Chapter Two 



DDT is Born 



Unwepf, Unhanored, and Unsung 



D 



ESTINED to live a life of virtual obscur- 

 ity and to die unaware that he held within his grasp the key 

 to fame and fortune — that was the fate of Othmar Zeidler. 

 For almost seventy years, while millions of people on the face 

 of the earth died in agony from the bites of lice, flies, fleas, 

 mosquitoes, and other insects, the chemical formula of a 

 white, crystalline substance that could have saved these lives 

 was available to anyone who had the curiosity to look for it. 

 But no one bothered to thumb through the dusty volume of 

 the Berichte der Chemischen Gezellschaft — The Proceedings 

 of the German Chemical Society — for the year 1874, and to 

 read the six obscure lines of type that described the prepara- 

 tion of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane — DDT to you — by 

 Othmar Zeidler, a young chemistry s^dent^t Strasbourg, 

 Germany. 



After all, Zeidler himself had little interest in what he 

 had done. Like thousands of other chemistry students who 

 have gone through the ordeal known as "working for a de- 

 gree," Zeidler had to prepare a thesis, an uninspiring task at 

 which a student slaves away in a routine manner until he ac- 

 cumulates enough data to "write-up" and submit to his pro- 

 fessors, who, feeling that the poor student has been punished 



30 



