1422 Rachel Carson's Silent Millions

Following a link to Scientist Cards which I saw on a librarian's site, I was disappointed to find that Rachel Carson was one of only two women represented.

Rachel Carson is sometimes described as the mother of the environmental movement. "The idea for her most famous book, Silent Spring, emerged, and she began writing it in 1957. It was published in 1962, and influenced President Kennedy, who had read it, to call for testing of the chemicals mentioned in the book. Carson has been called the mother of the modern environmental movement." Source

JunkScience reports on her faulty reporting of another scientist's work. "Rachel Carson sounded the initial alarm against DDT, but represented the science of DDT erroneously in her 1962 book Silent Spring. Carson wrote "Dr. [James] DeWitt's now classic experiments [on quail and pheasants] have now established the fact that exposure to DDT, even when doing no observable harm to the birds, may seriously affect reproduction. Quail into whose diet DDT was introduced throughout the breeding season survived and even produced normal numbers of fertile eggs. But few of the eggs hatched." DeWitt's 1956 article (in Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry) actually yielded a very different conclusion. Quail were fed 200 parts per million of DDT in all of their food throughout the breeding season. DeWitt reports that 80% of their eggs hatched, compared with the "control" birds which hatched 83.9% of their eggs. Carson also omitted mention of DeWitt's report that "control" pheasants hatched only 57 percent of their eggs, while those that were fed high levels of DDT in all of their food for an entire year hatched more than 80% of their eggs.

In 1972 the EPA banned the use of DDT. No one has ever died from the use of DDT, but millions of Africans die of malaria because of this woman and her legacy. She has brought about the death of more Africans than the infamous Arab and European slave trade and the middle passage. "A pandemic is slaughtering millions, mostly children and pregnant women -- one child every 15 seconds; 3 million people annually; and over 100 million people since 1972 --but there are no protestors clogging the streets or media stories about this tragedy. These deaths can be laid at the doorstep of author Rachel's Carson. Her 1962 bestselling book Silent Spring detailed the alleged "dangers" of the pesticide DDT, which had practically eliminated malaria. Within ten years, the environmentalist movement had convinced the powers that be to outlaw DDT. Denied the use of this cheap, safe and effective pesticide, millions of people -- mostly poor Africans -- have died due to the environmentalist dogma propounded by Carson's book. Her coterie of admirers at the U.N. and environmental groups such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund and the Environmental Defense Fund have managed to bring malaria and typhus back to sub-Saharan Africa with a vengeance." Lisa Makson

Surely, there is at least one more female scientist out there worthy of the honor of being on this silly website.