Word: ddt
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...DDT...
...pesticide residue, none of us will be suing Harvard University Dining Services for feeding us conventionally grown tomatoes at the salad bar. But long-term consequences are largely unknown and a cause for concern because of time lags between exposure and a disease’s development. For example, DDT was once a widely used insecticide, then certified as “harmless,” but has now been linked to an increased likelihood of premature birth and cancer...
...1950s--"Better living through chemistry," "Atoms for peace"--have a darker connotation today. Du Pont, which invented nylon, became known as well for napalm. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island soured Americans on nuclear power. Shuttle crashes and a defective Hubble telescope made NASA look inept. Substances from DDT to PCBs to ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons proved more dangerous than anyone realized. Drug disasters like the thalidomide scandal made some people nervous about the unintended consequences of new drug treatments. It's in that context of skepticism toward science that some reasonable questions have been raised lately about genetically modified foods...
...magnificent birds, with their eight-foot wingspan, striking white heads and piercing yellow eyes, are recognized worldwide as an American national emblem. But in the mid-1990s they were nearly wiped out in the lower 48 American states by chemical pesticides like DDT. While many U.S. populations have recovered, the majority of the world's 100,000 bald eagles still live in Alaska and B.C., says Canadian biologist Richard Cannings. And while the B.C. eagle population is thriving, large-scale poaching in the province threatens American bird populations, because eagles from throughout the western U.S. migrate to B.C. each winter...
...Alfred Kinsey published his report on Americans' previously concealed sex lives. The Nobel Prize in Medicine went to the Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Muller, for his work in developing the "miracle" compound DDT. Fourteen years later, during the Kennedy Administration, the New Yorker would begin serializing Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. George Orwell transposed two numbers...