Jun 15, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 10 segments
The story of the use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War and the origin of the term "Ecocide" | In the autumn of 1942, a graduate student named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory in…
In the fall of 1942, a graduate student and plant physiologist named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying soybeans.
Soybean plants didn't flower early enough.
The growing season in central Illinois was short, and crops that didn't flower before the first frost didn't produce.
So Galston was looking for a way to chemically accelerate the process.
His dissertation was titled Physiology of Flowering, and his research was funded in part by the U.S. Army, a fact that at the time was unremarkable.
During World War II, federal military funding flowed into university laboratories across the country, supporting research in chemistry, biology, physics, and agriculture.
The Army wasn't directing Galston's work or watching over his shoulder.
It was just what wartime research looked like at land-grant universities.
Resources went where they might someday be useful.
What Galston found was a synthetic compound called 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid, which plant scientists abbreviated as TEBA.
At low concentrations, Teba did exactly what he needed.
It accelerated flowering in soybean plants.
He documented the result, then decided to run a follow-up experiment by testing it at a much higher concentration.
This time, the plants didn't flower at all.
Instead, their leaves shriveled and fell.
The stems were left bare and brown, stripped of everything green.
He noted this effect as a footnote in his dissertation without further consideration.
Then he finished his degree and went on to become one of the most respected plant biologists in the country at Yale University.
Galston had no idea what he'd just found.
In fact, he wouldn't for decades.
That day in 1942, he couldn't have known that one day his discovery would be used to destroy 5 million acres of forest, poison generations of adults and children, and give the world a word for environmental destruction that didn't yet have a name.
Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world and follows what happened next and who was left to deal with the fallout.
In the fall of 1942, a graduate student and plant physiologist named Arthur Galston was working alone in a laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, studying soybeans.
Soybean plants didn't flower early enough.
The growing season in central Illinois was short, and crops that didn't flower before the first frost didn't produce.
So Galston was looking for a way to chemically accelerate the process.
His dissertation was titled Physiology of Flowering, and his research was funded in part by the U.S. Army, a fact that at the time was unremarkable.
During World War II, federal military funding flowed into university laboratories across the country, supporting research in chemistry, biology, physics, and agriculture.
The Army wasn't directing Galston's work or watching over his shoulder.
It was just what wartime research looked like at land-grant universities.
Resources went where they might someday be useful.
What Galston found was a synthetic compound called 2,3,5-triiodobenzoic acid, which plant scientists abbreviated as TEBA.
At low concentrations, Teba did exactly what he needed.
It accelerated flowering in soybean plants.
He documented the result, then decided to run a follow-up experiment by testing it at a much higher concentration.
This time, the plants didn't flower at all.
Instead, their leaves shriveled and fell.
The stems were left bare and brown, stripped of everything green.
He noted this effect as a footnote in his dissertation without further consideration.
Then he finished his degree and went on to become one of the most respected plant biologists in the country at Yale University.
Galston had no idea what he'd just found.
In fact, he wouldn't for decades.
That day in 1942, he couldn't have known that one day his discovery would be used to destroy 5 million acres of forest, poison generations of adults and children, and give the world a word for environmental destruction that didn't yet have a name.
Each episode investigates a moment when human activity collided with the natural world and follows what happened next and who was left to deal with the fallout.
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