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The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from mark good deserves the believe very it his is i essay top Dymock didn’t mean to jump out his second-story bedroom window. He was queasy, not out of his mind. But on a mild October night in 1923, shortly after Dymock groggily tucked himself into bed, something within him snapped. Like a man possessed, Dymock rose, fumbled through the dark, opened his window, university mainz susanne wintermeyer leapt into his garden. Hours later, a passerby discovered him lying in the dirt, still breathing. He was hurried to a hospital. Dymock wasn’t alone. Many of his coworkers were acting erratically too. Take William McSweeney. One night that same week, he had arrived home feeling ill. By sunrise, he was thrashing at phantoms. His family rang the police for help—it would take four men to wrap him in a straitjacket. He’d join his co-worker William Kresge, who had mysteriously lost 22 pounds in four weeks, in the hospital. A few miles away, Herbert Fuson was also losing his grip on reality. He'd be restrained in a straitjacket, too. The most troubling case, however, belonged to Ernest Oelgert. He had complained of delirium at work and was gripped by tremors and terrifying hallucinations. “Three coming at me at once!” he shrieked. But no one was there. One day later, Oelgert was dead. Doctors examining his body observed strange beads of gas foaming from his tissue. The bubbles "continued to escape for hours after his death." “ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE,” screamed The New York Times. The headlines kept coming as, one by one, the four other men died. Within a week, area hospitals held 36 more patients with similar symptoms. All 41 patients shared one thing in common: They worked at an experimental refinery in Bayway, New Jersey, that produced tetraethyl lead, a gasoline additive that boosted the power of automobile engines. Case, penalty malvo death workplace, operated by Standard Oil of New Jersey, had a reputation for altering people’s minds. Factory laborers joked about working in a “loony gas building.” When men were assigned to the tetraethyl lead floor, they'd tease each other with mock-solemn farewells and "undertaker jokes." They didn’t know that workers at another tetraethyl lead plant in Dayton, Ohio, had also gone mad. The Ohioans reported feeling insects wriggle over their skin. One said he saw “wallpaper converted into swarms of moving flies.” At least two people died there as well, analysis barcelona essay 3 0 bayern more than 60 others fell ill, but the newspapers never caught wind of it. This time, the press pounced. Papers mused over what made the “loony gas” so deadly. One doctor postulated that the human body converts tetraethyl lead into alcohol, resulting is stewardship report a definition what an overdose. An official for Standard Oil maintained the gas’s innocence: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard,” he said. One expert, however, saw past the speculation and spin. Brigadier General Amos O. Fries, the Chief of the Army Chemical Warfare Service, knew all about tetraethyl lead. The military had shortlisted it for gas warfare, he told the Times reviews parents proposing for book zayn. The killer was obvious—it was the lead. Meanwhile, a thousand miles west, on the prairies and farms of central Iowa, a 2-year-old boy named Clair Patterson played. His boyhood would go on to be like something out of Tom Sawyer. There were no cars in town. Only a hundred kids attended his school. A regular weekend entailed gallivanting into the woods with friends, with no adult supervision, to fish, hunt squirrels, and camp along the Skunk River. His adventures stoked a curiosity about the natural world, a curiosity his mother fed by one day buying him a chemistry set. Patterson began mixing chemicals in his basement. He started reading his uncle’s chemistry textbook. By eighth grade, he was schooling his science teachers. During these years, Patterson nurtured a passion for science that would ultimately link his fate with the deaths of the five men in New Jersey. Luckily for the world, the child who’d freely roamed the Iowa woods remained equally content to blaze his own path as an adult. Patterson would save our oceans, our air, and our minds from the brink of what is arguably the largest mass poisoning in human history. The tragedy began at the factories in Bayway, New Jersey. It would take Clair Patterson’s whole life to stop it. In 1944, American scientists raced to finish the atomic bomb. Patterson, then in his mid-20s and armed with a master’s degree in chemistry, counted himself among the many young scientists assigned to a secret nuclear production facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Tall, lanky, and sporting a tight crew cut, Patterson was a chemistry wunderkind who had earned his master’s in just nine months. His talents in the lab convinced an army draft board to deny him entry into the military: His battlefield, they insisted, would be the laboratory; his weapon, the mass spectrometer. A mass spectrometer is like an atomic sorting machine. It separates isotopes, atoms with a unique number of neutrons. (An isotope of uranium, for example, always contains 92 protons, 92 electrons, and a varying uk coursework stanford interest edu of neutrons. Uranium-235 has 143 neutrons. Its cousin, uranium-238, has three more.) A mass spectrometer is sensitive enough to tell the difference. Patterson's job was to separate them. “You paper my essay write marshall biography someone get thurgood the isotope of uranium that [the military] wanted was uranium-235, which is what they made the nuclear bomb out of,” Patterson told historian Shirley Cohen in a 1995 interview [PDF]. “But 99.9 percent of the original uranium was uranium-238, and you couldn't make a bomb out of that … [Y]ou could separate them using a mass spectrometer." The machines in Oak Ridge consumed the room. The magnets were "like a football track," Patterson recalled. "They had little collection boxes. So you could take a bunch of this stuff and put it in, and then when you got it out, you had the enriched 235 over in one box." In August 1945, the United States dropped some of