Read Five Past Midnight in Bhopal for Free Online Page B

Hudson
    T hey looked more like Davis Cup players than laboratory researchers. Thirty-four-year-old Harry Haynes and thirty-six-year-old
     Herbert Moorefield, both vigorous and fit-looking men, belonged to a profession that was relatively new. They were doctors
     of entomology. In July 1954, Union Carbide’s management had rented an entire wing of the Boyce Thompson Institute in Yonkers
     for these two eminent experts. It had further strengthened the team by adding to it one of the most brilliant staff members
     of its South Charleston, West Virginia, research center, thirty-eight-year-old chemist Joseph Lambrech. To these three exceptionally
     gifted people the company entrusted a mission of the utmost importance: Devise a product capable of exterminating a wide range
     of parasites while adhering to prevailing standards for the protection and safety of humans and the environment. That summer,
     on the top floor of the multinational’s New York office, no one was in any doubt: the company that managed to reconcile these
     two objectives would walk away with the world pesticide market. Lambrech gave the object of his labors a code name: Experimental
     Insecticide Seven Seven. For convenience’s sake it would soon become “Sevin.”
    Going through all his predecessors’ studies with a fine-tooth comb, the chemist combined new molecules, hoping to find one
     that would kill aphids, red spiders and armyworms without leaving too many toxic residues in the vegetation and environment.
     For months on end, his entomologist colleagues tested his combinations on leaves, stems and ears of corn infested with all
     kinds of insects. In its hundreds of cages and containers, the Boyce Thompson Institute harbored an unimaginably rich zoo
     of the infinitely small. It also had acres of glass houses in which all the climates of the planet could be recreated around
     a limitless variety of plants. In large glass cases the different molecules could be tested with sprays of varying doses,
     directed from every possible angle at samples of every variety of crop. The entomologists Haynes and Moorefield would then
     deposit colonies of insects raised in their laboratories on the treated surfaces. Hour by hour they would observe their subjects’
     agony. They collected the corpses on glass slides, examined them under the microscope, and subjected the plants and soil to
     detailed analysis to find any traces of chemical pollution. Their observations would enable their chemist colleague to hone
     the production of an insecticide ever nearer to what was required.
    After three years of intense effort the team came up with a combination of a methyl derivative of carbamic acid and alpha
     naphthol, in the form of whitish crystals soluble in water. Those three years had been taken up with hundreds of experiments,
     not just on all known species of insects, but also on thousands of rats, rabbits, pigeons, fish, bees and even shrimps and
     lobsters. Finally, one evening in July 1957, the three zealots in Yonkers, together with their wives, were able to crack open
     a bottle of champagne. Although the god DDT had had to be cast down, agriculture would not remain defenseless. Sevin, born
     on the banks of the Hudson, would soon put a weapon in the hands of all the farmers of the world.

    Carbide was quick to flood America with brochures proclaiming the birth of its miracle product. There was no end to the praises
     sung to it. To underline its “low toxicity to humans,” photographs depicted Herbert Moorefield, one of the inventors of Sevin,
     in the process of tasting a few granules with all the glee of a child licking his chocolate-coated lips. According to the
     publicity, Sevin protected an infinite range of crops: cotton, wheat, lemons, bananas, pineapples, olives, cocoa, coffee,
     sunflowers, sorghum, sugar cane and rice. You could spread it on maize, alfalfa, beans, peanuts and soybeans right up until
     harvest time, with no danger of any toxic