That bird populations were actually increasing during the period of heaviest use of DDT wasn’t a coincidence. DDT was beneficial in that it protected birds from a broad range of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, Newcastle disease, encephalitis, rickettsialpox, and bronchitis, and—because DDT lessened the harmful effects of pests on crops—it made more seeds and fruits available for birds to eat.
Rachel Carson wasn’t only a member of the National Audubon Society; she had also participated in its annual Christmas bird counts. So she must have known about the bird population data; still, she had chosen to ignore them. In Silent Spring, Rachel Carson never mentioned habitat destruction, egg collection, or hunting as reasons for why bird populations might have dwindled. It was a pesticide witch hunt. “Readers of Silent Spring, in the 1960s and even now, are impressed by its poetic language and imagery, but it did not escape the notice of scientists that while the book was heavy on prose it was light on science,” wrote Donald Roberts and colleagues in The Excellent Powder: DDT’s Political and Scientific History. “It seems certain that scientists and students of chemistry and the natural world could not have guessed how Silent Spring would pave the way for science to be sidelined in the development of laws, policies, and global strategies for disease control.”
—
WHEN THE EPA banned DDT in the early 1970s, much of the information about whether it had caused human disease or affected wildlife was already available. This information came to light at a public hearing forced by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). EDF officials wanted the public, the press, and politicians to hear just how harmful DDT could be. So they called a variety of environmentalists to testify on their behalf. Health officials, however, didn’t take this attempt at a public flogging lying down. They called their own experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, agriculture, and environmental health.
The hearing lasted eight months, included 125 witnesses and 365 exhibits, and generated a transcript that was 9,312 pages long. When it was over, Edward Sweeney, the hearing examiner, rendered his verdict: “DDT is not mutagenic [causing cancer] or teratogenic [causing birth defects] to man,” he wrote. “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds or other wildlife. The [EDF has] not fully met the burden of proof. There is a present need for the continued use of DDT for the essential uses defined in this case.” William Ruckelshaus, head of the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency, never attended the meeting. When it was over, he never read the report. Rather, on June 2, 1972, Ruckelshaus unilaterally banned DDT. It was a political decision, yielding to public sentiment. And it ignited an international firestorm against DDT that resulted in it being banned from the world.
The chemical industry seemed not to care. DDT was just one of many pesticides used in agriculture. And the agricultural market was far more lucrative than the public health market. Now, DDT could be replaced with drugs that were not only more expensive, but far more harmful to people.
—
IN MANY WAYS, Rachel Carson had sounded an important alarm. She was the first to say that we needed to be more attentive to our impact on the environment. (Indeed, climate change has been a direct consequence of man-made activities.) She was the first to warn us that DDT could accumulate in the environment. (Even after the spraying stopped, DDT and its by-products were still present throughout the ecosystem.) And she was right in her prediction that biological insect controls might eventually be of value. (Decades after publication of Silent Spring, the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis [Bti], which kills mosquito larvae, was included in malaria eradication efforts.) Unfortunately, Rachel Carson had taken one step too far. By claiming that DDT caused diseases like leukemia in children—or by claiming that children could be fine one minute and dead a few hours later—she had scared the hell out of the American public. In the end, Rachel Carson wasn’t the scientist she had claimed to be. She was a polemicist, willing to stretch the truth to fit her bias.
—
SILENT SPRING WAS SUCCESSFUL because it was lyrical, compelling, and dramatic. But there was another reason it had had such an enormous impact: Silent Spring was biblical, appealing to our notion that we had sinned against our creator.
The book begins in Eden. “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” Man, however, had eaten from the tree of knowledge, worshipping the false god of economic progress while destroying paradise. As a consequence, “a shadow of death had fallen on the people and the land.” And so man was to be cast out of Eden, forced to toil on a scorched earth while suffering all manner of illnesses.
In truth, Rachel Carson’s Eden never existed. And nature has never been in balance. It’s been in constant flux, arguably in chaos. Because the simple truth is that Mother Nature isn’t much of a mother: She can kill us, and unless we fight back, she will. “[Carson] paints a nostalgic picture of Elysian life in an imaginary American village of former years, where all was in harmonious balance with Nature and happiness and contentment reigned interminably,” wrote one scientist. “But the picture she paints is illusory. [T]he rural Utopia she describes was rudely punctuated by a longevity among its residents of perhaps thirty-five years, by an infant mortality of upwards of twenty children dead by the age of five of every hundred born, by mothers dead in their twenties from childbed fever and tuberculosis, by frequent famines crushing isolated peoples through long, dark, frozen winters following the failure of a basic crop the previous summer, [and] by vermin and filth infesting their homes…Surely she cannot be so naïve as to contemplate turning our clocks back to the years when man was indeed immersed in Nature’s balance and barely holding his own.”
