Muller, Paul Hermann

SUBJECT AREA: Agricultural and food technology

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b. 12 January 1899 Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland

d. 13 October 1965 Basle, Switzerland

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Swiss chemist, inventor of the insecticide DDT.

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Muller was educated in Basle and his interest in chemistry was stimulated when he started work as a laboratory assistant in the chemical factory of Dreyfus \& Co. After further laboratory work, he entered the University of Basle in 1919, achieving his doctorate in 1925. The same year, he entered the dye works of J.R.Geigy AG as a research chemist. He spent the rest of his career there, rising to the position of Deputy Head of Pest Control Research. From 1935 he began the search for an insecticide that was fast acting and persistent, but harmless to plants and warmblooded animals. In 1940 he patented the use of a compound known since 1873, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT. It could be easily and cheaply manufactured and was highly effective. Muller obtained a Swiss patent for DDT in 1940 and it went into commercial production two years later. One useful application of DDT at the end of the Second World War was in killing lice to prevent typhus epidemics. It was widely used and an important factor in farmers' postwar success in raising food production, but after twenty years or so, some species of insects were found to have developed resistance to its action, thus limiting its effectiveness. Worse, it was found to be harmful to other animals, which gave rise to anxieties about its persistence in the food chain. By the 1970s its use was banned or strictly limited in developed countries. Nevertheless, in its earlier career it had conferred undoubted benefits and was highly valued, as reflected by the award of a Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology in 1948.

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Principal Honours and Distinctions

Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 1948.

Bibliography

Muller described DDT and related compounds in two papers in Helvetica chimica acta for 1944 and 1946.

Further Reading

Obituary, 1965, Nature 208:1,043–4.

LRD