DUANE
Duane's take
Here's my telling of what the official marker has to say about this place, and friend, it is one of those stories where the hero is a fly — or rather, the absence of one. Now, sometime in the late 1930s, in a building right there in Menard, a scientist named Dr. Edward F.
Knipling — born in 1909 — was turning an idea over in his mind. A quiet, almost elegant idea, but one with enormous stakes. Screwworms.
If you don't know what a screwworm is, consider yourself fortunate. These parasitic larvae were destroying livestock and wildlife alike, burrowing into living animals, leaving devastation behind. And every rancher in Texas knew the misery they caused.
But Dr. Knipling wasn't thinking about how to kill screwworms. He was thinking about something far more audacious.
What if you could break the chain of reproduction entirely? What if you released sterile male flies — flies that couldn't produce offspring — and let nature do the rest? The screwworm would simply... breed itself out of existence.
Now that is a Texas-sized idea if I've ever heard one. The theory, bold as it was, still needed proof. And that's where this story moves forward in time.
By 1950 and into 1951, this same laboratory had been removed to the Kerrville area. And there, Dr. R.
C. Bushland and D. E.
Hopkins got to work sterilizing male screwworms — not with chemicals, but with irradiation. Precise, methodical, relentless work. The outcome?
The marker doesn't mince words, and neither will I. Eradication. The screwworm — eradicated.
Domestic animals saved. Wild animals saved. Across the entire United States.
One man in a building in Menard, late 1930s, nursing a theory. A laboratory, relocated to Kerrville, proving it true. Sometimes the biggest victories don't announce themselves with a bang.
Sometimes they arrive in silence — the silence of a fly that never hatches.
What the marker says
In this building (at Menard) during late 1930s, Dr. Edward F. Knipling (b. 1909) advanced theory screwworms might be eradicated by releasing sterile male flies to break chain of reproduction and save livestock from role of host to parasitic larvae that destroy livestock and wildlife. During 1950-51, this laboratory (removed to Kerrville area) was site of sterilization of male screwworms with irradiation, in procedures by Dr. R. C. Bushland and D. E. Hopkins. The outcome: eradication of the screwworm and saving of domestic and wild animals of the United States. (1972)