by doing odd jobs and got his bachelor's degree with honors in 1937. Earning master's and doctoral degrees at Harvard (1938, 1941), he began his teaching career as a biology instructor at Queens College (1940-1942). Serving in the Navy in World War II, he took part in spraying Pacific islands against insect-borne diseases with the new wonder chemical DDT, unaware as yet that indiscriminate use of such toxins was an invitation to environmental disaster. Married after the war to Gloria Gordon, a psychologist, Commoner served as associate editor of Science Illustrated before joining the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis, first as associate professor of plant physiology, later as chairman of the Botany Department, and finally as university professor of environmental science (1976-1981). It was here that he began the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (CBNS). Although he published numerous professional research papers, he rejected the conventional view that what non-scientists do with scientific knowledge is none of the scientists' business. He became a social activist and vocal public educator. What brought him out of the laboratory in 1953, Commoner declared afterward, was strontium-90, one of the radioisotopes contained in the fallout from nuclear tests in the atmosphere. His Committee for Nuclear Information set parents all over St. Louis to collecting their offspring's baby teeth for testing, and found out that in addition to the normal element calcium, those teeth contained also ominous proportions of strontium-90, which behaves physically and chemically much like calcium and can combine in building bones and teeth in much the same way, except that strontium-90 is highly radioactive. In the first sentence of a book published in 1966, Science and Survival, Barry Commoner announced that "the age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over." A massive electric power failure all over the Northeast, the admission of children to a St. Louis hospital 15 years after they had been exposed to radio-iodine from Nevada nuclear bomb tests, the disturbing news about DDT, and the potential menace of recombinant DNAnot to mention the threat of "nuclear winter" in the event ofthermonuclear war, a prospect Commoner discussed years before most Americans even heard of itled him to the conclusion that science, like the magic practiced by the legendary Sorcerer's Apprentice, was getting out of control. Therefore, scientists could no longer simply remain at their work; they had to go out and alert the nonscientists to the problems that their work was creating. "Science can reveal the depth of this crisis," the book concluded, "but only social action can resolve it." By 1970 Time magazine was calling Barry Commoner "the Paul Revere of Ecology." It said that Commoner was "endowed with a rare combination of political savvy, scientific soundness and the ability or excite people with his ideas." Commoner was not trained professionally as an ecologist. He came to it in reaction against the dismemberment of modern science by over-specialization, such that its practitioners could not see the forest for their own narrow trees. Scientists as well as laypeople, he believed, had to be educated