Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson grew up on a small farm outside Pittsburgh, in a family that was always short of money. She wanted to write, and went to college on a scholarship to study English before switching to biology. She did a master's degree in zoology at Johns Hopkins, but during the Depression the family's finances collapsed and she had to abandon plans for a doctorate. Her father died, then her sister, and she became the sole support of her mother and two nieces.

She found work with the US Bureau of Fisheries, writing radio scripts about sea life, and became only the second woman it employed full-time as a professional. She wrote in the evenings. Her book The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, was on the bestseller list for 86 weeks and finally gave her the money to write full time.

Then a friend wrote to her about birds dying after a pesticide spraying in Massachusetts. Carson began collecting evidence on DDT and other chemicals, which were being used in enormous quantities with almost no research on their effects. In 1960, in the middle of the work, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She kept the diagnosis private, fearing it would be used to discredit her, and finished the book through radiation treatment.

Silent Spring, published in 1962, was attacked by the chemical industry as hysterical and unscientific. It was neither. It led to a presidential inquiry, the banning of DDT in the United States and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Carson died in April 1964, aged 56.