“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 Itself.”, 2017-05-17 (; backlinks; similar):
[Clair Patterson’s clean-room innovations, reducing bias in chemistry, led to his anti-lead crusade as he discovered that existing data on ‘natural’ lead contamination were useless garbage due to global contamination & corrupt researchers, masking enormous increases, and played a key role in the recognition of its danger and eventual ban.]
…The feds gave lip service to critics like Henderson, 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+ 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.
…scientists pegged the Earth’s age at 3.3 billion years. However, an aura of mystery and uncertainty still surrounded the number…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× smaller than anybody had ever measured before. Brown needed a protégé, somebody experienced tinkering with a mass spectrometer and uranium, to make it happen…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…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?”
…As journalist Lydia Denworth describes in her book, Toxic Truth, Patterson 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” would be patented. Patterson’s contemporaries simply didn’t know that ~3 million microscopic particles floated around the typical lab, each particle a barrier obstructing The Truth. 5 years would pass before Patterson finally perfected his own ultraclean techniques…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 funded 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 what 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.”…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).
…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.
…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× more lead…His conclusion was dire. The human body probably contained 100× more lead than natural. “Man himself is severely contaminated”, Patterson said…The [final] results? The modern American contained nearly 600× more lead than his or her ancestors.
…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 pair of acid-cleaned gloves. 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%. 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 BC. Lead pollution was as old as civilization itself…“The same contamination problem that prevented Patterson from dating the Earth for many years also kept scientists, unknowingly, from measuring accurate concentrations of lead”, Cliff Davidson writes in Clean Hands. “There were plenty of values reported in the scientific literature, but they were mostly wrong.”…For decades, most experts rejected Patterson’s work because they carelessly tested corrupted samples and could not verify his data.
…Patterson’s testimony would influence the Clean Air Act of 1970, which granted the EPA authority to regulate additives in fuel—lead included…By that point, legislators were more apt to listen to Patterson. Once a kooky egghead, he had risen to become a mainstream scientific prophet. He was accepted into the National Academy of Science. He won the Tyler Prize, the greatest environmental science award. An asteroid was even named in his honor. In 1986, the EPA called for a near ban of leaded gasoline.