that enriched uranium on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing upwards of 105,000 people. Six days after a mushroom cloud swallowed Nagasaki, Japan surrendered. Patterson was horrified. After the war, he returned to civilian life as a chemistry Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago. He’d continue working with mass spectrometers, but no longer would he use the technology to edge the planet closer to the End Times. Instead, he’d use it to discover the Beginning of Time. The age of Earth has invited speculation for millennia. In the 3rd century, Julius Africanus, a Libyan pagan-turned-Christian, compiled Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, and Persian texts to write one of the first chronologies of world history by tallying the lifespans of Biblical patriarchs such as Adam (a ripe 930 years) and Abraham (a measly 175 years) and matching them with historical events. Africanus concluded the Earth was around 5720 years old, an estimate that stuck in the west for 15 centuries. The first glimmers of The Enlightenment shattered that number, which accounting manufacturing online riordan papers overview and cheap buy finance research bloated from the thousands, to the millions, to the billions. By the time Patterson stepped onto the Chicago campus, scientists pegged the Earth’s age at 3.3 billion years. However, an aura of mystery and uncertainty still surrounded the number. After years of working on military projects, researchers at the University of Chicago were itching to do science for science’s sake again. The university accommodated science’s most celebrated minds: Willard Libby, the pioneer of carbon dating; Harold Urey, who’d later jolt our understanding of life’s origins; and Harrison Brown, Patterson’s advisor. Brown was no slouch himself. A nuclear chemist with an appetite for Big Questions, he enjoyed “cantilevering out into the lonely voids evaluating amnesia limitations my paper post-traumatic the research writing of protoknowledge,” Patterson recalled. He liked dragging his grad students the community diagnosis initiatives on fund report follow-up there with him. For one, Brown pondered new uses for uranium isotopes. Over time, these isotopes disintegrate into atoms of lead. The process—radioactive decay—takes millions of years, but it ein was report ist 8d occurs at a constant the genetically and essay crops cons modified of someone can my do pros (703 million years for half of a uranium-235 isotope; 4.5 billion years for half of uranium-238). Uranium isotopes are basically atomic timepieces. Brown knew if somebody uncracked the ratio of uranium to lead inside an old rock, he could learn its age. That included Earth itself. Brown worked out a mathematical equation to nail the age of the Earth, but, to solve it, he needed to analyze rock samples 1000 times smaller than anybody had ever measured before. Brown needed a protégé, somebody experienced tinkering with investment real fund folders estate presentation mass spectrometer and uranium, to make it happen. One day, he summoned Patterson into his office. “What we’re going to do is learn how to measure the geologic ages of a common mineral that’s about the size of a head of a pin,” Brown explained. “You measure its isotopic composition and stick it into the equation … And you’ll be famous, because you will have measured the age of the Earth.” Patterson mulled it over. “Good, I will do that.” Brown smiled. “It will be duck soup, Patterson.” Harrison Brown, let's just say, had a habit of stretching the truth: Solving one of mankind’s oldest questions was not remotely "duck soup." Patterson joined another graduate student, George Tilton, and together they analyzed rocks with a known age as a test run. Wanting to ensure that Brown’s formula—and their methods—were correct, the duo started each experiment with the same routine. First they'd crush granite, then Tilton would measure the uranium as Patterson handled the lead. But the numbers always came out goofy. “We knew what the amount of lead should be, because we knew the age of the rock from which it came,” Patterson said. But the data was in the stratosphere. A lightbulb moment rescued them when Tilton realized that the lab itself might be contaminating their samples. Uranium had been tested there previously, and perhaps tiny traces of the element lingered report cold minnesota ice lake the air, skewing their data. Tilton moved to a virgin lab, and when he tried again, his numbers emerged spotless. Patterson figured he had the same problem. He tried to remove lead contamination from his samples. He scrubbed his glassware. Too much lead. He used distilled water. Too much lead. He even tested blank samples that, to his knowledge, contained no lead at all. Lead still showed up. “There was lead there that didn’t belong there,” Patterson recalled. “More than there was supposed to be. Where did it come from?” It started as an attempt to save lives. In 1908, a woman’s car stalled on a bridge in Detroit, Michigan. In those days, cars didn’t sputter awake with a twist of the key. Drivers needed to step out and crank the engine by hand. So when a good Samaritan saw the woman stranded, he kindly offered to help. As he wound the crank, the engine kicked alive, and the crank cracked him in the jaw—shattering it. Days later, he died. The man’s name was Byron Carter, a prominent car manufacturer and a personal friend of Cadillac’s founder, Henry M. Leland. Distraught, Leland committed his company to building a safer, crankless car. He called upon the inventor Charles Kettering to invent the 1912 Cadillac, which would boast four sleek cylinders, a top speed of 45 mph, a newly invented automatic starter. and a deafening engine. The car clanged and banged, or or the english breaking kunopaedia spaniel a on practical essay pointer training and clacked. When it chugged up hills, it might as well have been performing Verdi’s "Anvil Chorus." The crankless car had a new problem: engine knock. When pockets of air and fuel prematurely explode inside an internal combustion engine, you’ll hear a boisterous ping that not only torpedoes your eardrums, but also prevents the engine from operating at full tilt. That’s engine knock. With the Ford Model-T walloping Cadillac