Five Past Midnight in Bhopal - Dominique Lapierre [15]
The production of pesticides was in line with its past and its experience. The objective—to rid humanity of the insects that were stealing its food—could only enhance its international prestige.
5
Three Zealots on the Banks of the Hudson
They looked more like Davis Cup players than laboratory researchers. Thirty-four-year-old Harry Haynes and thirty-six-year-old Herbert Moorefield, both vigorous and fit-looking men, belonged to a profession that was relatively new. They were doctors of entomology. In July 1954, Union Carbide’s management had rented an entire wing of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers for these two eminent experts. It had further strengthened the team by adding to it one of the most brilliant staff members of its South Charleston, West Virginia, research center, thirty-eight-year-old chemist Joseph Lambrech. To these three exceptionally gifted people the company entrusted a mission of the utmost importance: Devise a product capable of exterminating a wide range of parasites while adhering to prevailing standards for the protection and safety of humans and the environment. That summer, on the top floor of the multinational’s New York office, no one was in any doubt: the company that managed to reconcile these two objectives would walk away with the world pesticide market. Lambrech gave the object of his labors a code name: Experimental Insecticide Seven Seven. For convenience’s sake it would soon become “Sevin.”
Going through all his predecessors’ studies with a fine-tooth comb, the chemist combined new molecules, hoping to find one that would kill aphids, red spiders and armyworms without leaving too many toxic residues in the vegetation and environment. For months on end, his entomologist colleagues tested his combinations on leaves, stems and ears of corn infested with all kinds of insects. In its hundreds of cages and containers, the Boyce Thompson Institute harbored an unimaginably rich zoo of the infinitely small. It also had acres of glass houses in which all the climates of the planet could be recreated around a limitless variety of plants. In large glass cases the different molecules could be tested with sprays of varying doses, directed from every possible angle at samples of every variety of crop. The entomologists Haynes and Moorefield would then deposit colonies of insects raised in their laboratories on the treated surfaces. Hour by hour they would observe their subjects’ agony. They collected the corpses on glass slides, examined them under the microscope, and subjected the plants and soil to detailed analysis to find any traces of chemical pollution. Their observations would enable their chemist colleague to hone the production of an insecticide ever nearer to what was required.
After three years of intense effort the team came up with a combination of a methyl derivative of carbamic acid and alpha naphthol, in the form of whitish crystals soluble in water. Those three years had been taken up with hundreds of experiments, not just on all known species of insects, but also on thousands of rats, rabbits, pigeons, fish, bees and even shrimps and lobsters. Finally, one evening in July 1957, the three zealots in Yonkers, together with their wives, were able to crack open a bottle of champagne. Although the god DDT had had to be cast down, agriculture would not remain defenseless. Sevin, born on the banks of the Hudson, would soon put a weapon in the hands of all the farmers of the world.
Carbide was quick to flood America with brochures proclaiming the birth of its miracle product. There was no end to the praises sung to it. To underline its “low toxicity to humans,” photographs depicted Herbert Moorefield, one of the inventors of Sevin, in the process of tasting a few granules with all the glee of a child licking his chocolate-coated lips. According to the publicity, Sevin protected an infinite range of crops: cotton, wheat, lemons, bananas, pineapples, olives, cocoa, coffee, sunflowers, sorghum,