William Cronon, an environmental scientist and the author of Changes in the Land, took Carson’s argument to its illogical end: “It is not hard to reach the conclusion that the only way human beings can hope to live naturally on the earth is to follow the hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon virtually everything that civilization has given us. If nature dies because we enter it, then the only way to save nature is to kill ourselves.” Biologist I. L. Baldwin sounded a similar theme: “Modern agriculture and modern public health, indeed, modern civilization could not exist without a relentless war against the return of a true balance of nature.” Carson never saw it that way, insisting on a world that had never existed: “Under primitive agricultural conditions the farmer had few insect problems,” she wrote, ignoring that fact that early farming societies were riddled with insect-borne diseases and insect-induced famines.
—
IN 2006, the World Health Organization, realizing its mistake, changed its position on DDT, no longer bowing to political pressures to ban the product. On September 15, Dr. Arata Kochi, director of the Global Malaria Programme, announced the new policy: “I asked my staff. I asked malaria experts around the world, ‘Are we using every possible weapon to fight this disease?’ It became apparent that we were not. One powerful weapon against malaria was not being deployed. In a battle to save the lives of nearly one million children a year—most of them in Africa—the world was reluctant to spray the inside of houses and huts with insecticides; especially with the highly effective insecticide known as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane or DDT.” The Sierra Club backed Kochi; the Pesticide Action Network didn’t.
For more than 30 years, countries where malaria epidemics were common had been denied this lifesaving chemical. Although there were alternatives, and some of those alternatives were used, no chemical was as cheap, long lasting, or effective as DDT. As a result, millions of people, mostly children, died needlessly.
Carson’s supporters have heard the criticisms. They’ve argued that, had she lived longer, she would never have promoted a ban on DDT. Indeed, in Silent Spring, Carson wrote, “It is not my contention that chemical pesticides never be used.” But it was her contention that
DDT had caused leukemia, liver disease, birth defects, premature births, and a whole range of chronic illnesses. An influential author cannot, on the one hand, claim that DDT causes leukemia (which, in 1962, was a death sentence) and then, on the other hand, expect that anything less than a total ban on the chemical would be the result.
—
“THE QUESTION IS WHETHER any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized,” wrote Rachel Carson in Silent Spring. Roger Meiners, co-author of Silent Spring at 50: The False Crises of Rachel Carson, countered, “This rhetorical question suggests another: whether any civilization that hobbles new technology that could reduce hunger and disease, on the chance that the new technology might have negative consequences—essentially giving up a real bird in hand for a hypothetical bird in the bush—should lose the right to be called civilized.”
—
THE LESSON FROM RACHEL CARSON and the banning of DDT reprises an earlier theme—it’s all about the data—as well as suggesting two new ones.
When officials at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) were deciding whether to ban DDT, they had two sets of data from which to choose. One was a 9,000-page report generated by more than a hundred experts in the fields of chemistry, toxicology, agriculture, and environmental health that included hundreds of graphs and figures. DDT, the report concluded, wasn’t killing birds, wasn’t killing fish, and wasn’t causing chronic diseases in people. Although numbingly boring, the report was accurate.
The other source of evidence was a book: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—a beautifully written, heart-pounding tale with biblical overtones. Unlike the expert report, however, it was short on data and long on anecdotes. For example, to prove that eagles were dying from DDT, Carson had relied on the observations of a retired banker from Florida whose hobby was bird-watching. In the end, the EPA’s decision to ban DDT wasn’t based on data; it was based on fear and misinformation.
Carson’s story provides another lesson. In the 16th century Paracelsus, a Swiss physician and philosopher said, “the dose makes the poison.” When Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, she appealed to a 1960s, back-to-nature mentality supported by young, energetic, community-minded activists. Carson’s basic premise—that man-made activities were destroying the environment—was correct. Thanks to Rachel Carson, we are now far more attentive to our impact on the planet. Unfortunately, Carson also gave birth to the notion of zero tolerance—the assumption that any substance found harmful at any concentration or dosage should be banned absolutely. If large quantities of DDT (like those used in agriculture) were potentially harmful, then even small quantities (like those used to prevent mosquitoes from biting) should be avoided. In a sense, Rachel Carson was an early proponent of the precautionary principle. But, as we’ll see in the final chapter with cancer-screening programs, we should be cautious about being cautious.
CHAPTER 7
NOBEL PRIZE DISEASE
“Pride goes before destruction, haughty spirit before a fall.”
—Proverbs 16:18
Vitamin manufacturers today owe their multibillion-dollar-a-year business to one man: a Nobel Prize–winning scientist who, when he wandered far outside of his field, caused us to believe that large quantities of supplemental vitamins would make us live longer, better, healthier lives. In fact, they have only increased our risks of cancer and heart disease.
—
LINUS PAULING was a genius.
In 1931, Pauling published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society titled, “The Nature of the Chemical Bond.” At the time, chemists had already described two different types of bonds: ionic (where one atom gives up an electron to another) and covalent (where atoms share electrons). Pauling said that it didn’t have to be one or the other—there was something in between. It was a novel and shocking concept—for the first time marrying quantum physics with chemistry. Pauling’s description of chemical bonding was so revolutionary, so far ahead of its time, that the editor of the journal had trouble finding an expert qualified to review it. “It was too complicated for me,” said Albert Einstein.
