3. Elixirs of Death
FOR THE FIRST TIME in the his tory of the world, every human being is now s ubjected to
contact with dangerous chemicals , from the mome nt of conception until death. I n the les s than
two decades of their us e, the s ynthetic pes ticides have been s o thoroughly dis tributed
throughout the animate and inanimate world that they occur vi rtually every whe re. They have
been recovered f rom most of the major river systems and even f rom streams of groundwater
flowing uns een through the earth. Res idues of thes e chemicals linger in s oil to which they may
have been applied a dozen years before. They have entered and lodged in the bodies of fis h,
birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal
experime nts find it almos t impos s ible to locate s ubjects free from s uch contami nation. They
have been found in fis h in remote mountain lakes , in earthworms burrowing in s oil, in the eggs
of birds—and in ma n hims elf. For thes e chemicals are now s tored in the bodies of the vas t
majority of human beings, regardless of age. They occur in the mother’s milk, and proba bly in
the tis s ues of the unborn child. All this has come about becaus e of the s udden ris e and
prodigious growth of an indus try for the production of ma nma de or s ynthe tic chemicals with
ins ecticidal prope rties. This indus try is a child of the Second World War. In the cours e of
developing agents of chemical warfare, some of the chemicals created in the laboratory were
found to be lethal to ins ects. The dis covery did not come by chance: ins ects were widely us ed
to test chemicals as agents of death for man. The result has been a seemingly endless stream of
s ynthetic ins ecticides. In being man-ma de—by ingenious laboratory manipulation of the
molecules , s ubstituting atoms, altering their arrangement—they differ s harply from the s impler
insecticides of prewar days. These were derived from naturally occurring minerals and plant
products—compounds of ars enic, coppe r, , manganes e, zinc, and other mine rals , pyrethrum
from the dried flowe rs of chrys anthemums , nicotine sulphate from some of the relatives of
tobacco, and rotenone from legumi nous plants of the Eas t Indies.
What s ets the new s ynthetic ins ecticides apart is their enormous biological potency. They have
imme ns e power not merely to pois on but to enter into the mos t vital proces s es of the body and
change them in s inis ter and often deadly ways. Thus, as we shall see, they destroy the very
enzy mes whos e function is to protect the body from harm, they block the oxidation proces s es
from which the body receives its energy, they preve nt the normal functioni ng of various organs ,
and they may initiate in certain cells the slow and irreversible change that leads to malignancy.
Yet new and more deadly che micals are added to the lis t each year and new us es are devis ed s o
that contact with thes e materials has become practically worldwide. The production of
s ynthetic pes ticides in the United States s oared from 124, 259,000 pounds in 1947 to
637,666,000 pounds in 1960—mo re than a fivefold increase. The wholesale value of thes e
products was well over a quarter of a billion dollars. But in the plans and hopes of the indus try
this enormous produc tion is only a beginning.
A Who’s Who of pes ticides is therefore of conce rn to us all. If we are going to live so intimately
with thes e chemicals—eating and drinking them, taking the m into the ve ry ma rrow of our
bones—we had bette r know s omething about their nature and their powe r. Although the
Second W orld War ma rked a turning away from inorganic chemicals as pesticides into the
wonder world of the carbon molecule, a few of the old materials persist. Chief among these is