Ramaswami: THIS column is admittedly, and regrettably, late in running an article commemorating the fiftieth year after the publication in September 1962 of Rachel Carsons’ Silent Spring, arguably one of the most influential books of our time. Many tributes and reviews of Silent Spring, not only on this half-centenary but even earlier over the past several decades, have hailed the book as marking the beginning of the environmental movement in the West or even, in some sense, in the world. That is somewhat of an overstatement, although not an unforgivable one. It would be a far closer description of its epochal character to recognise, as unfortunately few have done, that Silent Spring heralded a new way of looking at science and technology (S&T) and its relation to society in the second half of the twentieth century.