Word: ddt
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...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...
Recent experience in South Africa shows just how well DDT can work. In 1996 the South African government, under pressure from international and domestic environmental groups, decided to phase out its use of DDT in residential spraying and rely instead on pesticides containing pyrethroid chemicals. Unfortunately, it turned out that many anopheles mosquitoes in South Africa were resistant to pyrethroids. The number of cases of malaria, which had been hovering between 8,000 and 13,000 a year, grew steadily worse, and by the year 2000 it had reached 64,000 cases, with 423 deaths. When the government reintroduced DDT...
Even environmentalists had to admit that DDT was necessary. "I wasn't very happy about it, but we are what you'd call pragmatic conservationists," says Gerhard Verdoorn, chairman of South Africa's Endangered Wildlife Trust, which had earlier lobbied the South African government to drop the pesticide and now helps train the 350 or so DDT sprayers who are employed each year. "We can't just look after animals and not care if people...