Elena Conis

"In the 1940s, DDT helped the Allies win the Second World War by wiping out the insects that caused malaria, with seemingly no ill effects on humans. After the war, it was sprayed willy-nilly across fields, in dairy barns, and even in people's homes, leaving environmental and human devastation in its wake across the globe, particularly in communities of color. Thirty years later the U.S. would ban the use of DDT--only to reverse the ban in the 1990s when calls arose to bring it back to fight West Nile and malaria. What happened? How to Sell a Poison traces the surprising history of DDT in parallel to the story of a predominantly Black town poisoned by a neighboring DDT plant. Historian Elena Conis reveals new evidence that it was not the shift in public opinion following Silent Spring's publication that led to the ban so much as the behind-the-scenes political machinations of Big Business. She argues that we've been missing the lesson of this cautionary tale and the harm caused by DDT is a symptom of a larger problem: the prioritization of profits over public health. If we don't change our approach, Conis argues, we're doomed to keep making the same mistakes and putting people--particularly the most vulnerable--at risk, both by withholding technologies that could help them and by exposing them to dangerous chemicals without their consent. In an age when corporations and politicians are shaping our world behind closed doors and deliberately stoking misinformation around public health issues, from vaccines to climate change to COVID-19, we need greater transparency and a new way of communicating about science--as a discipline of discovery that's constantly evolving, rather than a finite and immutable collection of facts--in order to restore public trust and protect ourselves and our environment."--