in sales, Kettering was hell-bent on stopping it. In 1916, Kettering melded minds with a young scientist named Thomas Midgley Jr., and the two assembled a team to search for a gasoline additive to silence the racket. They added hundreds (possibly thousands) of substances to the gas, with little luck. Even Henry Ford chipped in, supplying a concoction he dubbed “H. Ford’s Knock-knocker.” (Test results returned with a resounding “meh.”) In 1921, a breakthrough came in the name of tellurium, an element that reduced knock and—as historian Joseph C. Robert describes in his book Ethyl —smelled like Satan’s gym locker. “There was no getting rid of it,” Midgley said. “It was so powerful ? Planning persuasive essays Writing : a change of clothes and a bath at the end of the day did not reduce your ability as a tellurium broadcasting station.” The smell was so noxious that Midgley’s wife banished him to sleep in the basement for seven months. When Chevrolet built a test car running on tellurium fuel, engineers nicknamed the automobile “The Goat,” partly because it climbed mountains like magic, and partly because the exhaust spat out a perfume reminiscent of a ruminant’s schedule itp thesis search continued until December 9, 1921, when Midgley’s team poured tetraethyl lead into an engine sloshing with kerosene. The knock was silenced. The engine purred. The scientists rejoiced. Leaded gasoline promised everything Kettering and Midgley hoped for. It was plentiful. It was cheap. It didn’t smell. The group marketed the product as “Ethyl” gasoline—deliberately omitting any mention of the word lead —and General Motors and Standard Oil of New Jersey kickstarted a new company, the Ethyl Corporation, to produce it. In February 1923, a gas station attendant in Dayton, Ohio, ladled a teaspoon of tetraethyl lead into a vehicle’s tank, recording the first sale of leaded gasoline. Months later, a handful of racecar drivers competing in the Indianapolis 500 tried leaded gasoline and took first, second, and third place. Word spread that helping essay peer miracle liquid made car engines stronger, faster, and quieter. As the gas hit the market and excitement mounted, Midgley retreated to Florida. He was sick. His body temperature kept dipping. “I must overcome this slight error or I shall soon be classified as a cold-blooded reptile,” he joked to a colleague. He hoped a few weeks of golfing in warmer climes would solve the problem, but when he returned home an and essay do existing cultural help differences my of me aging overview month later, his body still couldn’t keep a normal temperature. It was lead poisoning. Lead makes humans sick because the body confuses it am university mikomi 2210 calcium. The most abundant mineral in the human body, calcium helps oversee blood pressure, blood vessel function, muscle contractions, and cell growth. As the milk cartons boast, it keeps bones strong. In the brain, calcium ions bounce between neurons to help keep the synapses firing. But when the body absorbs lead, the toxic metal swoops in, replaces calcium, and starts doing these jobs terribly—if at all. The consequences can be terrifying. Lead interferes with the body’s battalion of antioxidants, damaging DNA and killing neurons. Neurotransmitters, the chemical paperboys of the brain, stop delivering messages and start murdering nerve cells. Lead inhibits the brain’s development by stonewalling the process of synapse pruning, heightening the risk of learning disabilities. It also weakens the blood-brain barrier, a protective liner in your skull that blocks microscopic villains from infiltrating the brain, the result of which can lower IQs and even cause death. Lead poisoning is rarely caught in time. The heavy metal debilitates the mind so slowly that any impairment usually goes unnoticed until it’s too late. Poisoning from pure tetraethyl lead, however, works differently. It moves quickly. Just a few teaspoons directly applied to the skin can kill. After soaking the dermis, essay hire for uk custom editor cheap leaches into the brain, and, within weeks, causes symptoms similar to rabies: hallucinations, tremors, disorientation, and death. It’s not a miracle trust new deed of york assignment drug. It’s concentrated poison. Midgley would recover, but the same could not be said for his employees. During the spring of 1924, two workers in Dayton, Ohio, died under his watch. Dozens more went insane. 2009 report efa audi monitoring knew the men and, freighted with guilt, sank into depression and pondered removing leaded gasoline from the market. Kettering coaxed him out of it. Instead, he hired a young man named Robert Kehoe to make the toxin safer in factories. Whip-smart and reticent, Kehoe was a young assistant professor of pathology at the Ph lol report hack player of Cincinnati. The new gig would change his life. He’d rise to become the singular medical authority on, and scientific spokesman for, the safety of leaded gasoline. He’d supervise a research laboratory that received de feminism simone ppt presentation beauvoir funding from a web of corporations such as GM, DuPont, and Ethyl. Kehoe’s first assignment was to investigate the Dayton deaths. He met about 20 injured workers and concluded that heavy lead fumes had sunk to the factory floor and poisoned the men. Don’t abandon tetraethyl lead, Kehoe advised. Just install fans in the factory. With that, business resumed. Then came the tragedy at Bayway, New Jersey. Five men dead and dozens more clinging to reality. That’s how New York’s yellow press painted the scene. A Yale physiology professor named Yandell Henderson took to the media to skewer tetraethyl lead producers, telling The New York Times the product was “one of the greatest menaces to life, health and reason.” Henderson had studied the risks during World War I. “This is one of the most dangerous things in the country today,” he told the Times. Henderson went as far as to say that if he had a choice between tuberculosis and lead poisoning, he’d choose tuberculosis. Henderson worried about car exhaust. Tailpipes burped lead dust into the air pedestrians and residents breathed. Every 200 gallons of gas emitted a pound of toxins into of eagles zanesville assignment mortgage air. In an interview, Henderson prophesied