An anniversary, but no one's celebrating

It was 100 years ago this month that scientists reported the first case of resistance to insecticides. In April of 1914, A.L. Melander, an entomologist at the Washington Agricultural Experiment Station, published a paper entitled "Can insects become resistant to sprays?". As you can tell from the naive tone of this title, the possibility of resistance to any pesticide had not really occurred to anyone before. Unfortunately, the agricultural industry would soon lose its innocence on this question, as more…