Chemical Testing Records --

From roughly the 1940s until 1976 two federal laboratories conducted a large chemical screening program. The Denver Wildlife Research Center (DWRC) and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center (PWRC) tested thousands of chemicals for their potential as repellents, deterrents, markers, toxicants, and other purposes. Prior to 1967, chemical companies sent chemical sampled to the laboratories for bling testing without identifying information such as chemical names, Chemical Abstracts Registry Number (CAS), or chemical structures. This created a need for a tracking number system. In 1959 the DWRC began the Denver Research Center (DRC) numbering system to track the unnamed chemicals.

Chemical testing at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, a sister lab to the DWRC located in Laurel Maryland, was a precursor to chemical screening at the DWRC. Patuxent was under contract with the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1959 to test and develop chemicals used as substitutions for restricted pesticides. During this period, thousands of chemical compounds were tested under the supervision of principal investigator James DeWitt. The records for many of these tests were transferred to the DWRC following the cessation of the chemical testing program at PWRC in 1959.

DWRC took over all chemical testing efforts in 1960. DWRC chemists Edward Schafer and Walter Bowles were major figures in the chemical testing program at DWRC. Towards the end of their careers they also worked on preserving the data created during the chemical testing to make it available for future researchers in what would become the Chemical Effects Database. Prior to the creation of the Chemical Effects Database, Schafer and Bowles compiled the information on all known chemicals tested by Patuxent and the DWRC into the Chemical-Biological Data File, published in 1984, and the Chemical-Biological Data Compendium, published in 1999.