Environment: Paul Revere of Ecology

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After service in the Navy during World War II, Commoner chose to teach at Washington University, where he eventually chaired the botany department. His early research was an investigation of the relationship between viruses and genetics that earned him an award from the A.A.A.S. in 1953. Switching from biochemistry to biophysics, he then studied the effect of "free radicals" (molecules with unpaired electrons) on cell metabolism. A research team led by Commoner was the first to discover that abnormal free radicals may be the earliest evidence of cancer in laboratory rats. In 1961, he startled the scientific community by disputing the Watson-Crick theory of DNA and its primary role in heredity. One of his greatest strengths as an ecologist is his holistic approach to science—a belief that wholes rather than parts are the determining factors of living organisms.

In the mid-'50s, Commoner began trumpeting the consequences of ra dioactive fallout. He helped establish the Committee for Nuclear Information, now the Committee on Environmental Information, and conducted a nationwide survey proving that strontium 90 had lodged in U.S. babies' teeth. The 1963 nuclear test-ban treaty was a distinct victory for Commoner and the committee, which had been vilified by McCarthy-era hecklers. Commoner sensed correctly that fallout was only one aspect of something bigger—the impact of technology on the entire environment. Soon he was delving into the "death" of Lake Erie. That led him in ever-widening circles to the problems of sewage, fertilizers, detergents, chemical pesticides, auto pollution and atomic power plants. In the process, his avocation became his vocation.

In 1966, Commoner saw a need to unite physical and social scientists into one cooperative whole focused on the total environment. As a result, he founded Washington University's Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, the first of its kind in the U.S. Commoner is especially pleased with a study of the ecology of ghetto rats that has helped St. Louis health officials eliminate the rodents more effectively. "We could just as well do a study of the fence lizard," Commoner explains, "but that wouldn't be as relevant to human problems."

This insistence on relevance carries over to the classroom. A superb teacher, Commoner is likely to start his popular course in basic biology by asking students from Cleveland: "How is the swimming in Lake Erie?" As the class listens spellbound, he spends the next six weeks deriving most of the principles of biology from that one example. If he cannot save Erie, he has unquestionably turned a notoriously dull subject into one of the liveliest courses around—at least at Washington University.