On a Farther Shore (40 page)

It’s unclear how much Carson knew about Spock’s unusual beliefs—but Spock was a cheery and engaging correspondent who was excited at becoming acquainted with Carson and whose letters made more sense than did her private ideas. Spock was delighted when she learned that Carson’s interest in the Long Island case had grown into a book project. The two women got better acquainted by mail, and early in the summer of 1958 they spoke at length on the telephone.
Spock wrote to Carson immediately afterward to say what a pleasure it had been to talk with her and that it would never have happened if not for the DDT spraying case. “I have to reflect very often on the silver linings to the clouds in this suit,” Spock said. The trial, she confessed, had been a “terrible ordeal,” even though her own time on the witness stand hadn’t been as bad as she’d anticipated.

Spock—who also had a summer retreat in Maine—stopped in to meet Carson face-to-face in West Southport in the summer of 1958. They were by then a mutual fan club, and not long after their meeting
Carson insisted they address each other by their first names. Spock later told Carson that no matter how the Long Island lawsuit turned out, Carson’s book would almost certainly be more important. “
I can hardly wait until your book is done & published,” Spock wrote to Carson, “as I believe it’s going to make the biggest difference anything could possibly make in the spraying picture.”

Carson gave Spock periodic updates on her research.
She mentioned an interview she’d done with an official from the FDA who was plainly “exultant” over the judge’s ruling in the Long Island case. She also confided to Spock her belief that although science had gotten the pesticide question wrong with chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphates, science could ultimately solve the problem it had created.

In October 1958,
Life
magazine ran a story about the prospect of
controlling insect pests with “juvenile hormones” that would inhibit sexual maturation. Carson was already corresponding with several experts on this idea—including Edward O. Wilson at Harvard and Howard Schneiderman at Cornell, who would one day pioneer the development of genetically modified crops as head of research for the Monsanto Company. Encouraged about the prospects of developing pesticides based on hormones, the scientists believed these could theoretically be formulated to affect only targeted species—but they also urged caution.

Schneiderman said it was still unknown how “higher animals” would respond if exposed to hormones that seemed to have no obvious function outside the insect world. And getting an answer to that question would take time. Schneiderman thought it might take five or ten years to develop a safe hormone-based pesticide.
Carson told Spock she thought the article in
Life
made some exaggerated claims, but that it was “one straw that shows that the wind is beginning to veer away from chemicals as now used.” Carson also said she was amused to learn that the USDA was starting to look into such biological controls, and she wondered whether Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson’s “right hand knows what his left hand is doing.” Benson had been named as a defendant in the Long Island lawsuit.

It would be hard to overstate Carson’s labors in her effort to get a handle on the “spraying picture,” as Marjorie Spock called it. Her usual method—library research and a protracted back-and-forth shuttle of letters between herself and a long list of experts—produced a sea of paper. Carson sometimes employed a secretary to help her with the correspondence, but even so the threads of the story went in so many directions that it was dizzying. Carson filled file folders with scientific studies and reports, and kept card catalogs indexing hundreds of the latest findings.

The contamination of food and the environment by pesticides suggested similarities with the issues surrounding radioactive fallout and the explosive development of chemical products and medicines—which,
like pesticides, were promoted as safe, effective, economical, and the latest in scientific ingenuity. The marketing slogan “Better Living Through Chemistry”—widely appropriated from the DuPont Corporation’s long-standing catchphrase “Better Things for Better Living … Through Chemistry”—seemed to be everywhere. One common compound that had found its way into surprising corners of the environment was penicillin—the antibiotic whose curative powers had caused a great boom in its use.

Penicillin was first used in the United States in 1942, when some twenty-nine pounds of the drug were produced here. By 1956, the annual U.S. production of penicillin approached five hundred thousand tons. Like DDT, penicillin had multiple uses. It had wide clinical applications in the treatment of human illnesses and infections. It could be formulated in different ways—as ointments, powders, sprays, tablets, and injectable liquids—and saved tens of thousands of lives and cured millions of nonlife-threatening conditions. But there were problems. About 10 percent of the population turned out to be allergic to penicillin—either on first contact with the drug or in the course of repeated dosings. And while it wasn’t fully realized at the time, bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, and the more widely they were used the less effective they became. But new applications were being found for penicillin and other antibiotics in the control of livestock and plant diseases, and as an after-processing preservative for meats, poultry, and fish. This provided another route of human exposure to penicillin through food. A 1957 report from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration minimized the risk from antibiotic contaminants in the food supply—though it did so in a way that was not comforting:

The FDA left out DDT and other pesticide residues—but these were, of course, known food contaminants as well.
Time
magazine reported that although food contamination was supposedly regulated, there were growing amounts of “subtle new pollutants” in the American food supply that posed a danger to human health.
Time
said the food supply contained “illegal quantities” of DDT, penicillin, and hormones “either by accident or by design.” The story cited the example of milk—which was supposed to be thrown out for three days following the administration of penicillin or other antibiotics to a dairy herd. And yet penicillin turned up in milk with worrisome frequency anyway.

