Monona Rossol - Pick Your Poison: How Our Mad Dash to Chemical Utopia is Making Lab Rats of Us All

Copyright 2011 by Monona Rossol. All rights reserved

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada

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ISBN (cloth) 978-0-470-55091-5; ISBN (ebk) 978-0-470-91875-3;
ISBN (ebk) 978-0-470-91876-0; ISBN (ebk) 978-0-470-91877-7

For my darling husband, Jack Fairlie. Although I could easily lose sight of you in tall grass, you are still the tallest man Ive ever met.

PREFACE

Im a chemist, but I dont make my living mixing chemicals for a multinational company. Most of my colleagues in lab coats dont think much about the effects that their products will have on the rest of the world. Very few end up devoting their lives to education and prevention as I have, trying to get chemicals off the shelves and out of our homes, instead of onto and into them. How on earth did I end up on this side of the fence?

For one thing, I didnt start out in chemistry; I started out in vaudeville. Work began for me at age one when I was a prop in my fathers magic act. I was a substitute for the traditional rabbit in an illusion specially conceived and created by my father. By age three, I was a professional entertainment worker and, like my father and mother, a member of the American Guild of Variety Artists. My sister, Ellie, a year and a half younger than I was, also worked professionally. Audiences couldnt tell Ellie and me apart unless we were standing together, so my father could create some rather baffling illusions using us as assistants. Soon we were also performing a rather cute acrobatic act together, and I was lip-syncing funny recordings and singing.

For those who dont know much about vaudeville, it was the primary form of entertainment until moving pictures progressively displaced it in the 1930s. Yet as vaudeville slowly died, the vaudevillians continued to liveand most continued to perform. They simply stopped playing the fancy Orpheum circuit theaters and began to work at state and county fairs, circuses and carnivals, Elks and Moose Club events, bar mitzvahs, and church picnics. We played those kinds of venues and shared the bill with the most spectacular acts youve never heard ofacts that had been on the road for forty or fifty years, ranging from single performer acts to entire vaudeville families of acrobats, comics, jugglers, high-wire walkers, sharpshooters, musicians and singers, and more.

If being onstage teaches you anything, its self-discipline and the value of honing multiple talents. Instead of running away to join the circus, I ran away from the circus at seventeen to go to the University of Wisconsin. I worked my way through three degrees: a bachelor of science, a master of science degree, and a master of fine arts degree. This odd combination of degrees was not my idea. It reflected my attempts to find some avenue for a career when door after door slammed shut, only because I was a member of that half of the population that squats to pee.

First, I was a premed student. I had a backer who would have paid my way through medical school, so I filled out my med school application in 1956 with excitement. Before the applications were even acted on, there was a kind of orientation session. I remember that a woman administrator spoke, which made it worse. She said that the laws had changed and they were now forced to accept 10 percent women, and they didnt really want so many women in the school. Then she gleefully informed us that half of us would be flunked out after the first year anyway.

This was my first head-on encounter with discrimination. I had not seen this in show business. In entertainment, there will be equality as long as most men cant sing soprano or wear a brief costume effectively enough to misdirect attention away from a magicians gimmick. So I was unprepared for the med school speech. After working hard to make all As in the required courses, I had expected to be welcomed. I stood up in the orientation, made a very expressive hand gesture, and left.

Finishing pre-med left me about a year away from graduating with a major in chemistry, math, physics, or zoology. I chose to major in chemistry and minor in math. My plan was to become a chemist, and I was already working in the chemistry department as student slave labor. Just a few credits short of my degree, I ran out of money and went to work at Bjorksten Research Laboratories as a full-fledged research chemist. This firm was impressed with my work after a year and offered to pay for my education through graduate school. That offer evaporated, however, when the lab received a big government contract and found that it could not get security clearance for me. Apparently, being one of the few white members of the NAACP and participating in a few political events was enough to wreck your career in those days.

With another career down the pipe, I decided to switch majors completely. I had taken a large number of electives in art and found these courses very interesting. I finished my degree in chemistry and then applied for graduate school in studio art. My many art credits qualified me, but I was denied entry anyway. I was told that women couldnt be artists. Women had to enroll in art education to be art teachers instead.

My fury was barely controllable. I remember checking out a library copy of one of the primary textbooks for art education and reading it. With the tome under my arm, I walked into the dean of the art departments office, opened the book to page 1, and read the first convoluted, uninformative, verbose, useless sentence. I looked the dean in the face for a long, dramatic moment, then told him he had to be kidding. He enrolled me in studio art.