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GRAPHICS EDITOR'S NOTE

As befitting this special issue of Environmental History, this Gallery essay by Fritz Davis continues to explore the history of toxics. In this piece, Davis examines photographs taken around 1945 of the exterior and interior of the Toxicity Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Physical expansion of infrastructure outside the lab along with increasing specialization within its walls, Davis argues, helped to professionalize the science of toxicology by the end of World War II. The result, he concludes, proved a critical element of environmental analysis during the postwar era.

NEIL M. MAHER

Frederick Rowe Davis
On the Professionalization of Toxicology

THE MASSIVE SMOKESTACK that dominates the right side of Figure 1, taken in 1945, is the reason that the Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD) decided to locate the new Toxicity Laboratory at the University of Chicago during World War II. As part of an old powerhouse at the university, the smokestack could be used to ventilate the laboratory as it analyzed, tested, and destroyed chemical compounds during the war. The smokestack was in theory high enough so that these chemical compounds could be incinerated without fear of contaminating the university or the surrounding local community. On at least one occasion that theory proved questionable, however, when the director of the Tox Lab perceived a smell similar to mustard gas and feared an inadvertent exposure. Scientists subsequently assured him that the releases were in fact nontoxic. With this smokestack in mind, the National Defense Research Committee, in cooperation with the University of Chicago, established the Tox Lab in May of 1941 to evaluate the toxicity of chemical agents for the Chemical Warfare Research Division of the OSRD.1 In doing so, military officials hoped to avoid the crippling injuries inflicted on American troops by chemical warfare during World War I.	1
Figure 1. The Toxicity Laboratory at the University of Chicago, July 1945. From W. R. Kirner, "The Toxicity and Vesicancy of Chemical Warfare Agents," in Chemistry: A History of the Chemistry Components of the National Defense Research Committee, 1940–1946, ed. W.A. Noyes, Jr., Science in World War II: Office of Scientific Research and Development (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1948). Image appears between p. 244 and p. 245.
While the smokestack in this image reflects growing safety concerns within the emerging toxicology profession, the numbered and lettered buildings nearby trace the physical growth of the Tox Lab during its first few years. In order to receive many dozens of chemicals arriving each day during the war, the Tox Lab expanded from building 1 in 1942 to include by the end of the following year buildings 2–10 and buildings C, D, and E. This physical growth of the lab coincided with increasing scientific specialization. When this photograph was taken in July of 1945, the Tox Lab employed more than sixty scientists from a wide variety of fields including biology, medicine, and physics. Numerous specialists such as pharmacologists, physiologists, biochemists, pathologists, chemists, physicists, mathematicians, ophthalmologists, and dermatologists would later join the laboratory staff.2 The many buildings sprouting across the Tox Lab compound in the mid-1940s permitted these specialists to maintain disciplinary identity as they worked together to make the novel discipline of toxicology distinct from pharmacology.	. . .