We urgently need an end to these false assurances, to the sugar coating of unpalatable facts. It is the public that is being asked to assume the risk… - Rachel Carson

A dynamic female zoology professor expanded her intellectual horizons by urging her to take the daring step of majoring in biology rather than English. In doing so, Carson discovered that science not only engaged her mind but gave her “something to write about.

[…] can we afford to ignore the fact that we are now filling the environment with chemicals that have the power to strike directly at the chromosomes […]? Is this not too high a price to pay for a sproutless potato or a mosquitoless patio?

Only a few centuries have passed since those pre-Columbian days, yet today our whole earth has become only another shore from which we look out across the dark ocean of space, uncertain what we shall find when we sail out among the stars, but like the Norsemen and the Polynesians of old, lured by the very challenge of the unknown.