Oct 26, 2019 09:33 PM
(This post was last modified: Oct 26, 2019 10:01 PM by C C.)
https://www.science20.com/hank_campbell/..._it-242761
EXCERPTS: . . . DDT was hailed as a miracle product, Paul Hermann Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Medicine, while DFDT was left to history like many other Nazi programs. In their recent paper, the authors argue DFDT was better, but that is a bit like arguing that HD DVD was better than Blu-ray...
Things don't work that way. With a million people at risk, American scientists didn't want to do a bunch of new studies to try and validate work by Germans who came up with their product to get out of paying royalties on DDT and were only using their products in places where they believed people were "sub-human." After the war, DFDT would have cost a lot more to produce and no one wanted an "imitator" of the famous thing, especially not with the Nazi stigma when we had just sent 2,000,000 Americans over there to defeat them. They [American scientists back then] wanted DDT.
[...] Ironically, they [authors of study] jump on the chemophobia/ban-happy bandwagon about DDT (let's assume for media attention rather than they really know so little about the actual behavior of DDT) to try and boost this compound, but that tactic will limit the uptake of this alternative. We have a culture where there is distrust of climate science, vaccines (all medicine, really) and food precisely because a generation of modern scientists put both their politics and their desire for media coverage ahead of the work. When scientists "play to the crowd" knowing there is no legitimate reason to do so - like a hyperbolic "3 billion bird deaths" campaign preceded by a marketing blitz complete with hashtags and a website - it undermines trust in science across the board.
Will the same activists who spend $2 billion each year scaring us about the modern world embrace this chemical because paper authors write DFDT is "free of the DDT stigma" by being different in one letter? Not at all, the stigma is science. Activists might use this for wedge politics, the same way they raved about natural gas to oppose nuclear power - until the battle was won and then they turned on natural gas.
Nobel laureate Muller also embraced nicotine as a great insecticide and lauded the idea of a seed treatment in the future, much more efficient than broad spectrum spraying. He could only have dreamed about using biology to create resistance in food plants so only weeds would die when herbicides were used. Science finally achieved of those, and activists turned on them. Those products are neonicotinoids and GMOs.
[...Why the difference between the two might not be much...] it's been 75 years since DDT took the world by storm, and that means it's a good time to rethink these older compounds through the lens of modern chemistry, biology, and toxicology.
First, you have to ignore the sensationalism in both the paper and the press release. Calling DDT "notorious" while cooing about the "superior performance and reduced toxicity" of DFDT reads a lot more like someone fishing for Mother Jones coverage than it does a science paper.
"Müller, in his 1948 Nobel address acknowledging his discovery of DDT, argued that faster-acting DFDT should be the insecticide of the future."
No, what he actually said was it had "a somewhat faster contact-insecticidal activity than p,p’-dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane but an insufficient residual activity, in addition to which the cost is too high for widespread use."
That's not even close to what they claim. Sentences like that throw papers into doubt because it means there was little peer review fact checking of the obvious stuff, and that means there may be little peer review of the important science. The authors of this are from New York University, and they are scientists, but they write like they are instead part of the NYU Journalism Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. NYU journalists have never met a chemical in use they liked but always gush about supernatural alternatives if only Evil Corporations would get out of the way. That is not a good comparison if authors want to be taken seriously.
... Muller listed seven criteria for the ideal future insecticide:
1. Great insect toxicity.
2. Rapid onset of toxic action.
3. Little or no mammalian or plant toxicity.
4. No irritant effect and no or only a faint odour (in any case not an unpleasant one).
5. The range of action should be as wide as possible, and cover as many Arthropoda as possible.
6. Long, persistent action, i.e. good chemical stability.
7. Low price.
DDT, he noted, was not good when it came to 2, rapid action, and that is where the new paper finds their crystalline forms of DFDT are superior to what the Germans had... (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . DDT was hailed as a miracle product, Paul Hermann Müller won the 1948 Nobel Prize in Medicine, while DFDT was left to history like many other Nazi programs. In their recent paper, the authors argue DFDT was better, but that is a bit like arguing that HD DVD was better than Blu-ray...
Things don't work that way. With a million people at risk, American scientists didn't want to do a bunch of new studies to try and validate work by Germans who came up with their product to get out of paying royalties on DDT and were only using their products in places where they believed people were "sub-human." After the war, DFDT would have cost a lot more to produce and no one wanted an "imitator" of the famous thing, especially not with the Nazi stigma when we had just sent 2,000,000 Americans over there to defeat them. They [American scientists back then] wanted DDT.
[...] Ironically, they [authors of study] jump on the chemophobia/ban-happy bandwagon about DDT (let's assume for media attention rather than they really know so little about the actual behavior of DDT) to try and boost this compound, but that tactic will limit the uptake of this alternative. We have a culture where there is distrust of climate science, vaccines (all medicine, really) and food precisely because a generation of modern scientists put both their politics and their desire for media coverage ahead of the work. When scientists "play to the crowd" knowing there is no legitimate reason to do so - like a hyperbolic "3 billion bird deaths" campaign preceded by a marketing blitz complete with hashtags and a website - it undermines trust in science across the board.
Will the same activists who spend $2 billion each year scaring us about the modern world embrace this chemical because paper authors write DFDT is "free of the DDT stigma" by being different in one letter? Not at all, the stigma is science. Activists might use this for wedge politics, the same way they raved about natural gas to oppose nuclear power - until the battle was won and then they turned on natural gas.
Nobel laureate Muller also embraced nicotine as a great insecticide and lauded the idea of a seed treatment in the future, much more efficient than broad spectrum spraying. He could only have dreamed about using biology to create resistance in food plants so only weeds would die when herbicides were used. Science finally achieved of those, and activists turned on them. Those products are neonicotinoids and GMOs.
[...Why the difference between the two might not be much...] it's been 75 years since DDT took the world by storm, and that means it's a good time to rethink these older compounds through the lens of modern chemistry, biology, and toxicology.
First, you have to ignore the sensationalism in both the paper and the press release. Calling DDT "notorious" while cooing about the "superior performance and reduced toxicity" of DFDT reads a lot more like someone fishing for Mother Jones coverage than it does a science paper.
"Müller, in his 1948 Nobel address acknowledging his discovery of DDT, argued that faster-acting DFDT should be the insecticide of the future."
No, what he actually said was it had "a somewhat faster contact-insecticidal activity than p,p’-dichlorodiphenyl-trichloroethane but an insufficient residual activity, in addition to which the cost is too high for widespread use."
That's not even close to what they claim. Sentences like that throw papers into doubt because it means there was little peer review fact checking of the obvious stuff, and that means there may be little peer review of the important science. The authors of this are from New York University, and they are scientists, but they write like they are instead part of the NYU Journalism Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. NYU journalists have never met a chemical in use they liked but always gush about supernatural alternatives if only Evil Corporations would get out of the way. That is not a good comparison if authors want to be taken seriously.
... Muller listed seven criteria for the ideal future insecticide:
1. Great insect toxicity.
2. Rapid onset of toxic action.
3. Little or no mammalian or plant toxicity.
4. No irritant effect and no or only a faint odour (in any case not an unpleasant one).
5. The range of action should be as wide as possible, and cover as many Arthropoda as possible.
6. Long, persistent action, i.e. good chemical stability.
7. Low price.
DDT, he noted, was not good when it came to 2, rapid action, and that is where the new paper finds their crystalline forms of DFDT are superior to what the Germans had... (MORE - details)