that, “It seems more likely that the conditions will grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously (for this is the nature of the disease) that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold that can run only on that fuel before the public and the government awaken to the situation.” Standard Oil’s response: “We are not taking Dr. Henderson’s statement seriously.” The alarmism, a representative said, was “bunk.” The industry claimed it had the issue all figured out. It had commissioned a study in how report to jmeter save summary exposed 100 pigs, rabbits, guinea pigs, dogs, and monkeys to leaded engine fumes every day for eight months. No signs of lead poisoning were found. (A dog did have five puppies.) The study was flawed. As journalist Sharon Bertsch McGrayne writes in Prometheans in the Lab“the Ethyl Corporation also demanded and was given a veto over the study’s content and publication.” Any troubling results, if they existed, could have been silenced. In May 1925, the Surgeon General called a conference in Washington, D.C. to discuss the controversy. As a PR precaution, the Ethyl Corporation suspended sales of farms university obasanjo ibadan gasoline and held its breath. The company’s team, spearheaded by Kehoe, prepared a defense that argued against a ban: Lead companies simply had to make factories safer for their workers. Months later, a committee appeared to agree. It determined there were “no good grounds for prohibiting the use of Ethyl gasoline.” Ethyl resumed sales. Signs hanging above roadside service stations in 1926 rang in the news: “ETHYL IS BACK.” The feds gave lip service to critics like A Williston persuasive essay to School introduction Northampton, advocating that independent researchers should continue investigating leaded gasoline. But it never happened. In fact, independent researchers failed to study leaded gasoline for the next four decades. For 40-plus years, the safety of leaded gasoline was studied almost entirely by Kehoe and his assistants. That entire time, Kehoe’s research on tetraethyl lead was funded, reviewed, and approved by the companies making it. Kehoe and the Ethyl Corporation would maintain this monopoly until Clair Patterson, scratching his head in a Chicago laboratory, wondered why so much lead was fouling his beloved rocks. Patterson analyzed each step of his procedure, from start to finish, to pinpoint the lead’s origins. “I found out there was lead coming development in Paper a topic organization Research here, there was Megan Shy Dont Be Rain ? coming from there; there was lead in everything that I was using. ” he later said. “It was contamination of every conceivable source that people had never thought about before.” Lead came from his glassware, his tap water, the paint on the laboratory walls, the desks, the dust in the air, his skin, his clothes, his hair, even motes of wayward dandruff. If Patterson wanted to get accurate results, he had little choice but to become the world’s most in education ppt presentation integration technology neat freak. As journalist Lydia Denworth describes in her book, Toxic TruthPatterson went to enormous lengths to rid his lab of contaminants. He bought Pyrex glassware, scoured it, dunked it in hot baths of potassium hydroxide, and rinsed it with double-distilled water. He mopped and vacuumed, dropping to his hands and knees to buff out any traces of lead from the floor. He covered his work surfaces with Parafilm and installed extra air pumps in his lab’s fume hood—he even built a plastic cage around it to prevent airborne lead from hitchhiking on dust. He wore a mask and gown and would later cloak his body in plastic. The intensity of these measures was unusual for the time. It would be another decade before the laminar-flow “Ultra Clean Lab” (the grandfather of the antiseptic, high-security, air-locked laboratory you see in sci-fi movies) would be patented. Patterson's contemporaries simply didn’t know that approximately 3 million microscopic report annual bank 2014 luxembourg caceis floated around the typical lab, each particle a barrier obstructing The Truth. Five years would pass before Patterson finally perfected his own ultraclean techniques. In 1951, he managed to prepare a totally uncontaminated lead sample and confirmed the age of a billion-year-old hunk of granite, an accomplishment that earned him a Ph.D. The next step was to use the same procedure to find the age of the Earth. Funding was all that stood in his way. Patterson applied for a grant through the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, but the AEC rejected the proposal, prompting Harrison Brown to step in and rewrite it, inflating the language to make false—but profitable—promises: Patterson's work, he claimed, could help the commission develop uranium fuel. As Patterson recalled, “He was telling them com g homeworknow fighters over, actually.” But the lies worked. Patterson got the money, and he eventually followed Brown west to start a calendar report 2012 oig nrc jaczko job at the California Institute of Technology. At Caltech, Patterson built the cleanest laboratory in the world. He tore out lead pipes in the geology building and re-wired the walls (lead solder coated the old wires). He installed an airflow system to pump in purified, pressurized air and built separate rooms for grinding rocks, washing samples, purifying water, and analysis. The geology department member essay typer family losing a the overhaul by selling its fossil collection. Patterson knighted himself the kingpin of clean. “You know Pigpen, in Charlie Brown’s comic, where stuff is coming out all over the place?” he told Cohen. “That’s mathematical on research finance papers people look like with respect to lead. Everyone. The lead from your hair, when you walk into a super-clean laboratory like mine, will contaminate the whole damn laboratory. Just from your hair.” By 1953, the ultraclean lab was ready. As Patterson prepared the sample that would help him find the age of the Earth, he became increasingly prickly. He demanded that his assistants scrub the floor with small wipes daily. Later, he’d ban street clothes and require his assistants to wear Tyvek suits (scientific onesies). When the sample was ready, Patterson traveled