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act
FIFRA
Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act
FWS
United States Fish and Wildlife Service
HETP
hexaethyl tetraphosphate
HEW
Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
LD50
Lethal Dose 50 / Median Lethal Dose
mg/kg
milligrams/kilogram
μg/kg
micrograms/kilogram
NDRC
National Defense Research Committee
NIH
National Institutes of Health
OMPA or Pestox III
octamethyl pyrophosphoramide
OSRD
Office of Scientific Research and Development
PFDA
Pure Food and Drug Act
PHS
United States Public Health Service
ppb
parts per billion
ppm
parts per million
PSAC
President’s Scientific Advisory Committee
TOCP
triorthocresyl phosphate
Tox Lab
University of Chicago Toxicity Laboratory
USDA
United States Department of Agriculture
CHAPTER 1
Toxicology Emerges in Public Health Crises
In 1893 the city of Chicago announced to the world its arrival as a major metropolis through the Columbian Exposition. That same year, the British medical journal Lancet deployed a public health doctor to report on the state of the Chicago stockyards, which in terms of size and productivity were among the largest in the world. In the Chicago stockyards, slaughterhouses became industrial meat factories that rendered thousands of cattle into meat products to be transported via refrigerated railcar across the United States and shipped around the world. With the industrialization of meat production came spectacular demand, and the Chicago packinghouses refined meat production to the essence of efficiency. Nothing mattered save enhanced productivity and profit. Safeguards fell by the wayside, endangering workers and consumers alike.1 Technical reports failed to excite concern, but when Upton Sinclair published The Jungle in February of 1906, the conditions in the Chicago stockyards caught the attention of legislators, and even the president responded. Having languished in the form of several related bills for nearly two decades, the Pure Food and Drug Act (PFDA) was finally passed in June of 1906. Primarily directed at product labeling, the PFDA prohibited interstate transport of unlawful food and drugs.
The industrial principles of efficiency that infused the Chicago packing-houses extended to other dimensions of agriculture as well. Novel technologies facilitated the expansion of monoculture as the preferred and most profitable method, but for the threat of insect invasion. Paris green, and later lead arsenate, provided a technological fix to this problem. Adelynne Whitaker, historian of pesticide legislation, argued that agricultural chemists and entomologists during the early twentieth century were primarily concerned with “the economic aspects of adulterated and ineffective insecticides,” but “the scientists were not unaware of the public health implications of their work.”2 Just as the Chicago packers found an insatiable demand for their low-cost meat products, farmers found virtually unlimited demand for their produce. In both cases, industrializing modes of production resulted in previously un-imagined levels of productivity. As production became concentrated in Chicago and points farther west, Americans increasingly found themselves separated from the sources of their food. The PFDA and the Insecticide Act of 1910 reassured Americans that despite such detachment they could still expect a safe and healthy food supply. During the next three decades the foundations of such presumptions were shaken as Americans found their health and welfare threatened by pesticides and adulterated drugs. Yet it took a national tragedy to shake American consumers and regulators out of their complacency.
There is no question that the PFDA represented a watershed moment in the history of regulation in the United States. Yet legislators recognized that the act incorporated compromises that left American public health vulnerable to corporate deceit and malfeasance. By the 1930s, the president had called on Congress to revisit food and drug legislation and forge a law with greater power to protect Americans. As the House and the Senate debated health legislation, several crises accentuated the limitations of the 1906 law, notably its inability to prosecute abuses that led to injury and even death. In addition to legislators, a new generation of consumer advocates took up the cause, writing books and articles to alert Americans to the failings of existing legislation and to the flagrant violations that exposed them to significant risks. Among the many examples that failed to elicit regulation, the case of Jamaica ginger (“ginger jake”) paralysis, in which many thousands were poisoned after unwittingly consuming a highly toxic alternative to alcohol during Prohibition, was particularly egregious. The pesticide residues of arsenic and lead on fruit also failed to motivate consumers or legislators. Both ginger jake and pesticide residues received considerable coverage in the media (and in the books and articles of consumer advocates), but not until the Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, in
which ninety-three individuals died after ingesting a contaminated drug, did legislators pass the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938 (FFDCA), thereby revising the 1906 law.
The Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy, similar incidents, and the legislation that followed gave toxicology new standards and food and drug laws increased leverage.3 Moreover, several scientists and regulators launched their lengthy careers with the study of Elixir Sulfanilamide. Through their work on Elixir Sulfanilamide they learned vital lessons and developed new approaches to toxicology that they would continue to apply to pharmaceuticals and other new chemicals, such as insecticides, throughout their careers in government, industry, and research universities. Such cases also affected popular perceptions of risk in America. In addition to an expectation that government would provide safety standards for pharmaceuticals, Americans were becoming accustomed to the use of powerful chemicals in medicine as therapies. Similarly, new technologies, including chemical insecticides, accelerated the industrialization of agriculture in America during the first decades of the twentieth century.
The scale of meatpacking drove intensification of production, but meat was not the only agricultural commodity that was industrialized during the last half of the nineteenth century. The agricultural revolution saw the introduction of new technology in form of steel plows, seed drills, cultivators, and reapers, which greatly reduced the need for a large labor force. Moreover, methods of crop rotation and the application of fertilizers significantly enlarged yields of many crops. Mechanization and fertilization meant that established farmers could plant extensive crops consisting of monocultures. Successful harvests could be spectacularly profitable. Nevertheless, monoculture left crops profoundly vulnerable to insect invasions, which could quickly bankrupt ambitious farmers. Historian James Whorton placed these agricultural developments in context: “The favorable insect environment created by monoculture was further enhanced in America by westward expansion. The fulfillment of Manifest Destiny not only involved an enormous increase in the area of land under cultivation but, also, by the prerequisite clearing of forests in many areas, frequently destroyed predators of insects while forcing the insects themselves to turn to a domestic food supply.”4 Even the novel technologies, such as railroads and trans-Atlantic ships, that facilitated a related revolution in transportation contributed to the problem of insect invasions by transferring the culprits around the country.
Farmers became desperate for effective means to control insect infestations. Economic entomologists, hoping to escape unfavorable stereo-types as ineffectual, disengaged scientists preoccupied with some of the smallest and most inconsequential members of the animal kingdom, answered farmers’ hopes. Particularly promising was an insecticide extracted from the pyrethrum flower, a chrysanthemum. Drying and crushing the stamens of the flowers produced a powerful insecticide. Pyrethrum, as the insecticide became known, was prohibitively expensive because farmers in the Caucasus guarded their monopoly on the plant.5
Economic entomologists sought a synthetic insecticide as effective as pyrethrum. In 1867, farmers received the answer to their prayers in the form of Paris green, a copper acetoarsenite. Some journalists warned against adding arsenic to agriculture, but farmers soon adopted Paris green to fight a range of insect pests. In the five years after its introduction, Paris green became “the ally of first resort whenever death must be dealt to any pest.”6 Paris green was popular with farmers because it was inexpensive and effective against a variety of insects. The wonder insecticide met its match after a Harvard astronomer with an interest in silk production imported the gypsy moth, which took flight in 1869. Their caterpillars soon stripped trees around Medford, Massachusetts, of their leaves, and the moths expanded their range around New England. Heroic efforts at control included setting caterpillars aflame with kerosene. By 1890, gypsy moth caterpillars threatened orchards and forests throughout New England.7 Surprisingly, Paris green failed to control the resistant caterpillars. In 1892, F. C. Moulton, a Gypsy Moth Commission chemist, had introduced the solution in the form of lead arsenate. Its effectiveness outweighed its expense, and as an added benefit it was gentler on the foliage on which it was sprayed. At the turn of the century, lead arsenate had become the preferred insecticide, a position it would continue to occupy until the introduction of DDT after World War II. Despite the proliferation of Paris green and lead arsenate, regulation of pesticides languished until the passage of PFDA in 1906 and, more important, the Insecticide Act of 1910.
