Banned by Frederick Rowe Davis

Author:Frederick Rowe Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2014-04-26T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Rereading Silent Spring

By the late 1950s, toxicologists at the Tox Lab, the FDA, and elsewhere were working to establish toxicology as an independent discipline through courses, textbooks, a professional society, and a scholarly journal. Most Americans had little access to scientific research or the debates in the halls of government. As in the past, it again fell to popular science writers to bridge the gap between scientists, policy makers, and the public. Notable among them was Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring quickly became a bestseller. Silent Spring alerted Americans to the hazards of insecticides, but it also inspired renewed interest within government even at the executive level. President John F. Kennedy called for further study through the President’s Scientific Advisory Committee, which recommended that Congress review interagency coordination. During the resulting hearings, Congress called on now-familiar witnesses to clarify risks associated with pesticides. Where testimony revealed obvious deficiencies in existing legislation, Congress took decisive action, but the strands of pesticide risk and benefit remained entangled in a Gordian knot.

In August 1958, Kenneth DuBois sought to expand the research and teaching program in toxicology at the University of Chicago. The Toxicity Laboratory had been renamed the U.S. Air Force Radiation Laboratory in 1953, and all funding ($90,000) was dedicated to radiation research. This research extended well beyond Geiling’s work on radioisotopes in pharmacology. For example, Doull later recalled that one of his first tasks under the new contract was to collaborate with two other researchers to establish a screening program for radio-protective agents. Critically, the research group obtained LD50s for mice on several thousand agents. As Doull remembered: “The resulting large data base of acute toxicity data in male mice has subsequently proven to be of more lasting value than the few radio-protectors we found.”1

Although by 1958 the budget had expanded to $275,000, of which approximately half went to research and graduate training in toxicology, DuBois believed that a distinct toxicology laboratory would greatly enhance the Division of Biological Sciences at the university. His justification for such a program was that the discipline of toxicology had developed to such a degree that designated lectures in related courses on pharmacology could no longer encompass the breadth and depth of the burgeoning field: “However, the tremendous increase in the use of chemical agents for industrial, agricultural and household purposes, and the anticipated widespread use of atomic energy have introduced many toxicological problems. The field is expanding so rapidly that it is no longer possible to include adequate coverage of the subject in the formal courses of related disciplines nor for the teachers of other disciplines to keep abreast of developments in the field.”2 DuBois noted that at least one other university, the University of Rochester, was initiating a program in toxicology. Unfortunately, the administration at the University of Chicago did not approve DuBois’s proposal as the dean of biological sciences supported molecular approaches to the study of biology over whole animal studies.3

The shift to molecular approaches at Chicago reflected a trend at many of the leading universities in the U.

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