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BRIDGEPORT
— Arthur W. Galston did
not invent Agent Orange.
He didn't even get
credit for its model, a defoliant he developed as a University
of Illinois grad student in 1943 before he rushed off to war without
getting a patent.
Yet four decades after
the toxic compound began ravaging plants, and then people, Galston
speaks about the topic like a man out to make amends.
"I feel this responsibility,"
Galston, who lives in Orange, said recently during a lecture at
Housatonic Community College art
gallery.
At the HCC art gallery,
surrounded by a black-and-white photo exhibit depicting people
poisoned by Agent Orange, Galston urged those in the small audience
planning careers in science to know that anything they do could
some day be used in a harmful way.
"Look at me --
I was a botanist," said Galston. "I inadvertently found
something which, further developed, was used as an instrument
of war."
All these years later,
Galston, 85, a scientist and professor emeritus at Yale University,
teaches bio-ethics, a discipline that examines the social and
ethical consequences of scientific research.
His lecture drew people new to the topic as well as people fighting
to get reparations for the victims of Agent Orange, a chemical
defoliant used to clear the jungle during World War II and the
Vietnam War.
It was later blamed
for cancer and a host of other ailments.
"I never knew,"
said Katrina Haravata, 19, a Housatonic student originally from
the Philippines, who came to hear Galston after her curiosity
was sparked by the photo exhibit.
Galston told her Agent
Orange was named after the orange stripe painted around the 55-gallon
drums used to store the chemical.
Also attending were
Hau Nguyen and Tuan Le, journalists from a Vietnam news agency;
Thu Nguyen, a Vietnamese national who suspects family members
were contaminated with Agent Orange; and Constantine Kokkoris,
an attorney representing Vietnamese individuals suing the Dow
Chemical Co. and others over Agent Orange.
The case was dismissed
in a Brooklyn, N.Y., federal court in March and is now being appealed.
Galston is sympathetic but questions whether they can prove their
case in court.
"I will do everything
I can to help, but it's a tough job. It's not going to be easy
to convince a court of law," he said.
Although Vietnamese
scientists have good statistical data to show people in villages
that were sprayed with Agent Orange have much higher rates of
cancer and malformed babies, the scientific data to confirm that
Agent Orange was the cause are scarce.
"You cannot experiment
on humans," he said.
Agent Orange got its
start as a defoliant during World War II when scientists discovered
they could regulate the growth of plants through the infusion
of various chemicals and hormones. The military was out to get
rid of dense forests that often shielded the enemy.
Galston, a graduate
student working on a doctorate at the University of Illinois,
wasn't trying to kill plants, just hasten the growth of soybeans
in Illinois' short summers.
He was successful in
finding a compound that produced flowering two weeks earlier.
But he discovered if he used too high a concentration, it also
made the leaves fall off as he noted in his thesis before heading
off to serve in World War II.
He returned to find
that someone else had read his work and had the idea patented.
His compound and others were the basis for Agent Orange.
By the time the Vietnam
War arrived, it was ready for use. Millions of gallons were sprayed
over Vietnam from 1961 to 1970, exposing the Ho Chi Minh trail
and other enemy passageways and causing a tremendous amount of
ecological damage.
Valuable teak trees
and mangrove swamps along the estuaries of the delta south of
Saigon were stripped and remain so to this day.
Once aware of the ecological
damage the chemical was causing, Galston and other scientists
went to Vietnam.
They began to wonder
about the effects on people and animals. When they returned, a
committee was formed to study the impact of the spraying.
A November 1967 study
Galstonled was unable to come to firm conclusions about Agent
Orange but advised its continued use might "be harmful"
and have unforeseen consequences.
The spraying was stopped
in 1970 after Galston and others successfully appealed to the
Nixon administration.
"That was an important
victory," he said, adding that the war continued until 1975,
and the decision to stop using Agent Orange "probably averted
a good deal of damage."
Still, damage has run
into the billions. To this day, the United States has not spent
$1 in aid to restore any of the affected areas, Galston said.
"I consider it
a matter of conscience that our wealthy country, having produced
so much damage, should take some action," he said.
In 1990, Galston helped
to organize a Bioethics Project at Yale and is a member of the
Society for Social Responsibility in Science. He has had more
than 300 scientific articles published.
"Agent Orange: Collateral
Damage in Vietnam," a photographic exhibit
by Magnum photographer Philip Jones
Griffith, runs through Jan. 13 in the Housatonic
Museum of Art.
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