At What Cost?

Jeremy Barnes

Karl von Frisch

The visit of Karl von Frisch and his wife, Margarete, to the United States for two months in 1949 as guests of a number of Ivy League schools, proved to be a journey of mutual admiration. Karl gave a series of talks, including his discovery of the language of the bee dances, and he was by all accounts a superb speaker. He in turn, was impressed by America’s abundance, especially in the light of the dark backdrop of post-war recovery in Austria and Germany, and the sense of progress and optimism exuded by the people. According to his biographer, Tania Munz, writing in The Dancing Bees, Karl saw a washing machine for the first time, and “a machine that could be filled in the evening with ground coffee and water and then set to begin brewing early in the morning. When the coffee finished dripping into the carafe the device doubled as an alarm clock and woke its lucky owners to the smell of fresh coffee.”

Certainly there was a prevailing sense in America that scientific advances had not only won the war against the Axis powers and Japan, but were improving exponentially the daily lives of its citizens. With few exceptions, that optimism suppressed any thought of the risks and costs that came with such advances, and when concerns were expressed, many industries mobilized aggressively, and often dishonestly, to counter them.

I offer three stories as evidence, the first of which is that of DDT. Developed in 1939 and initially used during World War II to clear malaria-causing insects from South Pacific islands for American soldiers, DDT was effective in that it killed hundreds of different types of insects rather than targeting only one or two. In 1948, the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to a Swiss scientist, Paul Müller, “for his discovery of the high efficiency of DDT as a contact poison against several arthropods.”

Meanwhile Rachel Carson, a former marine biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, received a letter from a friend who was concerned about the numbers of birds dying on Cape Cod as a result of DDT spraying. When her investigative articles were rejected by a number of magazines, she spent four years writing the book that would become Silent Spring, detailing the process by which DDT entered the food chain and led to cancer and genetic damage. She ended with an appeal for further study before making any decisions with potential environmental impacts.

The book was first published 50 years ago and serialized in The New Yorker in 1962, initiating calls from readers for governmental action. In response, the pesticide manufacturing companies devoted three million dollars (in today’s money) to discredit Carson, an attack spearhead by E. Bruce Harrison, who will feature in the third story. An attempt to sue the publisher to stop publication of the book failed. One executive for the American Cyanamid Company complained that “if man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” Monsanto produced a parody of Silent Spring titled “A Desolate Year,” claiming that disease and famine would run amok in a world where pesticides had been banned. In a 1963 editorial entitled “The Myth of the ‘Pesticide Menace’”, published in The Saturday Evening Post, a former science editor, Edwin Diamond, raised rhetorical questions such as why “an industrialist or a scientist… would poison our food and water — the same food and water he himself eats and drinks?”

Many of the attacks, we now know, came from biostitutes – scientists who were rewarded handsomely by the chemical companies to write occasional articles casting doubt on Rachel herself and her work. Her integrity and her sanity were questioned; she was called ‘radical, unscientific, disloyal and hysterical.’ In Time, for example, her argument was called ‘unfair, one-sided and hysterically overemphatic,’ and it was claimed she had a ‘mystical attachment to the balance of nature.’ Some even questioned why she, an unmarried woman, would be concerned about genetics! The campaign against the book had an unintended effect: sales had reached one million by the time she died.

Eminent scientists rose to her defense and President Kennedy ordered the President’s Science Advisory Committee to examine the issue, leading to Carson’s eventual vindication. In 1980, President Carter posthumously awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Sadly, in 1961 she had been diagnosed with malignant breast cancer which had metastasized and which she kept a secret, knowing that the companies would use it against her. Rachel died in 1964 without seeing the fruits of her actions. In 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was formed and two years later DDT was banned. And the dialogue had shifted; the question was no longer if pesticides were dangerous, but rather, which ones.

In Silent Spring, Rachel had described how DDT remained in the environment even after rainfall, a claim confirmed by a PSU research team that confirmed the presence of DDT in our soils almost 40 years after it had been banned. In 2007, samples collected from honey bee colonies affected by CCD showed 87 different pesticides found in the wax. The average was nine pesticides per sample and they ranged across the chemical spectrum of every category and type. In August of this year at EAS in Ithaca, NY, Scott McArt mentioned that 17 insecticides and 10 pesticides were found in the apple blossoms of New York orchards, 20 in California almond orchards and 35 in New England’s blueberry fields. And, he added, there is a synergy between fungicides and pesticides – the former interfere with the detoxification process as enzymes in the bee gut break down the toxins.

Rachel Carson’s research and her fears were well founded.

