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-trichloroethaneor 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,...
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