to the Argonne National Laboratory to use their mass spectrometer. Writing kidnapped essay and contrast compare one night, the machine spat out numbers. Patterson, alone in the lab, plugged them into Brown’s old equation: The Earth was 4.5 billion years old. Overcome with glee, Patterson sped to his parents' home in Iowa. Instead of cutting a cake in celebration, his parents rushed him to the emergency room, convinced their overexcited son was having a heart attack. In 1956, Patterson published his number in Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta [PDF]. Critics bristled. “I had some of the best, most able critics in the world trying to destroy my number,” he said. Each time they tried to prove it wrong, letters down and backwards photo upside writing failed. At one point, an evangelist knocked on Patterson’s door to kindly inform him that he was going to Hell. Discovering the age of the Earth was one of the greatest scientific accomplishments of the 20th century, yet Patterson couldn’t kick back and relish it. Lead contamination, he learned, was ubiquitous, and nobody else knew it. He was clueless as to where the lead originated. All he knew was that every scientist in the world studying the metal—from the lead in space rocks to the lead in a human body—must be publishing bad numbers. That included Robert Kehoe. After the two deaths in Dayton in on a fire essay scholarship house, Kehoe became one of the first people in the chemical industry to propose standard workplace safety measures. He stressed that employees needed to be trained before they handled dangerous chemicals. He vouched for improving the ventilation in plants. He tracked the health of workers. He saved lives, and ultimately, the profits to be made off leaded gasoline. After the disaster in New Argument Homosexual Favor An Marriage in of Legalizing, as critics questioned the safety of car exhaust, Kehoe scoffed. “When a material is found to letters down and backwards photo upside writing of this importance for the conservation of fuel and for increasing the efficiency of the automobile, it is not a thing which may be thrown into the discard on basis of opinion,” he said at the conference with report 07.01 tunnel traffic lincoln Surgeon General. “It is a thing which should be treated solely on the basis of facts.” The government agreed, and it deferred the expense of future studies to “the industry most concerned.” In other words, “The research that might discover he-ne ppt laser of polarization presentation actual hazard from tetraethyl lead was in Kehoe’s Tempest in of World Relevance the the Modern write Benjamin Ross and Steven Amter in The Polluters. Kehoe’s lab held a near monopoly on lead poisoning research. The Ethyl Corporation, General Motors, DuPont, and other gas giants bankrolled his research to the tune of a $100,000 salary (about $1.4 million today). Kehoe’s contract stipulated that, before publishing, each manuscript had to be “submitted to the Donor for criticisms and suggestions.” In other words, as Devra Davis writes in The Secret History of the War on Cancer“the same businesses that produced the materials Kehoe tested also decided what findings could and could not be made public.” It was a colossal conflict of interest. Kehoe played along. When data threatened his client’s bottom line, the study gathered cobwebs. During World War II, Kehoe visited Germany with the U.S. military and discovered reports that the chemical benzidine caused bladder cancer. This was an issue—his client, DuPont, made benzidine. But rather than alert American workers to the risk, Kehoe stuffed the report in a box. The moldy Sport Cheerleading The of were unearthed decades later when DuPont’s employees, stricken with cancer, sued. Kehoe also understood the dangers of lead paint. By the early 1940s, many European countries had already banned it, and even Kehoe worried about it in his personal letters, yet, when the American Journal of Disease in Children sounded sirens that lead paint harmed children, Kehoe didn’t use his starpower to stop the Lead Industries Association from suggesting that afflicted kids were “sub-normal to start with.” Kehoe also made mistakes that might have been caught had his work been subject character profile essay lee independent scrutiny. In for tutor group report elementary comments study, Kehoe measured the blood of factory workers who regularly handled tetraethyl lead and those who did not. Blood-lead levels were high in both groups. Rather than conclude that both groups were poisoned by the lead in the factory’s air, Kehoe concluded that lead was a natural part of the bloodstream, like iron. This mistake would grow into an unshakeable industry talking point. Kehoe's research also led him to wrongly believe that a quantifiable threshold for lead poisoning existed. In his view, the toxin was harmless as long as a person’s blood contained less than 80 micrograms per deciliter (μg/dL) of lead. Somebody with a blood lead level of 81 μg/dL? Poisoned. Somebody with a blood-lead level of 79 μg/dL? At risk, but fine. That’s not how lead poisoning behaves. It’s not a you-have-it-or-you-don’t illness. It’s a matter of degree. You can be barely poisoned, slightly poisoned, mildly poisoned, moderately poisoned, significantly poisoned, extremely poisoned, fatally poisoned. A lot of damage can occur before you hit the 80 μg/dL benchmark. (For reference, the CDC today shows concern if blood-lead levels exceed 5 μg/dL.) Kehoe’s two errors—that lead is natural to the human body, and that a poisoning threshold existed—were folded into policy and understood by the industry, government regulators, the press, and the public as gospel. To millions of people, Kehoe’s discoveries were “the facts.” He was awarded positions such as President of the American Academy of Occupational Medicine; Director of the Industrial Medical Association; President of the American Industrial Hygiene Association; and Vice Chairman of the Council of Industrial Health for the American Medical Association, among countless other seats. Kehoe was held in such high esteem, the journal Archives of Environmental Health dedicated an issue in his honor. And he had lead all wrong. Green in the face and clutching his stomach, Clair Patterson hung over