Avoid Boring People: Lessons From a Life in Science (21 page)

At that time I was technically on sabbatical leave from Harvard, intending to take up a visiting fellowship at Churchill College in Cambridge. I had not anticipated my PSAC duties when I made plans to see MRC's brand-new Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) in action. I planned to start work there with RNA phages, whose existence had been discovered the year before at Rockefeller University by Norton Zinder and his graduate student Tim Loeb. Until Loeb finished his thesis experiments, Zinder did not want to send out aliquots of his
h
phage to possible competitors. In the year that followed, several additional RNA phages were also discovered, one of which, R17, Sydney Brenner had already got possession of. Now in his lab at the LMB, I wanted to purify R17 as a first step toward studying its relatively small, single-stranded RNA molecule of likely fewer than four thousand nucleotides. They might be super messenger RNA templates for use in in vitro (cell-free) protein synthesis studies. Upon arriving in late March, I was joined by Nina Gordon, who the year before had done senior thesis research in my lab. Now she wanted to be in Europe near her Italian-born theoretical physicist boyfriend, Gino Segre, then in Geneva. Over the next two months, Nina and I were distressingly set back by contamination of our host
E. coli
bacteria by more conventional DNA phages. It was only when I got back to Harvard in early June, where I could enlist the expert hands of my graduate students, that our RNA phage research could effectively start.

While still in England I hoped to learn more about anthrax by visiting the UK's top-secret biological weapons lab at Porton Down, near Salisbury. But its anthrax program proved no more advanced than that at Fort Detrick. In 1942 the UK had conducted extensive anthrax testing on a small island off the coast of Scotland, but the program's current leader, David Henderson, was not inclined to spend any more money on a weapon that he believed could destroy the moral authority of the British government. When temporarily back in Detrick, I was briefed in greater detail about a program on rice blast, a fungal pathogen, about which enterprise I had heard when last there. While geneticists elsewhere were working to develop new rice strains resistant to rice blasts, those at Detrick concentrated on developing appropriate blast strains for destroying the rice crops of North Vietnam. Producing rice blasts in large amounts was within Detrick's capabilities, but delivering them was another matter. Helicopter delivery was deemed totally impractical, and no operational American fighter pilot had the radar capabilities necessary for night spraying missions over the Red River delta rice paddies. Later an air force officer was to fill me in on a still-secret radar-guided, terrain-hugging bomber then being evaluated near Dallas.

Likely it was only a bureaucratic snafu that had let me inside Detrick's Special Project facility, a part of the operation I would never see again. There scientists worked not for the Department of Defense but for the CIA on poisons to be used for assassinations. Among others they were keen to employ was the puffer fish toxin. Synthesizing it, however, was a chemical challenge worthy of the best organic chemists, and they had approached Harvard's Bob Woodward for help. Somewhere within this nondescript, drab building was likely stored the chemical agent that Bobby Kennedy later hoped could be slipped to Fidel Castro.

Many faculty members at Harvard who were New Frontier boosters were embarrassed when JFK's thirty-year-old brother Edward Moore (Teddy) Kennedy campaigned against the incumbent George Lodge to become the new junior senator from Massachusetts. His one year of experience as an assistant district attorney was presumptuously paltry. And Teddy's undergraduate years at Harvard were tainted by the scandal of his having sent someone else to take a language exam in his place. Though he later obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia and passed the bar in 1959, Harvard was not proud to count him as one of its alumni. Also running for senator, as an independent, was Harvard history professor Stuart Hughes, whose campaign was based largely on opposition to the nuclear weapons race. Sam Beer, Franny Beer's political scientist father, did not warm to Hughes, believing that he was impractical and unelectable and that as Democrats we should be backing someone who would strengthen JFK's support in the Senate. Soon after I was invited to see Teddy in action at a gathering Sam was holding for important Harvard colleagues at the Hotel Continental in Cambridge. That day Teddy was clearly less impressive than his appealing, fair-haired wife, Joan.

