Can Walter Lippmann wipe out bugs? Possibly. After observing 1,500 tiny European Pyrrhocoris apterus bugs, Czechoslovakia's Dr. Karel Slama and Harvard's Dr. Carroll M. Williams report that a chemical substance in American newsprint prevented these insects from maturing into adults. Strangely, they grew into oversized larvae but could never reproduce.
The biochemists put the insects in contact with pieces of U.S. newspapers, starting with a Walter Lippmann column from the Boston Globe ("That seemed like a good beginning," says Williams) and going on to the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. A substance in the wood pulp used...
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