Analytical Chemist; direct and cross-examination

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Introducing the Witness
Analyzing DDT: some history
Finally noticing PCBs
PCBs interfere with DDT
Cross examination
Telling only certain scientists about PCBs
Thin Layer confirmation
Sampling salmon
Choosing columns
Coho again
Validating Robert Risebrough
Lost among the peaks
One more chromatogram
Hydrolysis was the Industry secret
The final examination

Direct examination by Willard Stafford, counsel for the National Aggricultural Task Force.

Introducing the Witness

Coon_direct_1_Introduction

Analyzing DDT: some history

Coon_direct_1a_history

Finally noticing PCBs

Coon_direct_2_PCBs

PCBs interfere with DDT

Coon_direct_2a

Cross examination

The objective of Yannacone’s cross-examination was to establish that there were two two kinds of “DDT” analyses: one for the agricultural chemical companies selling DDT and the other chlorinated hydrocarbon pesticides and another less comprehensive analysis for the natural scientists at colleges, universities, and in government who were looking at problems with entire populations of birds and other animals that happened to be at the top of complex food chains within even more complex foodwebs such as raptors and eagles, and game fish such as trout and salmon and tuna and swordfish.

Carmen’s River salt marsh and Great South Bay food web

The cross-examination questioning moved according to the principles of the Chinese internal martial arts, Taiji Quan (Tai Chi Chuan), angles; Pa Kua Chang, circles; Hsing-Yi Chuan, straight lines; and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.

At the time of the Madison hearings four scientists were raising the alarm about the worldwide contamination of the Evironment withh DDT and its principle environmental metabolite, DDE. Ornithologist and raptor expert Dr. Joseph Hickey at the University of Wisconsin; chemist Dr. Charles Wurster at the State University of Stony Brook; biochemist Dr. Robert Risebrough of the University of California at Berkely; and wildlife biologist Dr. Lucille Stickel of the United States Fish & Wildlife Service in Pawtuxet, Maryland who had just begun to bring peregrine falcons from the brink of extinction by hatching and rearing them initially in an environment relatively free of organochlorine pesticides.