Second story. In 2011, a report on CBS confirmed public suspicions that for fifty years tobacco companies had known that cigarette smoke contained cancer-causing particles. This places the industry’s initial awareness at the same time as Rachel was writing Silent Spring. The CBS report focused on a study published in the September 27, 2011 issue of Nicotine & Tobacco Research, in which UCLA researchers had examined dozens of internal tobacco industry documents made public after a 1998 court case. “They knew that the cigarette smoke was radioactive (as early as 1959) and that it could potentially result in cancer, and they deliberately kept that information under wraps,” wrote the study’s author Dr. Hrayr S. Karagueuzian, professor of cardiology at UCLA’s cardiovascular research laboratory. “We show here that the industry used misleading statements to obfuscate the hazard of ionizing alpha particles to the lungs of smokers and, more importantly, banned any and all publication on tobacco smoke radioactivity.”

The radioactive particle in question – polonium-210 – is found in all commercially available cigarettes and inhaled directly into a smoker’s lungs. An independent study by the UCLA researchers found the radioactive particles could cause between 120 and 140 deaths for every 1,000 smokers over a 25-year period. “We used to think that only the chemicals in the cigarettes were causing lung cancer,” Karagueuzian said, but the research suggested these radioactive particles were targeting “hot spots” in the lungs to cause cancer.

Their study outlined how the tobacco industry was also concerned by polonium-210 and went so far as to study the potential lung damage from radiation exposure. The industry could have removed this radiation through techniques discovered decades previously but chose not to, on the grounds partly that they would be “costly and dangerous for the environment,” but mainly, according to Karagueuzian, that the tobacco industry was concerned such techniques would make the absorption of nicotine by the brain more difficult, depriving smokers of the addictive nicotine.

Indeed David Sutton, a spokesperson for Philip Morris, confirmed on ABC News that the public health community had known about this particle for some time, justifying it on the grounds that “…polonium-210 is a naturally occurring element found in the air, soil and water and therefore can be found in plants, including tobacco.” The FDA was not convinced – the resultant Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act gave it the power to remove harmful substances, with the exception of nicotine, from tobacco. It’s an old lawyer’s mantra that when losing the argument, attack the person. When Bruce Harrison labeled Rachel Carson as ‘radical, unscientific, disloyal and hysterical,’ what was he saying? That it was radical to put the health and well-being of the soil, water, air and all life ahead of a company’s bottom line? That her methods were unscientific because they conflicted with the results of company-employed scientists who were being well paid to promote the welfare of the industry? That she was disloyal because she was incorruptible and refused to bend to industrial pressure? And she was hysterical because she was a woman!

It is comforting to know that the ultimate victory was for science and public health in the face of corporate profits, but the damage that was done in the meantime, both to the environment and to individuals worldwide, is incalculable. Nor, as the tobacco story shows, did the chemical industry learn any kind of ethical lesson from this experience.

Third story. Thirty years ago, E. Bruce Harrison, widely acknowledged as the father of environmental Public Relation, addressed a room full of business leaders in Washington, DC. At stake was a large contract with the Global Climate Coalition (GCC) which represented the oil, coal, auto, utilities, steel and rail industries; the pitch was for a communications partner who could persuade the public that global warming, as it was then labeled, was not a significant issue, even though these respective industries had done enough of their homework to know that climate change was real and escalating.

The GCC had been formed in 1989 as a forum for members to exchange information and to lobby policy makers against actions to limit fossil fuel emissions. Initially, it saw little cause for alarm – President George H.W. Bush was a former oilman and his message on climate was the same as that of the GCC: there would be no mandatory fossil fuel reductions.

But that changed in 1992. First, in June, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the international community created a framework for climate action. Secondly, in November, the presidential election brought environmentalist Al Gore to the White House as vice president. Clearly the new administration would attempt to regulate fossil fuels and the Coalition, recognizing that it needed strategic PR communications, put out a bid for a public relations contractor.

The details of that 1992 meeting are revealed in a three part documentary titled Big Oil v the World. Drawing on thousands or recently revealed documents, it was first shown on Front Line on April 22nd, 2022 – Earth Day.

Sixty years earlier, not only had Harrison spearheaded the attack on Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring but his PR company, founded in 1973, had discredited research on the toxicity of pesticides on behalf of the chemical industry and on the effects of smoking on human health on behalf of the tobacco companies.

Harrison reminded his new team that he had taken the lead in opposing tougher emissions standards for car makers by reframing the issue. The same tactics would help beat climate regulation – persuade the public that the scientific facts were not settled and that policy makers needed to consider how action on climate change would, in the GCC’s view, negatively impact American jobs, trade and prices. The strategy of fear-based misinformation was implemented through an extensive media campaign, everything from placing quotes and pitching opinion pieces to direct contacts with journalists. “A lot of reporters were assigned to write stories,” one of the team members later explained, “and they were struggling with the complexity of the issue. So I would write backgrounders so reporters could read them and get up to speed.” And the press provided a willing platform. One of those assigned to write ‘counter perspectives that were not in the mainstream’ later said, “Journalists were actually actively looking for the contrarians. It was really feeding an appetite that was already there.”

