Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [104]
That nuclear war and overpopulation are dangers is not a startling revelation. Gabor’s assertion is startling because the idea of a dangerous Age of Leisure seems like a joke. Many of us grew up being told that the best of times were just around the corner, that scientists would be kept busy inventing ways for the rest of us to occupy ourselves while robots and computers took care of everything. But it was no joke to Gabor: this age is ‘not yet with us, but it is coming towards us with rapid strides’, he wrote. We may now have laughed off the idea of the Age of Leisure, but it is worth noting Gabor’s serious tone, because some other twentieth-century pronouncements still have a hold over us. The most enduring is the idea that science is more powerful than nature.
In a 1963 CBS documentary, the chemist Robert White-Stephens looks and sounds every inch the authoritative voice of science. He wears a lab coat, a neat moustache and thick-rimmed spectacles. His phrases are delivered in grave, Churchillian cadences. ‘The modern chemist, the modern biologist, the modern scientist believes man is steadily controlling nature,’ he says.
White-Stephens was responding to accusations made by a young biologist called Rachel Carson, who had published a book questioning the wisdom of America’s new love affair with pesticides. Until 1945, most wars had ended because of insect-borne illnesses such as typhus: too many soldiers were dying of disease for fighting to continue. The invention of dichlorodiphenyl trichloroethane – DDT – changed that, and in the post-war era the chemists cashed in on the kudos they had garnered for themselves. Chemistry, its proponents suggested, could also change peacetime.
It certainly seemed plausible, and so governments invested in giant industrial complexes that churned out tons of chemicals for use in agriculture and city sanitation. US Public Health Department films show DDT being sprayed on happy children eating sandwiches in a public park, on others splashing in the municipal swimming pool, on mothers holding babies while watching community events. The chemists were going to eradicate the insect pest. And, despite the fact that one of the insecticides used, tetraethylpyro phosphate (TEPP), was nothing but the refined essence of a German nerve gas compound, it apparently never occurred to them that these pesticides could harm other organisms too.
It was only when people noticed birds dying that anyone began to express concern. Carson put across the extent of the threat with poetic clarity. The indiscriminate spraying, she said, could quickly lead to a springtime devoid of birdsong: a ‘silent spring’. America, she eloquently argued, must rein back its release of chemicals into the environment.
Beset by illness and personal tragedy, Carson took four years to research and write her book. It was published in 1962 to critical acclaim, public alarm and vociferous scorn from many scientists. Emil Mrak, a food scientist and the chancellor of the University of California at Davis, testified to the US Congress that Carson’s scientific conclusions were ‘contrary to the present body of scientific knowledge’. Loudest among the scientific critics, though, were White-Stephens and his colleagues in the American pesticide industry, backed by a $250,000 anti-Carson war chest. Carson was advancing ‘gross distortions of the actual facts completely unsupported by scientific experimental evidence and general practical experience in the field’, White-Stephens alleged. ‘The real threat, then, to the survival of man is not chemical but biological, in the shape of hordes of insects that can denude our forests, sweep over our croplands.’
Carson’s thorough grasp of the science, coupled with the calm demeanour she displayed during her rare public appearances to defend the book –