Early in 1958, Carson learned that
Reader’s Digest
had a story in the works that was going to be friendly to pesticides.
Carson wrote a long letter to the editor warning him of mounting scientific consensus that synthetic pesticides were unsafe. She said she felt sure that “a publication with the
Digest
’s enormous power to influence public thinking all over the country would not wish to put its seal of approval on something so potentially hazardous to public welfare.” Having been turned down by
Reader’s Digest
on numerous story proposals—including her 1945 idea for a piece on DDT—Carson was probably less interested in protecting the magazine than she was in projecting her own views on pesticides.

It worked.
Carson got an immediate answer from
Reader’s Digest
—where there had to be chagrin at being second-guessed by the esteemed Rachel Carson on an unpublished story—thanking her for her insight and assuring her that the magazine would “weigh all the facts” as it proceeded. Evidently the facts brought the piece around
to Carson’s point of view, as the story when it finally appeared in June 1959 was titled “Backfire in the War Against Insects,” and Carson thought it well done.
She wrote to the author, Robert Strother, saying as much and informing him that she was at work on a book about pesticides. Carson asked Strother—who had been flooded with letters from people with stories to tell about bad experiences with pesticides—if he might share some of the responses with her,
which he graciously agreed to do.

In the spring of 1959, the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission admitted that they had overestimated how long radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing would remain aloft in the atmosphere. Their original calculation predicted that such radioactive debris would stay high in the stratosphere for as long as seven years, during which time it would decay and disperse and gradually come back to earth as minimally radioactive fallout distributed uniformly across the globe. Now the officials couldn’t agree on how much shorter this cycle really was—but said it might be as little as two years. This meant that nuclear testing debris not only came down sooner and radioactively hotter as fallout, but it also fell over a more concentrated area. In fact, with respect to at least one radionuclide of special concern—strontium 90—the most contaminated area on earth was the United States. Given the steady pace of testing in the western part of the country, and the normal patterns of weather movement from west to east, a reasonable person could have wondered if a lot of radioactive debris stayed in the air for more than a few days, let alone a few years.

Strontium 90, which has chemical properties similar to calcium, is absorbed into bone tissue and had been linked to leukemia. Government officials were getting worried that even though the immediate risks to humans from nuclear testing appeared slight, there might be long-term consequences. And there were a number of
radionuclides of concern, including iodine 131, which, like ordinary iodine, is readily stored in the thyroid gland. All of these substances had entered the human food supply—mostly in milk. Wherever these isotopes ended up in the body, they bombarded the surrounding tissue with radiation.

Some were longer lived than others. Iodine 131 has a half-life of just eight days—that is, the amount of radioactivity it emits is reduced by 50 percent every eight days, continuously. But its supply was also being replenished every time another bomb sent a radioactive cloud into the sky. Strontium 90 has a half-life of more than twenty-eight years and so it came down in fallout with nearly the same level of radioactivity as it acquired in the explosion and stayed that way for a long time. Scientists believed exposure to such continuous low-level radiation would lead to an increased incidence of cancer—and that over much longer periods, subtle genetic mutations induced by radiation would cause a steady increase in birth defects.

In 1958, a group called the Greater St. Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information committed itself to a project that would measure the effects of exposure to radiation—by collecting baby teeth. Like calcium, strontium 90 also concentrates in teeth, and the plan was to compile data on strontium 90 levels in the baby teeth of children growing up during the period of atmospheric testing so it could be correlated with health issues many years after.
A half century later, in 2010, a preliminary study of men who died of cancer in middle age showed that their baby teeth had contained more than twice the amount of strontium 90 as had been measured in men from the same area who were still alive.

The government took the position that radiation in fallout was far below the normal background level of radiation from natural sources—cosmic radiation and radioactive elements in the earth’s crust—and that it was difficult to demonstrate any direct effects from such scant exposure. Still, the government admitted that the available evidence suggested that
any amount
of radiation might be harmful and
that it was “
virtually certain that genetic effects can be produced by even the lowest doses. These effects in the children of exposed parents and all future generations may be of many kinds, ranging from minor defects too small to be noticed to severe disease and death.”

In 1958, California Institute of Technology chemistry professor Linus Pauling, who had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work on the chemical bond and the nature of complex biological structures—and who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962 for his campaign against nuclear warfare—
presented the United Nations with a petition signed by more than eleven thousand scientists from forty-nine countries asking for an end to nuclear weapons testing. The scientists pointed out that radiation from natural sources regularly
does
cause genetic mutations in human beings, some of which lead to birth defects. Adding even a small amount of extra radioactive exposure could only compound this.

One radionuclide that especially worried Pauling was carbon 14, which has a half-life of eight thousand years and would therefore work its slow changes on the human genome over the course of many millennia. Pauling and the cosigners of the petition told the United Nations that only an immediate halt to nuclear testing could minimize whatever damage had already been done: “
Each nuclear bomb test spreads an added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world. Each added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of seriously defective children that will be born in future generations.”

In March 1958, the Soviet Union declared a halt to further atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons—on the condition that the Western nuclear powers do the same. A few months later, President Eisenhower announced that the United States would impose its own one-year moratorium. A year after that, the United States extended its moratorium for another twelve months. As the second moratorium period
came to a conclusion, Eisenhower told the Soviets that the United States would again feel free to resume testing at its discretion—but would not do so without advance notice. There the matter rested.