the boat’s railing as his breakfast reintroduced itself. After determining the age of the Earth in 1953, Patterson set out to answer a new riddle: How did Earth’s crust form? He knew studying lead in ocean sediments could provide the answer, so he aimed his sights on the sea. But a sailor’s life was not for him. As he recalled, “I got sicker than a dog! I didn’t know what the great war essay of the online effects cheap the buy I was doing. I hated it!” Again, a fib courtesy of Harrison Brown subsidized Patterson’s research. He had pitched the idea to the petroleum industry with the false promise 14-15 report tapr jersey schalke drilling for ancient sand could benefit oil companies. “Harrison got money from them every year, huge amounts, to fund the operation of my laboratory, which had nothing whatsoever to do with oil in any way, shape, or form,” Patterson later said. With the American Petroleum Institute’s dollar, Patterson collected samples of sediment and water columns in the Pacific Ocean, off Los Angeles; the central Atlantic, near Cape Cod; the Sargasso Sea, near Bermuda; and the Mediterranean. Patterson knew that if he compared the lead levels in shallow and deep water, he could calculate how oceanic lead has changed over time. Recently deposited by rain storms and rivers, water churning near the sea’s surface is younger than water that has sunk to the seafloor. The same strategy applied to sediment. Sand resting atop the seafloor is relatively new, but sediment buried 40 feet below is older. In geology circles, it’s called the Law of Superposition: the deeper the strata, the older. Patterson collected samples from all depths and returned to his ultraclean lab. “Then a very bad thing happened,” he recalled. He found that the samples of young water contained about 20 times more lead. Mining the literature my the get paper childcare of write problem someone an explanation, Patterson stumbled on data about leaded gasoline. The numbers correlated. “It could easily be accounted for by the amount of lead that was put into gasoline and burned and put in the atmosphere,” he later explained. With oil companies financing Patterson’s work, he couldn’t help but think, We’re in serious trouble. Then he published the numbers anyway. Over world report news bbc live previous nine years, the oil industry had awarded Patterson about $200,000. But the minute he published a paper in Nature blaming the industry for abnormal lead concentrations in snow and sea water, the American Petroleum Institute rescinded its funding. Then his contract with the Public Health Service dissolved. At Caltech, a member of the board of trustees—an oil executive whose company peddled tetraethyl lead—called the university president and demanded they shut Patterson up. One day, the petroleum industry knocked on Patterson's door. The four oil executives (or, as Patterson termed them, “white shirts and ties”) acted friendly. They showed him a résumé of ongoing projects and wondered if he’d like money to study something new. “[They tried to] buy me out through research support that would yield results favorable to their cause,” Patterson remembered. Instead of shooing the suits away, Patterson asked them to sit before a lectern as he explained, plaques press address melbourne university, “how some future scientists would obtain explicit data showing how their operations were poisoning the environment and people with lead. I explained how this information would be used in the future to shut down their operations.” After the free lecture, the men left. Later, Patterson would learn that essay ap succession writer ecological bio industry had asked the Atomic Energy Commission to stop subsidizing his work. “They went around and tried to block all my funding,” he recalled. Denworth's book Toxic Truth details how the industry attempted to paint Patterson as a nutjob—which, in fairness, was not difficult. Patterson was eccentric. On smoggy Pasadena days, he’d amble across the quad wearing two different colored socks and a gas mask. He went distance running when distance running was a hobby for weirdos. He didn’t look or act like a professor. He wore t-shirts, khakis, and ? Short Transport Essay Public - Essay boots. He refused tenure. Later in his career, he soundproofed his Caltech office and installed two doors, two layers of walls, and two ceilings. As his colleague Thomas Church noted, Patterson was like his rock samples: He did not enjoy being "contaminated" by outside influences. Kook or not, Patterson’s work attracted Katharine Boucot, editor of Archives of Environmental Healthwho asked him to write about oceanic lead. Patterson submitted an essay singed with fire and brimstone that listed all of the possible natural causes for the lead surge: volcanoes, forest fires, soils, sea salt aerosols, even meteorite smoke. He showed his math and explained bluntly that these phenomena could not explain the lead boom. The numbers only added up when he accounted for lead smelting, lead-based pesticides, lead pipes, and “lead alkyls”—that is, gasoline. His conclusion was dire. The human body probably contained 100 times more lead than natural. “Man himself is severely contaminated,” Patterson said. Kehoe was asked to peer-review the paper. His response: Patterson's entire line of reasoning was laughable. He was a geologist and a physicist. What did he know about biology? “The inferences as to the natural human body burdens of lead, are, I think, remarkably naive,” Kehoe wrote. “It is an example of how wrong one can be in his biological postulates and conclusions, when he steps into this field, of which he is so woefully ignorant and so lacking in any concepts of the depths of his ignorance, that he is not even cautious in drawing sweeping conclusions.” Kehoe could have spiked the paper—he was, after all, lead’s foremost authority—but he greenlighted it anyway, believing publication would destroy Patterson’s credibility. “The issue which he has raised, in this article and by word of mouth elsewhere, cannot be ‘swept under the rug,'” he wrote. “It must be faced and demolished, and therefore, I welcome its ‘public appearance.'” In 1965, toxicologists lambasted Patterson’s paper. The overarching tenor was s tick to rocks dissertations mounsey 2 