Arthur Galston
From: Sidel, Mark <mark-sidel@uiowa.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Date: Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 6:41 AM
Dear colleagues,
Arthur Galston's obituary is in the NY Times today, reprinted below. Professor Galston did much to alert the world to the dangers of chemical and biological weapons in Vietnam and beyond, and made among the earliest visits by any American scientist to both Hanoi and Beijing, both in about 1970.
On a personal note, Professor Galston was responsible for my being able to visit China during the Cultural Revolution, beginning in 1972, and thus in a sense for much of my very happy engagement with China and Vietnam in the decades since.
Mark Sidel
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Arthur Galston, Agent Orange Researcher, Is Dead at 88
By Jeremy Pearce
Published: June 23, 2008
Arthur W. Galston, a Yale plant biologist who did early research that helped
lead to the herbicide Agent Orange, then helped raise awareness of the
military’s use of it in Vietnam in the 1960s and its devastating effects on
river ecosystems, died on June 15 in Hamden, Conn. He was 88.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his family said.
In letters, academic papers, broadcasts and seminars, Dr. Galston described the
environmental damage wrought by Agent Orange and traveled to South Vietnam to
monitor its impact. >From 1962 to 1970, American troops released an estimated 20
million gallons of the chemical defoliant to destroy crops and expose Viet Cong
positions and routes of movement.
Dr. Galston asserted that harm to trees and plant species could continue for an
untold period, and perhaps for decades. He pointed out that spraying Agent
Orange on riverbank mangroves in Vietnam was eliminating “one of the most
important ecological niches for the completion of the life cycle of certain
shellfish and migratory fish.”
Then, in 1970, with Matthew S. Meselson of Harvard and others, he made a case
that Agent Orange presented a potential risk to humans. The scientists lobbied
the Department of Defense to conduct toxicological studies, which found that
compounds in Agent Orange could be linked to birth defects in laboratory rats.
The revelation led President Richard M. Nixon to order an immediate halt of
spraying.
In later years, Dr. Galston tied his activism to his own early research. In the
1940s, at the University of Illinois, he had experimented with a plant growth
regulator, triiodobenzoic acid, and found that it could induce soybeans to
flower and grow more rapidly. But if applied in excess, he noted, the compound
would cause the plant to catastrophically shed its leaves.
A colleague, Ian Sussex, a senior research scientist at Yale, said others used
Dr. Galston’s findings in the development of the more powerful defoliant, Agent
Orange, named for the orange stripe painted around steel drums that contained
it. The chemical, produced by Dow, Monsanto and other companies, is now known to
have contained dioxins, long-lived compounds associated with cancers, birth
defects and learning disabilities.
In the 1980s, Dr. Galston helped introduce popular courses in bioethics for
undergraduates at Yale and in the 1990s was instrumental in founding the
Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at the university. He explored the risks
and rewards of genetically modified plants and crops, pesticides, stem-cell
research, cloning and other issues as co-editor of two textbooks, “New
Dimensions in Bioethics” (2000) and “Expanding Horizons in Bioethics” (2005).
In other important work in plant physiology, Dr. Galston experimented with the
nutrient riboflavin and its role in enabling plants to absorb blue light, making
a connection that he advanced and published in 1950 in the journal Science. He
also wrote a book, “The Life of the Green Plant” (1961).
Arthur William Galston was born in Brooklyn. He graduated from Cornell and
earned his doctorate in botany from Illinois in 1943.
After teaching at the California Institute of Technology, he moved to Yale in
1955 as a professor of plant physiology. At Yale, he was chairman of the
department of botany in the 1960s and chairman of the department of biology in
the 1980s. Dr. Galston was also a former director of the division of biological
sciences at Yale. He retired in 1990 as a professor of botany emeritus.
Dr. Galston is survived by his wife of 66 years, Dale. He is also survived by a
son, William, of Bethesda, Md.; a daughter, Beth, of Carlisle, Mass.; and a
grandson.
In 2003, Dr. Galston reconsidered the arc of his research.
“You know,” he said, “nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in
benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be
turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends.”
He concluded: “That’s not the fault of science.”
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From: Diane Fox <DNFOX@holycross.edu>
Reply-To: Vietnam Studies Group <vsg@u.washington.edu>
To: vsg@u.washington.edu
Date: Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 7:33 AM
Thank you, Mark. I would have missed this. Arthur Galston was important to many of us who work on the effects of chemicals used during the war, and generous with his time and knowledge.
There is a tape of one of his lectures on Agent Orange to his bioethics class at Yale, made in perhaps 2003 or 2004. The lighting in the room was not good, but students have found his talk thought provoking. If anyone would like a cd of the tape, I would be happy to send you one.
Arthur Galston's insistence on both scientific accuracy and ethical action is an inspiration.
Diane
>>> "Sidel, Mark" <mark-sidel@uiowa.edu> 6/23/2008 8:41 AM >>>
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