PSAC's oversight of poisons took on more humane considerations after Jerry Wiesner read Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring,
serialized by the
New Yorker
in June of 1962. Carson argued that chemical pesticides were fast spreading through the world's food chains, posing an immediate threat to the global environment. Not only were they killing off fish and songbirds, they possibly threatened human existence. With her thesis quickly generating a firestorm of public concern, JFK himself was drawn into the controversy and stated that Carson's book had led his administration to take the pesticide threat seriously. No federal agency then had a real mandate for an honest investigation of the chemicals’ ecological consequences. The obvious candidate, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), was too cozy with the agricultural chemical industry. So Jerry assigned his Life Sciences deputy, Colin MacLeod, to head up a special PSAC panel, which Paul Doty and I were asked to serve on. Meeting first on October 1, our deliberations momentarily came to a halt when the Cuban missile crisis drew PSAC's attention elsewhere. Only years later did I learn that one of the nation's contingent responses that scary week was to have jets from Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami, drop VEE-filled devices on Cuba.

Our panel dealt with two major groups of pesticides: the long-lived chlorinated hydrocarbons, of which DDT was the best-known, and the much more toxic, short-lived organic phosphates, such as Sevin. The latter originally were developed as nerve agents for military deployment but later synthesized as less toxic derivatives, such as parathion, to kill insects. The use of both pesticide groups was steadily increasing, with many insects in turn developing genetic resistance, especially to the chlorinated hydrocarbons. Because of their much greater stability, Carson had focused more attention on the chlorine-containing pesticides, pointing out ever-increasing concentrations in the fatty tissues of creatures throughout the food chain. While large amounts of DDT given to human volunteers had no short-term effects, its more toxic derivatives, such as dieldrin, might well pose public health threats. An already widely used pesticide, dieldrin was a nasty liver toxin at high doses. More worrisome, mice exposed to it at much lower levels were developing liver adenomas that conceivably might develop into malignant carcinomas. But with the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) calling these adenomas benign, the USDA blocked the invocation of the so-called Delaney amendment, which prohibited cancer-causing agents in the nation's food. If the FDA were to ban outright all chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides, however, American agriculture would have been deprived of a chemical that had become vital to its productivity. Prudence suggested that the proper course was to recommend sharp curtailment of dieldrin use until the question of its carcinogenicity was settled.

Only after a thorough review of how the USDA and FDA dealt with pesticides did our panel invite Rachel Carson to appear. Pleased at being asked, she was nevertheless perfectly even-tempered on that late January day, giving no indication of the nutty hysterical naturalist that agricultural and chemical lobbyists had portrayed her to be. The chemical giant Monsanto had distributed five thousand copies of a brochure parodying
Silent Spring
entitled “The Desolate Years,” describing a pesticide-free world devastated by famine, disease, and insects. The attack was mirrored in
Time
magazine's review of
Silent Spring
deploring Carson's oversimplification and downright inaccuracy. Two weeks after meeting with her, our panel finished a much debated first draft of our presidential report. Though it accepted as indispensable the role of pesticides in modern agriculture and public health (e.g., to control mosquitoes), most of it was devoted to dangers that pesticides posed for human beings, fish, wildlife, and the environment.

The USDA reacted to the draft with instant fury, and Secretary Orville Freeman wrote to PSAC that in its present form the report would profoundly damage U.S. agriculture. After more pages on the benefits of pesticides had been added and the full PSAC panel had approved it, the USDA then demanded that they make a full review of it before the president released it. But Jerry Wiesner held firm, refusing to add a blanket statement that the food of our nation was safe or to remove the final sentence, which paid tribute to Rachel Carson for alerting the public to the problem. To our great relief President Kennedy released the document un corrupted on May 15,1963.

By then Diana de Vegh was no longer part of Marc Raskin's attic office above PSAC in the Executive Office Building. Despite having recently purchased a house on a quiet street near Georgetown University, she had precipitously left for Paris. My Washington meals increasingly had to be taken with fellow panel members or with Leo Szilard and his wife, then living out of suitcases at the Dupont Plaza Hotel.

During the Cuban missile crisis, Leo was so terrified that war was about to break out that he left New York for Geneva via Rome, where he tried unsuccessfully to get the pope's attention. A month later, the Szilards somewhat sheepishly returned to Washington, where Leo continued to devise unorthodox schemes to reduce the probability of nuclear war. Now aboveground test blasts were again occurring, with the Soviets breaking the international moratorium soon after the Berlin Wall went up. Six months later, our bomb makers were to follow suit.

