ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Regulating in the Dark: Public Chemical Control and the First Generation of Synthetic Pesticides

• In Event: Better Living through Chemistry

English Abstract

How did post-war European states seek to “control” radically new chemistry when they lacked both methods and expertise to measure, interpret, and regulate it?
This paper explores that question through the early history of synthetic pesticides in Denmark, focusing on the state Chemical Control agency (Kemikaliekontrollen) and its interactions with the pesticide producer Cheminova from the mid-1940s to the early 1950s.
Drawing on administrative correspondence, laboratory reports, and court material, the paper reconstructs Kemikaliekontrollen’s struggle to keep pace with a rapidly expanding arsenal of organophosphate insecticides and phenoxy herbicides. Regulators faced a Sisyphean task: new substances appeared faster than they could be classified, commercial mixtures blurred the boundaries between products, and even the naming of compounds such as parathion was unstable. Complex formulations, variable purity, and overlapping spectra made it difficult to define “correct” analytical methods and thus to decide whether a product was under-strength, mislabeled, or illegal. At the same time, the agency grappled with shortages of staff, instruments, and literature, relying on microfilmed congress proceedings, Nordic cooperation, and borrowed expertise to learn how to use novel tools such as spectrophotometers and infrared analysis.
The paper argues that “public control” of new chemistry was not simply a matter of applying pre-existing toxicological standards to new substances. Instead, control emerged through fragile infrastructures of measurement, negotiation, and learning that bound together ministries, university laboratories, industrial chemists, and international expert bodies.

Author

• Jørgen Burchardt, Middelfart Museum