He Didn’t Know It Was Loaded: He Didn’t Know It Was Loaded

Some nine years ago, a Swiss chemist named Paul Müller was busy in a laboratory in Basel, looking for a drug to protect plants against insects. Trying one combination of chemicals after another, he finally found one that killed flies. He took some of the stuff home, and discovered that it killed mosquitoes too. Dr. Mller’s compound was dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane—or DDT.*

Last week Dr. Müller, no medical man, was awarded the 1948 Nobel Prize in medicine. Said he: “It came as a surprise to me that DDT proved so useful in the fight against diseases in human beings.”

Despite Dr. Müller’s surprise, DDT’s place in preventive medicine is secure. It kills the mosquitoes that carry malaria, the flies that carry cholera, the lice that carry typhus, the fleas that carry the plague, the sand flies that carry kalaazar and other tropical diseases. Because of DDT, the tropics are becoming safer places to live; because of it typhus was no serious threat in World War II.

Next month in Stockholm, Dr. Müller, now 49, and the father of three, will receive the prize money (159,772 Swedish crowns—about $44,000).

*First synthesized by a German chemist in 1874, but not put to practical use.