For this single paper, Linus Pauling was awarded the Langmuir Prize as the most outstanding chemist in the United States, elected to the National Academy of Sciences—the single highest honor that can be bestowed on a scientist by his peers—and made a full professor at Caltech, one of the most prestigious universities for science and engineering in the world. He was only 30 years old. And he was just getting started.
In 1949, Pauling published a paper in Science titled, “Sickle Cell Anemia: A Molecular Disease.” At the time, scientists knew that people with sickle-cell disease suffered crippling pain when their red blood cells changed from plump round disks to thin narrow sickles. What they didn’t know was why. Pauling showed that hemoglobin, the molecule in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the rest of the body, had a slightly different electrical charge in patients with sickle-cell disease. It was the first time that a scientist had described the molecular basis of a disease, launching the field of molecular biology.
In 1951, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “The Structure of Proteins.” Taking yet another Einsteinian leap, Pauling showed that proteins folded upon themselves in recognizable patterns. At the time of publication, scientists knew that proteins were made of a series of linked amino acids. But they hadn’t envisioned what proteins looked like in three dimensions. Pauling did. One of the protein structures Pauling described was called the alpha helix, a finding that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to solve the structure of DNA: nature’s blueprint.
In 1954, for his work on chemical bonding and protein structure, Linus Pauling won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
Pauling was also active outside the laboratory. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Linus Pauling became one of the world’s most recognizable peace activists. He opposed the creation of the atomic bomb and forced government officials to admit that nuclear radiation damaged human DNA. His efforts were rewarded with the first nuclear test ban treaty. They were also rewarded with his second Nobel Prize, this time for peace. Linus Pauling had become the first (and so far only) person in history to win two unshared Nobel Prizes. In 1961, Pauling appeared on the cover of Time magazine, hailed as one of the greatest scientists who had ever lived.
Then, in the mid-1960s, Linus Pauling fell off an intellectual cliff.
—
TO THOSE WHO KNEW HIM, Pauling’s lack of rigor wasn’t surprising. It had first appeared in his science.
In 1953, Pauling published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences titled “A Proposed Structure for the Nucleic Acids.” Pauling claimed that DNA was a triple helix. (Within a year, Watson and Crick proposed their now famous double-helix model.) It was the single greatest scientific error of his career. And his colleagues never let him forget it. Whereas Pauling had spent decades considering the structure of proteins, he had spent only a few months on the structure of DNA. His wife, Ava Helen, later remarked, “If that was such an important problem, why didn’t you work harder on it?” James Watson was less kind, remembering his surprise “that a giant had forgotten elementary college chemistry.” “If a student had made a similar mistake,” said Watson, “he would be thought unfit to benefit from Caltech’s chemistry department,” where Pauling was a professor.
But Linus Pauling’s full descent into the abyss began on a single day in March 1966, when he was 65 years old. Pauling was in New York City where he had just accepted the Carl Neuberg Medal for his scientific achievements. During his talk, Pauling said that he wished only that he could live another 25 years so he could see how certain scientific investigations were proceeding. Pauling later wrote, “On my return to California, I received a letter from a biochemist, Irwin Stone, who had been at the talk. He wrote that if I followed his recommendation of taking 3,000 milligrams of v
itamin C, I would live not only 25 years longer, but probably more.”
Pauling followed Stone’s advice, taking 10, then 20, then 300 times the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C, eventually 18,000 milligrams a day. It worked. Pauling said that he felt livelier, healthier, and better than ever before. No longer did he have to suffer the debilitating colds that had plagued him for years. Convinced that he had stumbled upon the fountain of youth, Linus Pauling, with the weight of two Nobel Prizes behind him, became the nation’s leading advocate for megavitamins. Based on his limited personal experience, Pauling recommended megavitamins and various dietary supplements for mental illness, hepatitis, polio, tuberculosis, meningitis, warts, strokes, ulcers, typhoid fever, dysentery, leprosy, fractures, altitude sickness, radiation poisoning, snakebites, stress, rabies, and virtually every other disease known to man. Now a zealot for a cause, Linus Pauling would later ignore study after study showing that he was wrong. Clearly and spectacularly wrong.
—
THE MEETING BETWEEN Linus Pauling and Irwin Stone was a watershed moment in the history of the vitamin and supplement craze in the United States—made all the more remarkable by the contrast between the two men. Pauling was the product of a classical education, well grounded in the fields of chemistry and physics. Stone, who was generously described by Pauling as a “biochemist,” had studied chemistry for two years in college before receiving an honorary degree from the Los Angeles College of Chiropractic and a bogus Ph.D. from Donsbach University, a nonaccredited correspondence school in California. Pauling had succeeded in unlocking some of nature’s best kept secrets because he was dogged in his devotion to formal proofs—the kind of proofs that result in publications in major scientific journals and the kind of proofs that win Nobel Prizes. Stone had never received a valid scientific credential, never published a paper in a medical or scientific journal, and had graduated from a program in Los Angeles that taught that all human diseases were the result of misaligned spines. Yet Pauling accepted Stone’s revelations uncritically.
Pandora's Lab Page 17