AVOID BORING PEOPLE: Lessons from a Life in Science

by James Watson

  Our panel dealt with two major groups of pesticides: the long-lived chlorinated hydrocarbons, of which DDT was the best-known, and the much more toxic, short-lived organic phosphates, such as Sevin. The latter originally were developed as nerve agents for military deployment but later synthesized as less toxic derivatives, such as parathion, to kill insects. The use of both pesticide groups was steadily increasing, with many insects in turn developing genetic resistance, especially to the chlorinated hydrocarbons. Because of their much greater stability, Carson had focused more attention on the chlorine-containing pesticides, pointing out ever-increasing concentrations in the fatty tissues of creatures throughout the food chain. While large amounts of DDT given to human volunteers had no short-term effects, its more toxic derivatives, such as dieldrin, might well pose public health threats. An already widely used pesticide, dieldrin was a nasty liver toxin at high doses. More worrisome, mice exposed to it at much lower levels were developing liver adenomas that conceivably might develop into malignant carcinomas. But with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) calling these adenomas benign, the USDA blocked the invocation of the so-called Delaney amendment, which prohibited cancer-causing agents in the nation's food. If the FDA were to ban outright all chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, however, American agriculture would have been deprived of a chemical that had become vital to its productivity. Prudence suggested that the proper course was to recommend sharp curtailment of dieldrin use until the question of its carcinogenicity was settled.

  Only after a thorough review of how the USDA and FDA dealt with pesticides did our panel invite Rachel Carson to appear. Pleased at being asked, she was nevertheless perfectly even-tempered on that late January day, giving no indication of the nutty hysterical naturalist that agricultural and chemical lobbyists had portrayed her to be. The chemical giant Monsanto had distributed five thousand copies of a brochure parodying Silent Spring entitled “The Desolate Years,” describing a pesticide-free world devastated by famine, disease, and insects. The attack was mirrored in Time magazine's review of Silent Spring deploring Carson's oversimplification and downright inaccuracy. Two weeks after meeting with her, our panel finished a much debated first draft of our presidential report. Though it accepted as indispensable the role of pesticides in modern agriculture and public health (e.g., to control mosquitoes), most of it was devoted to dangers that pesticides posed for human beings, fish, wildlife, and the environment.

  The USDA reacted to the draft with instant fury, and Secretary Orville Freeman wrote to PSAC that in its present form the report would profoundly damage U.S. agriculture. After more pages on the benefits of pesticides had been added and the full PSAC panel had approved it, the USDA then demanded that they make a full review of it before the president released it. But Jerry Wiesner held firm, refusing to add a blanket statement that the food of our nation was safe or to remove the final sentence, which paid tribute to Rachel Carson for alerting the public to the problem. To our great relief President Kennedy released the document un corrupted on May 15,1963.

  By then Diana de Vegh was no longer part of Marc Raskin's attic office above PSAC in the Executive Office Building. Despite having recently purchased a house on a quiet street near Georgetown University, she had precipitously left for Paris. My Washington meals increasingly had to be taken with fellow panel members or with Leo Szilard and his wife, then living out of suitcases at the Dupont Plaza Hotel.

  During the Cuban missile crisis, Leo was so terrified that war was about to break out that he left New York for Geneva via Rome, where he tried unsuccessfully to get the pope's attention. A month later, the Szilards somewhat sheepishly returned to Washington, where Leo continued to devise unorthodox schemes to reduce the probability of nuclear war. Now aboveground test blasts were again occurring, with the Soviets breaking the international moratorium soon after the Berlin Wall went up. Six months later, our bomb makers were to follow suit.

  At that time, my major political concern was ever-expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Then just back in Washington were my sister, Betty, and her husband, Bob, the former CIA station chief in Cambodia. Bob's more than fifteen years of experience in the Far East had convinced him that sending more American troops to Vietnam would create a quagmire that would long haunt our nation. But he knew that many U.S. Army officials were more optimistic. In their ranch-style house, within easy commuting distance to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, I expressed my belief that our Limited War Panel had nothing to offer the American cause in Vietnam. By then I had learned that staph enterotoxin could no longer be considered merely an “incapacitating” agent. Monkeys exposed to it through their lungs promptly died. We had to assume that humans would suffer the same fate if exposed. I informed John Richardson of this fact four months later, when he came out to Bob and Betty's house following his removal as station chief in Saigon, an action taken to mean that the United States no longer supported the corrupt Diem government. Two years before, on my way to Cambodia for a family visit, I had been warned by Bob Bloom, then leading the CIA's secretly funded Asia Foundation, that any successor to Diem was likely to be even worse.

  A month later I was with the “superspook,” Desmond FitzGerald, whose house I came to one mid-June evening to take his stepdaughter, a classmate of Abby Rockefeller's, to dinner. A member of the Social Register elite that helped found the CIA, Desmond knew from his experience in the Philippines that bribes, not soldiers, were generally the best way to promote American foreign policy objectives in Asia. His mind seemed elsewhere when I indicated doubt that Fort Detrick's rice blast arsenal could prevent North Vietnam from continuing to support the Viet Cong. Only twenty-five years later did I learn that Desmond had been entrusted by Bobby Kennedy with the task of assassinating Fidel Castro.

