Silent Spring: Chapters 10–13

A group of Long Island citizens led by the world-famous ornithologist Robert Cushman Murphy had sought a court injunction to prevent the 1957 spraying.

Denied a preliminary injunction, the protesting citizens had to suffer the prescribed drenching with DDT, but thereafter persisted in efforts to obtain a permanent injunction.

“Up to 1953 I had regarded as gospel everything that emanated from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the agricultural colleges,” one of them remarked bitterly.

It is an outstanding example of an ill-conceived, badly executed, and thoroughly detrimental experiment in the mass control of insects, an experiment so expensive in dollars, in destruction of animal life, and in loss of public confidence in the Agriculture Department that it is incomprehensible that any funds should still be devoted to it.

Although we are warned that some of these will dissolve varnish, paint, and synthetic fabrics, we are presumably to infer that the human skin is impervious to chemicals.

Every hardware store, garden-supply shop, and supermarket has rows of insecticides for every conceivable horticultural situation.

Those who fail to make wide use of this array of lethal sprays and dusts are by implication remiss, for almost every newspaper’s garden page and the majority of the gardening magazines take their use for granted.

Examination of a biopsy specimen of fat showed an accumulation of 23 parts per million of DDT.

According to a Food and Drug official, only an infinitesimal part of the crop products moving in interstate commerce — far less than 1 per cent — can be checked with existing facilities, and this is not enough to have statistical significance.

Now our major concern is no longer with the disease organisms that once were omnipresent; sanitation, better living conditions, and new drugs have given us a high degree of control over infectious disease.

“A change at one point, in one molecule even, may reverberate throughout the entire system to initiate changes in seemingly unrelated organs and tissues,” says a recent summary of the present status of medical research.

Their symptoms ranged from impairment of memory to schizophrenic and depressive reactions.

Some of the defects and malformations in tomorrow’s children, grimly anticipated by the Office of Vital Statistics, will almost certainly be caused by these chemicals that permeate our outer and inner worlds.

Probably as an effect of such storage in the sex organs, atrophy of the testes has been observed in experimental mammals.

Experiments show that the motility of bull sperm is decreased by dinitrophenol, which interferes with the energy-coupling mechanism with inevitable loss of energy.