At that time, my major political concern was ever-expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Then just back in Washington were my sister, Betty, and her husband, Bob, the former CIA station chief in Cambodia. Bob's more than fifteen years of experience in the Far East had convinced him that sending more American troops to Vietnam would create a quagmire that would long haunt our nation. But he knew that many U.S. Army officials were more optimistic. In their ranch-style house, within easy commuting distance to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, I expressed my belief that our Limited War Panel had nothing to offer the American cause in Vietnam. By then I had learned that staph enterotoxin could no longer be considered merely an “incapacitating” agent. Monkeys exposed to it through their lungs promptly died. We had to assume that humans would suffer the same fate if exposed. I informed John Richardson of this fact four months later, when he came out to Bob and Betty's house following his removal as station chief in Saigon, an action taken to mean that the United States no longer supported the corrupt Diem government. Two years before, on my way to Cambodia for a family visit, I had been warned by Bob Bloom, then leading the CIA's secretly funded Asia Foundation, that any successor to Diem was likely to be even worse.

A month later I was with the “superspook,” Desmond FitzGerald, whose house I came to one mid-June evening to take his stepdaughter, a classmate of Abby Rockefeller's, to dinner. A member of the Social Register elite that helped found the CIA, Desmond knew from his experience in the Philippines that bribes, not soldiers, were generally the best way to promote American foreign policy objectives in Asia. His mind seemed elsewhere when I indicated doubt that Fort Detrick's rice blast arsenal could prevent North Vietnam from continuing to support the Viet Cong. Only twenty-five years later did I learn that Desmond had been entrusted by Bobby Kennedy with the task of assassinating Fidel Castro.

Though I attended a full Limited War Panel meeting in early May, my main PSAC role then was to lead its new panel on cotton insects. Its origin lay in a request to JFK from Arizona's Senator Carl Hayden that the federal government somehow prevent the boll weevil from spreading from Mexico into his state's highly profitable irrigated cotton fields. Pesticides already amounted to 20 percent of total production costs in southeastern states, and every year boll weevils were becoming increasingly resistant to the chlorinated hydrocarbons being used. When our panel first met in nearby Beltsville, Maryland, we were briefed about the problem as well as a possible solution. The sterilization procedures that had supposedly eliminated screwworms from selected horse-racing regions of Florida promised a theoretically ideal method of purging the cotton crop of the boll weevil. But the technique's application to weevil eradication seemed practically daunting. Producing and releasing enough sterile boll weevils to significantly reduce their population could easily cost several billion dollars.

During our subsequent tours of the cotton fields of Mississippi, Texas, California, and Mexico, the entomologists who dominated our panel believed integrated pest management approaches could save farmers from further pesticide expenditures. Our first stop was the Boll Weevil Research Laboratory at Mississippi State College in Starkville, not surprisingly located in the congressional district of the powerful Jamie Whitten. As chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Whitten was more influential in shaping agricultural research policies than the secretary of agriculture. Later as we drove toward the vast cotton fields of the still British-owned Delta and Pine cotton plantation near Greenville, the homes of the “hoe-hands” who weeded the cotton fields struck me as even more run-down than the dwellings bordering the rice paddies of Cambodia that I had visited two years earlier. Later the Delta and Pine official showing us around his vast domain remarked that his farm laborers lazily stopped hoeing every time his car passed out of sight.

On our way to the USDA cotton insect lab near Brownsville, Texas, we were lucky not to be in a convertible when our car was doused with pesticides released by a small plane flying overhead. Pesticide advertisements were ubiquitous on the large roadside billboards, where competing agrochemical companies touted the merits of their respective pesticide brews like so many aftershaves. Before I got to Texas, I had hopes that the boll worm, in some years a worse pest than the boll weevil, might be best controlled by spraying with polyhedral viruses. Similar viruses had already been used to control the spruce bud worm in Canada, but such an enterprise could not be supported here, as we found to our dismay that 85 percent of the Brownsville laboratory's budget went to salaries. A major function of most USDA regional labs was then to provide patronage jobs for friends of local congressmen. At the Boll Weevil Research Lab, for example, the chief administrative assistant was a close relative of Congressman Whitten.