Word: cockroaches
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...Cockroaches come out at night," intones a voice-over announcer in German. On three television screens, larger-than-life cockroaches crawl over sausages and bread. "They breed all over the world," continues the announcer. "For health reasons alone they must be exterminated." Scientists appear, wielding pipettes and tanks of lethal gas. Piles of cockroach cadavers are swept up into dustpans...
When artist Yael Bedarshi discovered this promotional film in Berlin a few years ago, the sponsor's name was instantly and ominously familiar. Bayer, a developer of cockroach control chemicals, was a subsidiary of IG Farben during World War II. IG Farben was the chemical cartel responsible for the manufacturing of Zyklon B gas, a pesticide used to exterminate victims of he Nazi regime...
...experiment was in fact a good deal more complex than creating a "cockroach dating agency," of course...
Schreiber was synthesizing--or essentially making from scratch-a complex molecule known as Periplanone-B. This molecule, which was a cockroach pheromone represented a certain structural class of molecules in chemistry known a terpenes...
...dismay it was the....reason that got the most coverage by the media," Schreiber says "Most of the newspaper articles and wire services focused on using this molecule as a cockroach sex attractant...