Who was Edgar Queeny, the cold-eyed social Darwinist who inherited a chemical company from his father and turned it into one of the most powerful industrial forces in American history? Why did the man who helped trigger the atomic bomb, kept the Arsenal of Democracy running, and photographed brown bears in Alaska with Walt Disney also preside over a factory in West Virginia where workers were quietly being poisoned — and then denied compensation? And how does the story of a chemical explosion in Coal Country, a misfiled letter about dioxin, and thirteen men who couldn't afford to say no open a window onto the darkest chapter in the history of American agriculture; from the Manhattan Project to the jungles of Vietnam?
Join John and Patrick for the second episode of their Monsanto series — the PCBs, the explosion at Nitro, the workers whose wives caught chloracne from their husbands' clothes, and the herbicide that was about to go to war — in an age when the company that made the bomb also made the weedkiller on your lawn...
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