  Though I attended a full Limited War Panel meeting in early May, my main PSAC role then was to lead its new panel on cotton insects. Its origin lay in a request to JFK from Arizona's Senator Carl Hayden that the federal government somehow prevent the boll weevil from spreading from Mexico into his state's highly profitable irrigated cotton fields. Pesticides already amounted to 20 percent of total production costs in southeastern states, and every year boll weevils were becoming increasingly resistant to the chlorinated hydrocarbons being used. When our panel first met in nearby Beltsville, Maryland, we were briefed about the problem as well as a possible solution. The sterilization procedures that had supposedly eliminated screwworms from selected horse-racing regions of Florida promised a theoretically ideal method of purging the cotton crop of the boll weevil. But the technique's application to weevil eradication seemed practically daunting. Producing and releasing enough sterile boll weevils to significantly reduce their population could easily cost several billion dollars.

  During our subsequent tours of the cotton fields of Mississippi, Texas, California, and Mexico, the entomologists who dominated our panel believed integrated pest management approaches could save farmers from further pesticide expenditures. Our first stop was the Boll Weevil Research Laboratory at Mississippi State College in Starkville, not surprisingly located in the congressional district of the powerful Jamie Whitten. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Whitten was more influential in shaping agricultural research policies than the secretary of agriculture. Later as we drove toward the vast cotton fields of the still British-owned Delta and Pine cotton plantation near Greenville, the homes of the “hoe-hands” who weeded the cotton fields struck me as even more run-down than the dwellings bordering the rice paddies of Cambodia that I had visited two years earlier. Later the Delta and Pine official showing us around his vast domain remarked that his farm laborers lazily stopped hoeing every time his car passed out of sight.

  On our way to the USDA cotton insect lab near Brownsville, Texas, we were lucky not to be in a convertible when our car was doused with pesticides released by a small plane flying overhead. Pesticide advertisements were ubiquitous on the large roadside billboards, where competing agroch
emical companies touted the merits of their respective pesticide brews like so many aftershaves. Before I got to Texas, I had hopes that the boll worm, in some years a worse pest than the boll weevil, might be best controlled by spraying with polyhedral viruses. Similar viruses had already been used to control the spruce bud worm in Canada, but such an enterprise could not be supported here, as we found to our dismay that 85 percent of the Brownsville laboratory's budget went to salaries. A major function of most USDA regional labs was then to provide patronage jobs for friends of local congressmen. At the Boll Weevil Research Lab, for example, the chief administrative assistant was a close relative of Congressman Whitten.

  In the fall we came together three times to hammer out details of our final report. I wrote the introductory sentence: “The boll weevil is almost a national institution.” Secretly I hoped that JFK himself might read it and mark me out as a potential speech writer. On the first day of our last scheduled meeting, we were interrupted by Colin MacLeod's deputy, Jim Hartgering, bursting in to tell us that the president had been shot in Dallas. Halfheartedly we tried to refocus on cotton insects until news reached us an hour later that JFK had died. In a state of shock, I walked about the PSAC offices, soon drifting upstairs to see Marc Raskin, who for months had wanted to resign from his sideline position on Bundy's National Security Council to start his own foreign policy institute. We wondered under what circumstances Diana de Vegh would hear the news. That Lyndon Johnson was to be our president was at that moment emotionally impossible to accept.

  At last I saw no point in hanging around and went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel, where I was staying to be near the Szilards, rather than the Hay-Adams Hotel, across Lafayette Park from the White House, which was inexpensive in those days and where I had stayed on earlier Washington trips. Always looking forward to his next meal, Leo insisted that Trudy and I quickly go with him to the Rathskeller, across Dupont Circle down Connecticut Avenue. There he obsessed about how one might get Lyndon Johnson to end the nuclear arms race. I didn't have the heart to stay in town and see the funeral cortege that would soon be making its solemn way down Pennsylvania Avenue. Abjectly I flew back to Boston the next morning.

  Though Bundy stayed on as national security advisor, Jerry Wiesner soon resigned to return to MIT as dean of science. Almost eight months were to pass before our cotton insects report finally was released in a gutted form. Gone were our recommendations to spend more on cotton research facilities and supplies and less on salaries. Unless many more entomologists were trained to help bring sawier approaches to the fields, we saw no chance of American cotton's escaping its total dependence upon pesticides. But we were told that the new president didn't want us to recommend policies requiring more money for cotton insect research. With our final report likely to have an impact on no one, I saw no reason to oppose its new, more pedestrian opening sentence, “Cotton is the largest cash crop in the United States.”

