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Pennsylvania; in Aargau during every summer from 1993 to 1996 (the map below is based on data from 2,600 Aargau insects); and as an invited participant on a 1990tour of the zone surrounding Chernobyl. She lectures, speaks at conferences, organizes exhibits of her paintings in collaboration with environmental groups, and is working on a large-scale project with the group Strom ohne Atom (Electricity without Nuclear Power) to document the distribution of eleven types of morphological deformities (missing and misshapen feeler segments, wings of different lengths, irregular chitin, misshapen scutella, deformed legs, and so on) among sets of fifty insects she is collecting at each of twenty-eight locations in Germany.

    She has succeeded in forming some important relationships with scientists. At Cap de la Hague, for example, Jean-François Viel, a professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the University of Besançon who has identified a leukemia cluster among local residents, collaborated on the statistical analysis of her collection. But in general she is more cynical now about enlisting experts and instead responds to critics directly through her research design: her data collection is more systematic, her documentation more rigorous, and her paintings are no longer the rapid sketches of those first frenetic field trips. In interviews and publications, she has begun to explicitly address methodological questions, arguing that there can be no reference habitat on a planet thoroughly polluted by fallout from aboveground testing and emissions from nuclear power plants and being careful to point out that she is documenting induced deformities to somatic cells rather than heritable mutations. (“I cannot say they are mutations because I cannot prove it, and if I cannot prove it, I don’t think I can say it,” she tells me.) In this way, she emphasizes her own expertise, strengthening her intervention in those nonscientific arenas where her talents are valued, publicizing her findings through environmental organizations, mass media, and cultural institutions.
    These tactics free Cornelia to act as an environmentalist, to participate in a world in which the politics of scientific proof are inverted by the precautionary principle, which asserts that a well-founded fear of potential danger is a sufficient basis on which to oppose the deployment of a policy, practice, or technology. They free her from the shadow of science, from having to assert herself against a set of methodological and analytic standards that are always impossible to achieve because they are always initially institutional—that is, recognized only among those with the requisite credentials (a doctorate, an affiliation, a professional network, a fundinghistory, a publishing record). The irony, of course, is that no one understands her scientific inadequacies better than Cornelia herself. And no one—as the tone of those early articles and her petitioning of professors showed—was more willing to accept the conventional subordinate role of the amateur as the handmaiden of the scientific expert. It strikes me that the relentlessness of her work has grown in direct proportion to her understanding of its importance. And that her understanding of her work’s importance has increased as it has become clear how isolated is her quest for recognition of the effects of low-level radiation on insects and plants. Where would she be now if she hadn’t faced such hostility and rejection? “It’s something I don’t understand,” she told me in Zürich, “because if I had only found one leaf bug with its face shifted that would be enough to ask what was going on.” And yet somehow, despite all this, there are signs of change. Perhaps the current interest in nuclear power as a “green” fuel has given new urgency to her message, perhaps it is the fruit of her relentlessness, but she has recently had an unexpected success, publishing a prominent (and beautifully