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The Cockroach Cure - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com · 5,137 words · saved by 1 readers

Forty years ago, scientists did the impossible. Why doesn’t anyone remember?

A week before Christmas in 1983, two chemists at Yale University made a breakthrough that they thought could change the world. “It was like opening up a door and seeing a light,” one of the scientists, Stuart Schreiber, later told The New York Times . The pair had produced a substance, periplanone-B, that sends the male American cockroach into a thrashing, sexual frenzy. What if this were used to build a better trap—a cockroach honeypot that lured bugs into a dish of poison? The implications were mind-bending. Cockroaches were overrunning U.S. cities in the 1980s—more than 2 billion lived in N

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