Once the PFDA established labeling standards for drugs and foods in the U.S. in 1906, prospects for comparable standards for insecticides (and fungicides) began to look very promising. E. Dwight Sanderson reported that one of the nation’s largest insecticide manufacturers agreed to include an analysis of its goods on all labels. As the director and entomologist of the New Hampshire Experiment Station and the head of the Standing Committee on Proprietary Insecticides of the Association of Economic Entomologists, Sanderson interpreted the agreement as a promising sign that the insecticides industry would support his committee’s resolution for national labeling legislation for insecticides and fungicides.8 Harvey Wiley, director of the Bureau of Chemistry and a staunch advocate for the regulation of foods and drugs, encouraged Sanderson to lobby Congress for such legislation for three reasons: the PFDA did not extend to insecticides, an amendment to the PFDA was not feasible, and labeling of insecticides was critically important. When compared to the tortuous path of the food and drug act, passage of the insecticide act was both speedier and more direct. The passage of the Insecticide Act in April 1910 confirmed Sanderson’s impression that the insecticide industry was ready for regulation. Historian Adelynne Whitaker argued that the quick passage of Insecticide Act hinged on industry acceptance, but insecticides producers witnessed how the food and drug act benefited responsible and reliable producers of food and drugs, whereas producers of adulterated goods were forced out of the market.9
As the PFDA set labeling standards for foods and drugs, the Insecticide Act of 1910 established similar standards for insecticides. The manufacture and sale of adulterated and misbranded insecticides and fungicides in interstate commerce became illegal under the insecticide law. It codified legislative standards for insecticides in general and specifically the two insecticides that were most commonly used in the United States: lead arsenate and Paris green. Regulators expected specific standards to reduce problems with enforcement, which had posed difficulties for the USDA.10 Enforcement of the federal Insecticide Act fell to the Insecticide and Fungicide Board within the Bureau of Chemistry. Early in the act’s history, few if any noted the potential conflict of interest, but by the mid-1920s, the USDA’s dual role as protector of both farmers and consumers garnered criticism, particularly as the problem of pesticide residues on produce became a matter for regulatory concern.11 Understanding of the risks posed by heavy metals contaminants, such as lead and arsenic, owed much to the pioneering work of a few researchers who were establishing the new study of industrial hygiene.
The history of industrial hygiene (later, occupational medicine) owes much to the sweeping research of the social historian of medicine Christopher Sellers.12 Other historians have made important contributions with respect to specific toxins, diseases, and companies.13 In general, the U.S. lagged behind Britain and Germany in the evolution of industrial hygiene. Sellers attributed the lag to several factors, including the ambiguity of indeterminate symptomology of industrial diseases, delayed onset of diseases, a worker culture that dictated stoicism and personal fortitude in the face of workplace hazards, rapid turnover in employment, fear and mistrust of company physicians and orthodox medicine in general, financial barriers to medical care, and a general lack of knowledge of industrial diseases (exacerbated by the increasing occupational specialization).14 In Great Britain and Germany, pioneer researchers in academic or government posts began to study occupational disease in the late nineteenth century. Particularly noteworthy were the efforts of Kar
l Lehmann as the director of the Hygienic Institute in Wurzburg. Lehmann began studies the effects of gases and vapors on cats.15
In the U.S., systematic study of occupational disease took form in Alice Hamilton’s studies of working conditions in Illinois factories beginning in 1910. Hamilton (1869–1970) meticulously documented the hazards of various occupations, most notably the lead industry. Remarkably, without specific authority, she depended on the good faith of lead companies to allow her to survey workers and determine their illnesses and the causes thereof. After surveying several companies, Hamilton was able to compare lead poisoning rates among their workers. Such comparison led to informal competition between companies as they tried to lower their disease rates below those of their rivals. Hamilton later expressed mixed feelings regarding the effect of such competition and hoped that the companies sought the moral high ground rather than favorable cost-benefit ratios.16