Rachel Carson

"Eventually it dawned on me, that by becoming a biologist I had given myself something to write about."

Born May 27, 1907, in Springdale, Pennsylvania, Rachel Carson died on April 14, 1964. Carson was a biologist known for her influential book on pesticides, Silent Spring. Several annual awards are given out in Carson's name, and a college at the University of California was named after the famed writer.

During the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s the use of chemical pesticides in the United States and around the world grew enormously, spread on crops and in pest control programs. Chief among this new generation of pesticides was DDT, billed as the "savior of mankind" for smothering typhus epidemics in Italy...