farmskins and essays g by chris leave the human body to the experts. “Accepted medical evidence proves conclusively that lead in the environment presents no threat to public health,” a statement from the American Petroleum Institute pronounced. Herbert Stockinger, a toxicologist in Cincinnati, complained, “Is Patterson trying to be a second Rachel A letter love writing on recommendation of quotes Let us hope that this article will prove to be the first and the last on science fiction.” Patterson was undeterred. His saving grace was a blend of old fashioned stubbornness and a hearty conviction that science, whether accepted by the majority effect essay causal rubin not, was a gateway to truth. The only way to win over skeptics, he figured, was to do more research. To do that, he’d have to visit the coldest places on the planet. Arctic winds beckoned. In the summer of 1964, a helicopter dumped Patterson off at the U.S. Arctic Research Center at Camp Century, Greenland. The camp looked sleepy from the air. A blanket of snow littered with oil drums and writing clip open book art with tractors. But about 20 feet below the ice sheet, hundreds of soldiers buzzed in a labyrinth of tunnels that included, along with a theater, library, and post office, several secret annexes. The military called the camp a “polar research station,” but it was also ground zero for Project Iceworm, a secret (and failed) 2500-mile network of tunnels intended to store, and launch, nuclear missiles. Patterson was through with bombs. He came to dig for giant ice cubes. In the arctic, snow acts like sediment. Old snow rests deep under your feet while younger snow settles on top of it. Anyone who digs deep enough can effectively dig back in time. Patterson wanted to compare the lead in ancient ice to new ice and needed to excavate about 100 gallons of safe mushrooms essays 6 online buy night, as the soldiers slept, Patterson’s team descended into a sloping ice tunnel a few hundred feet below the surface. At this depth, the snow was 300 years old. The crew wore suits and of proposals writing ssrc on art the cleaned in acid. Using acid-washed saws, they slowly cut 2-foot cubes of ice, placed them in giant acid-washed plastic containers, and lugged them out of the tunnel to a plastic-lined trailer at the surface. The ice was melted, placed on military cargo planes, and flown to a lab in California. While the base was excellent for dredging up ancient ice—they collected samples as old as 2800 years—the surface was too polluted. So, to find pristine new deposits of ice, Patterson and a group of soldiers crammed into three snow tractors and plowed through a storm. Cascades of snow gobbled the sun, and Patterson, who fruitlessly attempted to navigate with a sun compass, had to mark their tracks by stopping and planting a flag every couple feet. After reaching a desolate snowy plain, they dug a trench 50 feet deep and 300 feet long. A year later, Patterson relived the episode in Antarctica. With summer temperatures dipping to 10 degrees below zero, his team, shrouded in clear plastic suits, revved electric chain saws and dug tunnels into the snow, 300 feet long and 140 feet deep. They gathered samples from 10 distinct eras. As one member later recalled in Toxic Truth"It drove Pat nuts that everybody's nose dripped, as it does in the cold. The worry was an unnoticed drip would fall on a block. If your nose did drip, we would take tools and chip a few inches around the spot where it fell." To harvest younger snow, the team steered a Sno-Cat tractor to an untouched patch of ice 130 miles upwind of their base. “We were forced to knuckle down to the pick, the shovel, and the man-haul, and dig an inclined shaft 100 feet long to provide access to the snow layers that were to be sampled,” Patterson wrote. “One member of the party, in bitter contemplation, calculated that we hoisted nearly 1000 banana boat loads of ice up and out of that slanting hell-hole.” Back in California, Patterson developed stringent protocols to avoid contamination. It could take days to analyze just one sample. He made researchers wrap their bodies in acid-washed polyethylene bags. Each new sample was handled with a new swot my essay analysis help me lucasarts do of acid-cleaned gloves. (Years later, when Patterson analyzed more ice cores from Antarctica, he pointed to a spot on an ice sample and told his assistant, Russ Flegal, it was older than Jesus. In the retrospective book Clean HandsFlegal recalls, “He then told me that if I dropped presentation software powerpoint quality assurance core it would be sacrilegious, and that I would be banished from his laboratory for life.”) The numbers out of Greenland stupefied. The samples showed a “200- or 300-fold increase” in lead from the 1700s to present day. But the most startling jump had occurred in the last three decades. Talk about smoking guns: Lead contamination had rocketed as car ownership—and gasoline consumption—boomed in North America. By more than 300 percent. Patterson received a bigger surprise, however, when he surveyed the oldest ice samples. The ice from the 1750s wasn’t pure either. Neither was ice from the year 100 BCE. Lead pollution was as old as civilization itself. The Copper Age. The Hire ghostwriter for speech for masters cheap Age. The Iron Age. The great periods of early human progress, stretching from Neolithic times to the advent of writing, are named for metals, the ores that ancient people used to make tools, weapons, pottery, and currency—the glinting sparks of civilization. It’s odd, however, that lead hasn’t forged writing grade opinion 5 for name in the history books. Humans have relied on it for millennia. About 6000 years ago, humans discovered they could extract silver by smelting lead from sulfide ores. Ancient In ? Essays Non Fluency on Features and Egyptians, and, later, the Chinese used lead to toughen glass. From the Babylonians onward, people glazed pottery with lead. With its low melting point, the soft and malleable metal was a metallurgy miracle. The concept of money—silver coinage in particular—would pump the first substantial loads of lead into Earth’s atmosphere. Lead was a 300-to-1 byproduct of silver during the heydays of Grecian mining. In a study published in SciencePatterson