  My last day as a $50-a-day PSAC consultant occurred when the Biological and Chemical Warfare subpanel was brought together to evaluate a proposed release of several infectious agents over the Pacific Ocean southwest of the Hawaiian Islands to test whether they would infect endemic Pacific birds. If no such infections occurred, VEE, for example, would finally get a true green light for appropriate military use. When I saw that a lieutenant general had come to preside over the briefing, I knew the army strongly wanted these tests to take place. Already they had co-opted the Smithsonian Institution for ornithological help. That morning I was the only panel member in opposition, in particular arguing that VEE was not an “incapacitating” agent. It killed the very young and very old and should never be sprayed over any civilian-populated areas. Talking later to Vincent McRae, I got the distinct impression that the lieutenant general had wanted a unanimous vote in favor of his Pacific tests. So I was not surprised never again to be called back to the Executive Office Building.

  More than a year later, in early June 1965,1 was invited to a reception held for Presidential Scholars—those honored as the cream of the nation's graduating high school seniors, under a program LBJ invented—on the south lawn of the White House. I found myself next to the ice skater Peggy Fleming, who in turn was next to General William Westmoreland. Upon the dais Lucy Baines Johnson talked about how we should now strongly support our American soldiers, no longer in Vietnam merely as “observers” but now in frighteningly larger numbers as combat troops. Later going through the reception line, I watched Senator J. William Fulbright attempt civility when briefly speaking to the president. Equally gracious then was Lady Bird Johnson, leading some of us inside to see the executive mansion's reception rooms. I realized at that moment that an era had passed and that seeing the inside of the White House was a now-or-never opportunity.

  Remembered Lessons

  1. Exaggerations do not void basic truths

  Books, like plays or movies, succeed best when they exaggerate the truth. In communicating scientific fact to the nonspecialist, there is a huge difference between simplifying for effect and misleading. The issues that scientists must explain to society—then DDT contamination, today global warming or stem cell technology, say—require far too many years of training for most people to take hold of them in all their nuances. Scientists will necessarily exaggerate but are ethically obliged to society to exaggerate responsibly. In writing my textbooks I realized that emphasizing exceptions to simple truths was counterproductive and that use of qualifying terms such as probably or possibly was not the way to get ideas across initially. So while some of Rachel Carson's facts have proved less solidly grounded than she first believed, the truth is that man-made pesticides were spreading through the food chains so fast that they were very likely to reach levels dangerous to humans. No good purpose other than the bottom line of the chemical industry would have been served hedging that fact.

  2. The military is interested in what scientists know, not what they think

  PSAC's briefing by Fort Detrick's staff focused on whether proposed biological warfare agents would be effective if deployed by either our military or the Soviets'. Whether these weapons should be deployed was not open for discussion. And so the question as to whether VEE should then be seen as a tactical or strategic weapon was never brought before us. I naively assumed that no one would seriously consider using it in any capacity in the near future, but what may seem absurd to a civilian can be perfectly plausible in a world where options are rarely taken entirely off the table. It is hardly surprising we were never told that the VEE was almost ready for military deployment. We would have gone instantly to McGeorge Bundy, if not the president, to let him know of our opposition to its use at any time. Whether either Bundy or JFK knew how advanced the nation's VEE program was I still don't know. My guess is that they knew no more than our PSAC panel. Top-secret clearance should never be confused with “need to know.” I was granted the former but only through my natural curiosity about a building with no apparent function did I learn that one of Fort Detrick's better-funded missions was to advance CIA assassination possibilities.

  4. Don't back schemes that demand miracles

  Ridding our southern states of the boll weevil by exposing female weevils to irradiated sterile males was a proposal that instantly smelled of nonsense to us experts. No one who briefed us was prepared to say how much it might cost. Even worse, almost all the small pilot tests done to date had failed, with their proponents now saying more research was needed. The sterile male project had an interest in preserving the congressional perception that the Boll Weevil Research Lab was on the verge of something big. Congressman Jamie Whitten could then bask in its supposed glory. Those reading our report knew that we thought the local research was going nowhere, but ultimately it is possible to ignore what even the government's own scientific advisers think. Never mind that producing enough sterile males to blanket the nation's cotton-growing regions might cost more than the profit from an average year's crop.

  5. Controversial recommendat
ions require political backing

  Our PSAC panel's conclusion that pesticides pose a threat to the environment reached the public only through its release by President Kennedy. If he had owed a major debt to the chemical industry, his staff might have seen to it that passages damaging to those interests were toned down, leaving open the question of whether Silent Spring's argument had merit, and dampening the demand for corrective action. Happily, JFK owed no such political debt, and no White House pressure ever came to bear on us. In contrast, President Johnson's staff saw political harm in a White House report that said the nation's cotton farmers needed more than heavy pesticide spraying to keep their fields financially viable. When our badly gutted cotton insect report came out, most panel members realized we had toiled to no useful end.

  10. MANNERS APPROPRIATE FOR A NOBEL PRIZE

  INDIVIDUALS nominated for Nobel Prizes are not supposed to know their names have been put forward. The Swedish Academy, which judges candidates and awards the prize, makes this policy very explicit on their nomination forms. Jacques Monod, however, could not keep secret from Francis Crick that a member of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm had asked him to nominate us in January for the 1962 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. In turn, Francis, when visiting Harvard that February to give a lecture, let the cat out of the bag at a Chinese restaurant where we were having supper. But he told me we should say nothing to anyone, lest it get back to Sweden.