 |
||
 |
|
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The Yale Alumni Magazine is owned and operated by Yale Alumni Publications, Inc., a nonprofit corporation independent of Yale University. The content of the magazine and its website is the responsibility of the editors and does not necessarily reflect the views of Yale or its officers. |
|
A Scientist Turned Ethicist “Sometimes, it pays to be a rebel,” wrote Arthur Galston, the Eaton Professor Emeritus of Botany, in an October 2002 essay about Duke Ellington that was published in this magazine. Galston, who died on June 15 at the age of 88 from congestive heart failure, certainly had a cause. A respected plant physiologist, Galston is known for an act of rebellion during the Vietnam War that helped end the U.S. military's use of Agent Orange. Some of Galston’s work in the early 1940s had helped lead to the development of the herbicide. But after learning about the ecological and human toll caused by the widespread use of the defoliant in Vietnam, Galston and a few colleagues began, in the mid-1960s, to lobby against the spraying campaign. In 1970, after a Department of Defense study—conducted in response to Galston’s charges—confirmed that the herbicide was linked to birth defects, President Nixon halted the spraying. Galston, a native of Brooklyn who got his doctorate
in plant biology from the University of Illinois, joined the Yale faculty in
1955. In his lengthy academic career, he authored several textbooks and more
than 320 academic papers, many of them on plant pigments and discoveries he
made about how plants sense and respond to light. After his mandatory
retirement from the biology faculty in 1990, he pursued full-time a
professional interest in bioethics that had been sparked by his experience with
Agent Orange. His second career with Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for
Bioethics resulted in two textbooks, more than 50 public policy articles, and a
popular course on bioethics. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
||
|
||
©1992–2012, Yale Alumni Publications, Inc. All rights reserved. Yale Alumni Magazine, P.O. Box 1905, New Haven, CT 06509-1905, USA. yam@yale.edu |
||