Within a year, Harrison’s firm claimed to have secured more than 500 specific mentions in the media. The ‘scientific uncertainty’ caused some in Congress to pause on advocating new initiatives, and one of the environmental activists later wrote, “What the geniuses of the PR firms who work for these big fossil fuel companies know is that truth has nothing to do with who wins the argument. If you say something enough times, people will begin to believe it.”

In 1995, Harrison wrote that the “GCC has successfully turned the tide on press coverage of global climate change science, effectively countering the eco-catastrophe message and asserting the lack of scientific consensus on global warming.” Thus was laid the groundwork for the biggest campaign to date – opposing international efforts at Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, to negotiate emissions reductions. There was a consensus among scientists that human-caused warming was now detectable but 44% of U.S. respondents to a Gallup poll believed scientists were divided. With the political arena poisoned by public antipathy, Congress never implemented the Kyoto Accords. It was a major victory for the industry coalition.

In the same year, Harrison sold his firm and the GCC began to disintegrate as some members grew uncomfortable with its hard line. But the tactics, the playbook and the message of doubt were now embedded and would outlive their creators. Three decades on, the consequences are all around us. According to Al Gore, “it is the moral equivalent of a war crime. It is, in many ways, the most serious crime of the post-World War II era, anywhere in the world.”

How different would our world be today if we had addressed the issue openly and impartially at the outset?

If there is one statement that most typifies the opposing horns of this dilemma it is that from an executive of the American Cyanamid Company: “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” The implication is that Rachel Carson’s moderate, well-researched appeal for further study before making any decisions with potential environmental impacts was radical, irresponsible and doom-laden. Her suggestion that exercising reasonable caution with chemicals, that putting first the health and well-being of humanity and of our natural resources, would reinstate ‘the Dark Ages,’ is insulting to all those who have been damaged by their indiscriminate use. Yet, this is the power of the profit motive, this is the impact of short term quarterly performances to satisfy shareholder expectations in the absence of long term rewards. The indifference of many to our fellow creatures on this earth, human and otherwise, as well as what we will do for money, is shameful, even knowing that the truth will out eventually. As Dave Goulson writes in Silent Earth, with three million tons of pesticides going into the global environment every year, some of which are thousands of times more toxic to insects than any that existed in 1962, “(Rachel Carson) would weep to see how much worse it has become.”

Nor do we often see abusive corporations and industries held accountable, even as there are exceptions such as judicial rulings against some of the tobacco giants (a large sum levied against the companies) including Juul e-cigarettes in September, and glyphosate manufacturers (large sums in favor of individual law suits). The amounts might have been reduced on appeal but they were not overturned.

These contemptuous behaviors are significant for beekeepers, not only because of their impact on our charges but also because a honey bee community offers a stark contrast of environmentally responsible behavior. Everything in the colony is motivated by the survival of the super-organism in as strong and as healthy a form as possible, and it utilizes the surrounding resources in ways that not only facilitates healthy reproduction but in such a manner that not so much as a leaf is harmed.

And what of the two men featured in this essay? Karl von Frisch was professor of Zoology at the University of Munich when Hitler came to power in 1933. In an effort to purge government of Jews ‘and other undesirables’, and based on an abuse of science, the Nazi government required all civil servants to provide proof of their Aryan descent. In 1940, and after months of searching, the Nazi office for genealogical research found that his maternal grandmother had been of Jewish descent, even though her parents had converted to Catholicism three years before she was born, presumably to secure a better future for their family in a society that was primarily Christian. Von Frisch, a practicing Christian all of his life, was a declared ‘a Quarter Jew’ because Nazi ‘science’ was based exclusively on blood, no matter how distant, rather than on cultural heritage or religious belief, no matter how genuine.

The personal threats and trials he faced during the Second World War make for depressing reading, and he continued his research only because he convinced his connections in the Nazi hierarchy that his research on honey bees was vital for the agricultural effort needed to support the front line troops. When he visited the U.S. in 1949, he was welcomed by most as one of the ‘good’ Germans (again, a term from the times), one whose life had been devoted to science in its most pure and thorough form. As he said in one of his Ivy League lectures, “A bee’s life is like a magic well: the more you draw from it, the more it fills with water.”

And E. Bruce Harrison, who died last year, aged 88, and whose life was devoted to denying scientific authenticity? In 2003, a sub-genus of mosquito was named Bruceharrisonius. Anyone who has been locked in a small dark room with a mosquito knows just how irritating such a small critter can be.