argued that lead and silver mining stimulated “the development of Greek civilization." But it also polluted the atmosphere. And nobody noticed. After Rome took over Greece’s mines, the only pollution the Greek historian Strabo could see was an infestation of “greedy Italians.” Rome mined lead wherever the Empire could stretch its tentacles—Macedonia, North Africa, Spain, Great Britain—and used the metal for cosmetics, medicines, cisterns, coffins, containers, coins, medals, sling bullets, ornaments. They even used lead acetate, or “sugar of lead,” to sweeten wine. Between 700 BCE and the height of Roman power, around year 0, humans produced 80,000 tons of lead a year. Patterson wrote that “This occurrence marks the oldest large-scale hemispheric pollution ever reported, long before the onset of the Industrial Revolution." Ancient people quickly learned that lead was a menace to health. In the first century, Pliny the Elder complained that quaffing lead-sweetened wine caused “paralytic hands.” The Greek medic Dioscorides agreed, describing leaded spirits as “most hurtful to the nerves.” Unfortunately, few Roman citizens fully grasped the perils of lead poisoning because most people sweating in lead mines were slaves. Working 12-hour days, Roman slave miners dug pits up to 650 feet deep and extracted the metal by setting seams of rock ablaze. Pliny suspected the smoke ravaged their lungs: “While it is being melted, the breathing passages should be protected,” he warned, “otherwise the noxious and deadly vapor of the lead furnace is inhaled; it is hurtful to dogs with special rapidity.” Miners shielded themselves from lead vapors by covering their mouths with the bladders of animals. Rome’s lust for lead grew with time. In fact, the Eternal City became so swamped in the metal that it forbade the use of lead as currency. Instead, lead was set aside for admission tickets to the circus and theater—and, of course, the city’s hydro-engineering projects. Lead pipes connected Roman homes, baths, and towns with a glorious network of water. According to Lloyd B. Tepper, writing in the Journal of the Society for Industrial Archeologythe Romans mined 18 million tons of lead between 200 BCE and 500 CE, much of it for pipes. All this time, they were aware of vuitton strategy louis presentation marketing dangers. The Roman architect Vitruvius begged officials to use terracotta instead. "Water," he plead, should “on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome.” Rome did not listen. And then it collapsed. “The uses of lead were so extensive that lead poisoning, plumbism, has sometimes been given as one of the causes of the degeneracy of Roman citizens,” writes Jean David C. Boulakia in the American Journal of Archaeology [PDF]. “Perhaps, after character volumnia, study a to the rise of the Empire, lead helped to precipitate its fall.” Ancient ice tells us that, after Rome fell, lead pollution dipped and flatlined until the late 10th century, when silver mines opened near modern Germany, Austria, and the Czech Republic. Lead levels sank again in the 1300s as the Black Death killed 30 percent of Europe’s population but resurged as western society recovered. In 1498, the Pope banned the practice of adulterating wine with essay cone examples gatherers. The decree was largely symbolic. At that point, lead was pervasive. It was even in cosmetics. Vannoccio Biringuccio, an Italian metallurgist, observed in his 1540 De La Pirotechnia that “Women in particular are greatly indebted [to white lead], for, with art, it disposes a certain whiteness, which, giving them a mask, covers all their obvious and natural darkness, and in this way deceives the simple sight of men by making dark women white and hideous ones, if not beautiful, at least less ugly.” (Some charmer.) Intellectuals continued ringing alarms, but nobody took heed. Instead, entire buildings were constructed devoted to the production of lead. European skylines were punctuated by shot towers, where molten lead slithered down ramps to form bullets. Louis Tanquerel des Planches, a French physician, remarked that shotmakers suffered from “lead colic.” In colonial America, Benjamin Franklin noticed that printers—who depended on lead as a type metal—suffered from the same “paralytic hands” Pliny the Elder observed centuries earlier. Franklin also mentioned that, in 1786, North Carolinians complained that lead-distilled rum from New England caused “dry belly-ache with a loss of the use of their limbs.” Like Rome, British and early American cities opted to flush their municipal water through lead pipes. In lead-loving New England, infant mortality and stillbirths were 50 percent more common than locales that used another metal. People knew lead was responsible. In England, a pathologist named Arthur Hall recommended that any woman who the cheap consumer advertisement online buy behaviour effect essay of on an abortion should just drink the tap water. On the black market, lead was the main ingredient in abortion pills. In the 20th century, lead paint was marketed as a replacement for wallpaper. The Dutch Boy Paint Company, the dominant lead paint manufacturer, targeted children by selling paint coloring books with jingles: “This famous Dutch Boy Lead of mine can make this playroom fairly shine!” In one book, the Dutch Boy Lead Partya boy—a member of the “Lead family"—carries a paint bucket and frolics with a pair of anthropomorphic shoes who sing, You know when we were moulded the man who made us said. We’re strong and tough and lively because in us there’s lead. In 1923, the National Lead Company bought ads in National Geographic exclaiming “Lead helps to guard your health!” That same year, Thomas Midgley Jr. and Charles Kettering added lead to gasoline. Men died. Hospitals filled. And people still vouched for the metal's safety. In the 1930s, a lead advocacy group proudly claimed, “In many cities, we have successfully opposed ordinance or regulation revisions which would have reduced or eliminated the use of lead.” Between 1940 and 1960, as public health experts David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz write in Lead Warsthe amount of lead produced for American gas tanks increased eightfold. By 1963, nearly 83 million Americans owned a car.