Ozone: Symptoms without Disease

During her early career at Rutgers University, Zilinskas was highly influenced by Eileen Brennan, a fellow professor at the university. Brennan was a graduate of Douglass College who later went on to attend graduate school at Rutgers University and ultimately become a professor in the Plant Pathology department at the university. At the time that Brennan was hired, gender equality had not been fully resolved in the workforce. Brennan was hired during World War II, most of the male population was away in battle; however, Zilinskas speculated that the man who hired Brennan wouldn’t have done so had the circumstances been different. But the gender inequality didn’t stop there: throughout Brennan’s time as a professor at Rutgers, there were many instances when her superior took credit for her research. But, being the “special person” that she was—and I borrow these words from Zilinskas—Brennan “never really griped about not being treated as equal to a man."

But had Brennan “griped,” her voice would have been heard. At the time, Brennan was conducting research in a hot field of plant pathology. She was one of the first scientists to study the effect that air pollution had on plants. At this point in her story, Zilinskas pulled out what seemed like a scientific picture book and began to show me ozone’s damaging effects on vegetation. There were photographs of all sorts of sickly looking foliage: some of the leaves were splattered with tan-colored polka dots; others were marred by darker brownish splotches. Others still had turned an unhealthy brown or red color. What all these damaged plants had in common was a lack of pathogenic infection. This completely revolutionized the field of plant pathology because scientists could no longer use Koch’s Postulates to establish the causal relationship between pathogenic infection and disease-like symptoms. Koch’s Postulates state that if a microorganism isolated from a diseased tissue and reintroduced into a healthy tissue causes the healthy tissue to develop diseased symptoms, then it is assumed that that microorganism is responsible for the disease.