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Forty Years after Silent Spring I
read recently in the Smithsonian magazine that Silent Spring was published in September 1962. Author Rachel Carson’s book described the environmental damages of DDT, chlordane, and other pesticides and herbicides. Environmentalism in the United States had a long, previous history, but this detailed report had an enormous impact, catalyzing public and governmental concern about the effects of anthropogenic chemical substances on the natural world and human health. The impact of Silent Spring was among the political and social forces that led the Nixon administration in 1970 to establish the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Its first director, William Ruckelshaus, upon being appointed, commented, “I think that enforcement is a very important function of this new agency. Obviously, if we are to make progress in pollution abatement, we must have a firm enforcement policy at the federal level.” As a result of further studies, DDT was banned in the United States in 1973, and a forest of regulations has grown in the ensuing years governing the manufacture, application, and allowable residues of other insecticides in agricultural products and environmental media. Parallel developments ensued in Europe. In 1996, the Food Quality Protection Act was passed, mandating a review of the safety (“a reasonable certainty of no harm”) of roughly 9000 different chemicals over the next decade. I write about the above events because they have been a major force in the discipline of analytical chemistry, and because it is appropriate for us to acknowledge the challenges and opportunities that Silent Spring produced. Nearly every area of analytical methodology has felt this challenge and has responded by advancing its capacity to determine pesticides (and rodenticides, fungicides, and herbicides) in water and soils, in agricultural raw materials and food products, and in the tissues of plants and animals. These are incredibly complex matrixes in which to search for a few parts per million or parts per billion of an organic molecule. A classic armamentarium of analytical measurements has been created and deployed: sampling media that concentrate water and airborne analytes, separations methods that isolate target analytes from a matrix, selective reagents that label desired analytes for an immunoassay or fluorescence or electrochemical detection, and separation methods married with MS.
Solid-phase microextraction, electrospray MS, ELISA, electron capture detectors, HPLC, CE, and analytical microchips are methods and platforms that spring up in any search for a pesticide residue analysis. These analytical methodologies have been developed in university, industry, and government laboratories; whether spurred by regulation, intellectual curiosity, or moral imperative, no single sector has shirked its responsibility for environmental monitoring. Major industrial segments have emerged that offer analytical pesticide residue services and instruments. I truly doubt that analytical chemistry would possess the trace organic analysis capacity it now enjoys had problems with pesticides never existed or been recognized. (Although is it probably likely that someone besides Carson would have stood up.) While praising the environmental movements in our societies, I have to point out that the coin has another side. I believe that too many environmentalists are sadly lacking in respect and regard for human life and the economic benefits that come with the chemical control of insects. I have read that DDT has saved 25 million lives (World Health Organization estimate). Many of these benefits come from the control of our ubiquitous enemy, the mosquito, whose depredations, especially malaria, far, far exceed the damage inflicted by any contemporary terrorist organization. The health benefits of insect control cannot be ignored. Although the return of DDT cannot in good conscience be advocated, what can be pressed, and what is being sought by the chemical industry, are pesticides that combine the ideal attributes of nonpersistence and selectivity. Rachel Carson, who died in 1964, did not advocate the elimination of pesticides; neither do I, nor should any person who understands the dual merits of protecting humanity against insect-borne disease and from further environmental degradation. This is indeed the mandate of the EPA, which I applaud, as I do Rachel Carson on the anniversary of her book.
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