A Lost Chapter in the Early History of DDT: The Development of Anti-Typhus Technologies by the Rockefeller Foundation's Louse Laboratory, 1942-1944

On 5 December 1943, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, commander of the Allied forces in North Africa and Italy, sent an urgent secret radiogram to Washington regarding the War Department's refusal to ship to North Africa a large quantity of a secret new chemical for the control of louse-borne typhus. Arguing that "typhus fever is [an] actual threat to military personnel in Italy at this time," he stated that "seventeen tons of [DDT] concentrate are total requirements for this theater for Civil and Military [authorities]." Then he demanded "reconsideration of [Washington's] decision to deny shipment of equivalent 10 tons concentrate and that [instead the] shipment be made on highest priority," and emphasized the seriousness of the situation by reminding his superiors that the "season of [typhus] prevalence commences early in January."

Impressed by its commanding general's argument, the department immediately reversed its position, and speeded shipments of the precious DDT for use in the Mediterranean. DDT's astounding effectiveness led Eisenhower to send another secret message a month later, insisting that "it is considered of utmost importance that additional five tons DDT 100% be made available for A[llied] M[ilitary] G[overment] use. This must reach this theater in late February without fail."¹ Unknown as an insecticide before World War II, DDT had become critical to the operations of the Allied army. How and why did that happen?

The beginning of the DDT era coincides with the shift from what one leading public health historian terms the "unrepentently experimental" public health strategies of the League of Nations Health Organization and the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s and 1930s to what William H. McNeill has called the "triumph of administrative rationality" that succeeded it in the mid-twentieth century.² The experimental approach, emerging from late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century research at the institutes of Louis Pasteur, Robert Koch, Paul Ehrlich, and other luminaries, gave enormous confidence to public health workers. They had reason to hope that if they studied a disease in the laboratory, identified its human pathologies, and either created a vaccine or identified a disease's nonhuman vectors of communicability, it could be controlled. This laboratory focus underpinned post–World War I public health activities, particularly with regard to diseases carried by insects. The awarding of a Nobel Prize in medicine to Charles Nicolle in 1928 for his discovery, through research at the Pasteur Institute in Tunis, that typhus is transmitted by the human body louse, certified the validity of the experimental model. The laboratory, home of the "microbe hunters" made famous by Paul de Kruif, was where diseases were to be conquered.³

But in the 1940s DDT became the key to a radical change in developing insect-borne disease strategies: the attack on disease now engaged the laboratory in support of fieldwork, where critical trials took place. The development of DDT, which could kill or control insects cheaply and with simple technologies, has been recognized as one of the great triumphs of the World War II era.⁴ This powerful insecticide made possible a series of attempts to eradicate insects known to be carriers of human disease and others perceived to be economically harmful.

DDT came onto the wartime scene rather suddenly. In 1939, searching for a means to protect woolens from moth infestations, Paul Müller, working for the J. R. Geigy company of Basel, came across DDT, a chemical synthesized years before but thought to be unremarkable. He found that it killed an amazingly broad spectrum of insects on contact and had other important characteristics, such as environmental stability and a lack of odor. It was also cheap to manufacture. Geigy took out a patent on DDT in 1940 and had...