Once Kennedy became president, wanted to move in when Kisty asked me would I be – George Kistiakowsky, who was... he had been the head of the Scientific Advisory Committee under Eisenhower and was still on the committee about six months after Kennedy became President – said would I want to work with biological weapons? They wanted someone. Of course I said yes because, you know, it might let me, in a quiet way, influence policy. I think everyone wanted to go to Washington, hoped that the Government would act more effectively and sensibly and, you know, in this case is don't use this sort of weapon. So I've written about it in Avoid Boring People. And it was fun having, you know... I always said a White House pass to get in and...
[Q] Did you have an influence?
No. Well, yes, not in ways that I consider probably I made a mistake and partially both Paul Doty and I got put on the committee to investigate Rachel Carson. That's the way it was almost phrased. When Silent Spring was written, the President apparently... well, certainly Jerry Wiesner, Science Advisor, wrote the... read the sort of advance material which appeared in The New Yorker, and somehow Jerry thought that, you know, if there really was going to... all the songbirds were going to be killed, this was worth discussing and were the pesticides in the food chain, could they harm human beings as well as birds? And so I was put on this committee and most of them who were there sort of took the view, yes, we had a problem and there would have to be regulation.
And the Department of Agriculture fought it. Industry which was producing and making a lot of money from pesticides, they didn't want any regulations, but we came out and said there's enough evidence that the food chain may be threatened. And we didn't say what the regulation was but I think we urged that there be rules and, you know, DDT effectively became banned. And when I say, you know, now it wasn't clear that DDT has ever hurt one person and that, you know, it might – if it were used in Africa – it might be preventing, inside homes, a lot of malaria, so it was a one-sided approach. On the other hand we knew that the approach of the chemical industry, Monsanto and these large makers of it, was pretty vicious. You know, they tried to stop the report and but Kennedy insisted it came out so that was...
[Q] And did it have teeth in the sense that it would...?
Oh, it did finally, yes. I mean, the organic phosphates, the deodorants, the odorants, which clearly were more toxic to animals that DDT was, their use was severely curtailed.
