In this paper, I explore the following counterfactual question: could twentieth-century chemical synthesis and production have proceeded in a way that caused less damage to human health and the environment? The option of pursuing safer chemicals was precluded, in part, as the result of technical and regulatory assumptions that regulation could and should proceed by identifying safe and unsafe levels of chemicals, rather than distinguishing between safe and unsafe chemicals tout court. These industrial chemicals could have been developed with less harmful properties for physiological and ecological health, in particular as the result of adoption of a research program to design chemicals that were “benign by design” (in the words of contemporary “green chemists” Paul Anastas and John Warner) rather than the path that firms and regulators chose: designing toxic chemicals with an eye to safe levels of use.
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