Silent Spring: Chapters 14–17

Dr. W. C. Hueper of the National Cancer Institute, a foremost authority on environmental cancer, has suggested that congenital cancers and cancers in infants may be related to the action of cancer-producing agents to which the mother has been exposed during pregnancy and which penetrate the placenta to act on the rapidly developing fetal tissues.

In Cordoba Province in Argentina, however, chronic arsenic poisoning, accompanied by arsenical skin cancers, is endemic because of the contamination of drinking water derived from rock formations containing arsenic.

Deer inhabiting nearby forests sometimes had abnormal pigment spots and precancerous warts. One had a definitely cancerous lesion.

There is, however, one presently known exception to the fact that a long period of latency is common to most malignancies.

After the third use of the aerosol new symptoms developed: fever, pains in the joints and general malaise, acute phlebitis in one leg.

What happens in a cell to change its orderly multiplication into the wild and uncontrolled proliferation of cancer?

Warburg has devoted a lifetime of study to the complex processes of oxidation within the cell.

Even therapeutic measures have the important result not only of curing the patient but of reducing the foci of infection.

The long promised “breakthrough,” when or if it comes, cannot be expected to be a panacea for all types of malignancy.

The fecundity of many forms of life is almost beyond our power to imagine, though now and then we have suggestive glimpses.

It was evident that this summer of 1957 had brought the most extensive and spectacular infestation of spider mites in history.

The scene as described was a macabre picture — something that might have been created by a surrealist brush.

Nearly half a century ago, a professor of entomology at Washington State College, A. L. Melander, asked the now purely rhetorical question, “Can insects become resistant to sprays?”

Less serious in terms of human health, but vexatious as man measures economic values, is the fact that salt-marsh mosquitoes in Florida also are showing resistance.

Here and there in California fields of young alfalfa are being sprayed with a substance as deadly as any insecticide for the destructive alfalfa caterpillar — a solution containing a virus obtained from the bodies of caterpillars that have died because of infection with this exceedingly virulent disease.