For all his fine work at Caltech and Yale, his running of departments, encouragement of students and production of more than 300 papers on plant physiology, it was his sense of responsibility that most distinguished him. He once thought, he said, that the way to be a moral scientist was to avoid projects with bad applications. But he had changed his mind. The vital thing was to stay involved; to speak, write, testify, and make sure that research was turned not to evil, but to good.
Jun 26th 2008
From The Economist print edition
Arthur Galston, botanist, died on June 15th, aged 88
IT WAS the mangroves he noticed first, reduced to cobwebbed wraiths as far as the eye could see. The mud around them was clogged with their leaves, and the shellfish in it were dead. Then he saw the hills, once thick with teak trees, shaved bald like an old man’s skull. He could have seen worse: children with monstrous lolling heads and palsied, tiny limbs, adults with gnarled growths erupting from their bellies. But these were hidden away in the hospitals. The trees were less adept at concealment.
What had been sprayed on them was millions of gallons of a herbicide known as Agent Orange. Fixed-wing aircraft flew over the jungles of Vietnam in swarms, dumping the stuff, which then drifted over crops and into villages. The food that was destroyed might have fed 600,000 people for a year. But it was perfectly harmless to people, said America’s military men. They kept down the grass at bases with it, and the GIs hosed each other with it for fun. And there was no better strategy, at the height of the conflict in the 1960s, than to strip bare the river banks and forest trails where the Vietcong fought their war.
Arthur Galston was less sanguine. If you had asked him, on one of his visits to Vietnam in those years, whether Agent Orange was directly responsible for the sarcomas, lesions and deformities, he would have replied, like the careful scientist he was, that it was hard to make a connection solid enough to stand up in a court of law. But three things he was sure of. First, Agent Orange had caused “an ecological disaster” that might take decades to repair. Second, its use contravened the Geneva protocols against chemical and biological warfare. And third, he had a responsibility to speak, because this agent of horror was partly his child.
The birth had been accidental. As a young graduate student at the University of Illinois in 1943, he had been studying ways to make soyabeans—then a new crop plant from China—flower and set their pods earlier in the season, before the winter frosts. A mild spray with 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid brought them on nicely; but a stronger dose caused the plants to release ethylene, which digested the cell wall between leaf and stem and defoliated them.
Though Mr Galston soon had to go off to war himself, and then got sidetracked on the effort to find a new plant substitute for rubber, it did not occur to him that his discovery had military uses. It might, perhaps, be helpful to farmers. He was a botanist, who once spent a happy year in Stockholm isolating catalase from spinach leaves, and who patiently observed “rhythmic opening and closing in the dark in the plant Albizzia”. He believed in the inherent beauty and usefulness of science. On the other hand, he knew that any discovery was morally neutral. Society might apply it to good or evil ends.
As a plant physiologist, he was also aware that the life of plants was far from serene. They strained after light and water and struggled to cope with stress, of the sort that had made his soya seedlings drastically shed their leaves. They competed for food and saw off enemies. He watched oat seedlings warn each other of danger by releasing jasmonate acid, and tracked the dropping of poisoned leaves by the Sonoran brittlebush to ward off competition. But this did not mean, when the men from the chemical warfare unit at Fort Detrick started to exploit his findings in the 1950s, that he was happy to help wage war through and against plants.
The new potentised strain of his discovery appalled him, and the more so because it contained dioxin as a by-product of manufacture. The toxicity of dioxins was not then well understood, but Mr Galston had his fears from the beginning. From 1965 onwards, as the use of Agent Orange relentlessly increased in Vietnam, he lobbied both his scientific colleagues and the government to stop. Lyndon Johnson would not answer his letters; but Richard Nixon, faced with more suggestive statistics on the human cost from the Department of Defence, eventually agreed. In 1970 the spraying stopped. The ecological damage, and the cries for compensation from sick civilians and soldiers, continue to this day.
Mr Galston liked to call himself an accidental botanist: a Brooklyn boy, where barely a weed could poke between the bricks, who took agriculture at Cornell only because, with his father jobless in the Depression, he could go there free. He meant to be a doctor, with a sideline in playing jazz saxophone, but fell under the spell of a pipe-smoking botany teacher, and that was that.
History dictated that he also became an accidental bioethicist. For all his fine work at Caltech and Yale, his running of departments, encouragement of students and production of more than 300 papers on plant physiology, it was his sense of responsibility that most distinguished him. He once thought, he said, that the way to be a moral scientist was to avoid projects with bad applications. But he had changed his mind. The vital thing was to stay involved; to speak, write, testify, and make sure that research was turned not to evil, but to good. For more than 20 years he taught bioethics at Yale, a course he had started and which, by his last year, was one of the most popular in the college. His country forgot, but he did not, the mangrove ghosts.