HORACE TELFORD

Horace Telford, one of eight children, grew up on a family farm in Idaho Falls, a short distance from Yellowstone National Park.  After High School he moved to Ontario, California to be near his older sister while he attended Junior College.  His life long interest even at that early age was Entomology, the study of insects.  He was a bit disappointed to find there was only one survey course in Entomology offered at Ontario, so he began to look for other opportunities.  He found East Texas Tech had several Entomology courses listed so he transferred there in the early 1930s.  He worked in a laundry to support himself while going to school.

After working with his dad on the home farm the summer before  his junior year he hitched-hiked to Utah and negotiated a transfer of his credits so could earn his Bachelor's Degree at the University of Utah, meanwhile working at a dairy.  The next summer he found employment as a biologist in a Bureau of Fisheries program and also enjoyed a great summer of fishing and camping.  He gained entry to a Master's program at University of Minnesota where he wrote his thesis on Syrphidae, or Hover Flies, and assured himself a Doctorate was well on its way.  His thesis was published as a bulletin, then several years later it was republished by a National Bureau of University editors and given national recognition.  That paper earned him a telephone call from the Dean at North Dakota who told him the paper was the "best damn report" he had ever read.

He lived in North Dakota for four years where he worked on  various projects with the State University of North Dakota.   Although the Dean who admired his writing offered Telford a teaching and research job at the University, Horace accepted a position with Hess and Clark, a chemical company willing to offer him twice as much money as had the University.  Scientists usually are prohibited from publishing their findings, but Telford would not take the job offered to him without full authority to publish, the one stipulation he agreed to being that new products needed to be protected by the government, a relevant concern during war time. 

Hess and Clark's project to develop insecticides for treating cattle sparked an interest in Horace and so it was as the war began in Europe he was doing research on what was a developing product at that time, DDT.  DDT was an insecticide that killed lots of insects, but was not hazardous to humans.  Others at Hess and Clark testing DDT along with Horace discovered it interfered in nature with regard to the food chain and increased in intensity as time went on.  Telford's research recognized that when animals were exposed to DDT through infected food they consumed, or were exposed to sprayed DDT, those animals developed tremors, which was how he was able to determine they were intoxicated. 

While in the early 1940s there was no chemical way to prove it was the DDT causing tremors in exposed animals, Telford was sufficiently convinced to publish a paper outlining his findings in a 1946 issue of a prestigious magazine.  Shortly after the article appeared Horace was walking down a street in New York City when he heard a newsboy on a corner shouting, "Don't drink milk!  Don't drink milk!"  All the newspapers nation-wide had picked up the story about his discovery that DDT traveled through grasses eaten into the milk of cows and goats, and assumed in print that DDT was dangerous to public health.  Within a few weeks DDT had been outlawed by the Food and Drug Administration.  The government stopped use of DDT because of what was perceived as a danger to animals, although there never was a case of sickness or death to warm blooded animals proven connected to DDT. 

Horace Telford's research contributed to a solution for controlling the spread of disease by killing lice on animals and human beings.  He found  that DDT added to paint used on buildings controlled lice on animals and people in those buildings.   DDT had been used extensively in the war years, from 1940 to 1945, in military applications around the world.  As disease began to rage through American troops in foreign lands, powdered DDT was employed very effectively to kill lice, known to be a common carrier of many diseases. 

Dr. Horace Telford received a Selective Service notice late in the war when he was twenty-eight years old and had a wife and three children.  He reported for his physical where he was rejected due to arthritis in his back. 

"I didn't have arthritis, still don't," Telford said, shaking his head in wonder undiminished after more than sixty years.  "But I didn't argue the point.  They refused me and so the next day I went back to my job and continued research on DDT."

After the war Telford and his family moved to Pullman where he started the University's first Department of Entomology which he chaired until his retirement at age sixty-five. He then went to Brazil where he served as an advisor to a university Zoology Department.  He consulted with them on how to set up the department, including the hiring of scientists and determining medical student requirements.

He and his wife then moved on to Florida when he was sixty-seven.  He led further research on insect control for fourteen years at Florida

A & M.  Now widowed, he finally retired again just a few years ago and lives a quiet life in Pullman, at rest knowing his contribution to the American way of life was played out studying insects that plague mankind and insecticides that control them.