The political struggle over the introduction of leaded gasoline marked a historical watershed, a moment that would help define the future direction of technological development and corporate power in American society. The automobile was fast becoming the mechanical “chicken in every pot” that each American family craved as a symbol of personal financial success. Simultaneously it was coming to symbolize the idea that technological innovation marked the way forward for human freedom and progress. “No-knock” gasoline meant that automobile engines would have more power, more efficiency, more speed—in short, everything that modern society has come to see as desirable indicators of progress. The worker poisonings at several different locations suggested, however, that this progress might come at a great price. No one knew or could even imagine yet the sheer number of automobiles that would be racing down public highways 50 years hence, but it was clear that the lead going into gas tanks would exit through the tailpipe—not as a liquid but as an aerosol, making it almost entirely bioavailable from the moment it left the engine. It would float in the air, then gradually settle to the ground, contaminating streets and soil.
A proper, precautionary response to the lesson learned from worker exposures would have been to ban leaded gasoline. Instead, automakers and government officials preferred to assume that the amount of lead in leaded gasoline was so small as to present no danger. In a letter to the U.S. Surgeon General, DuPont’s chairman stated that this question “had been given very serious consideration . . . although no actual experimental data has been taken.” Even without data, he was confident that “the average street will probably be so free from lead that it will be impossible to detect it or its absorption.” In order to minimize public concern about the product’s potential hazard, leaded gasoline was given the brand name Ethyl, with the word “lead” deliberately omitted.
For help in generating a scientific rationale for the introduction of leaded gasoline, General Motors turned to the U.S. Bureau of Mines. As an official arm of the U.S. government, the Bureau of Mines purported to offer an “independent” and hence reliable assessment of the safety risks involved with leaded gas, but in fact its independence was compromised at multiple levels. Its history with respect to the safety of mineworkers had shown it to be a pliable tool of industry. In reality it was an institution that existed to promote and support the mining industry, and tetraethyl lead promised to create a huge new market for mined lead. Worst of all, GM was paying the Bureau to conduct its study on the safety of leaded gas—creating an obvious conflict of interest, as several prominent public health specialists pointed out to little avail. “It seems to me extremely unfortunate that the experts of the United States Government should be carrying out this investigation on a grant from General Motors,” wrote Dr. Yandell Henderson, a leading public health physiologist at Yale University, pointing to the “urgent need for an absolutely unbiased investigation.”34
Just as the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation had taken the word “lead” out of its own name, the Bureau of Mines went out of its way to omit references to lead in its internal correspondence regarding the GM-funded study. Questioned about this omission, a Bureau of Mines official replied that it was deliberate. “If it should happen to get some publicity accidentally, it would not be so bad if the word ‘lead’ were omitted as this term is apt to prejudice somewhat against its use,” he stated. Censoring the word “lead” out of research into lead toxicity strays considerably, of course, from what might be considered strict scientific rigor. Not surprisingly, the Bureau of Mines study produced a scientific whitewash, which was promptly released as “proof” that “there is no danger of acquiring lead poisoning through even prolonged exposure to exhaust gases of cars using Ethyl Gas.”
In addition to the Bureau of Mines, industry turned for scientific backing to the Charles F. Kettering Foundation and the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology. Forerunners of today’s Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research, both the foundation and the laboratory were founded by Charles Kettering, a General Motors executive who had been directly involved in the company’s efforts to develop tetraethyl lead as a gasoline additive. The laboratory’s first director, Robert Kehoe, was the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation’s medical director. He quickly became the most vocal scientist in the United States on the subject of lead hazards. His writings, which remained influential well into the 1960s, claimed that lead occurs “naturally” in human beings and that the body “naturally” eliminates low-level lead exposures. At “natural” low levels, it was safe. The only exposures that mattered, he said, were acute exposures like the worker poisonings that had occurred at the “house of butterflies.” This formulation of the facts, which has since been conclusively refuted, provided the scientific weapon that industry needed to fight off the threat that lead poisoning might be environmentally defined and that tetraethyl lead might be banned.
God, Gas, and Civilization
On May 20, 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General convened a national conference that brought together representatives from labor, business, and the public health community to discuss the future of tetraethyl lead. “At this conference the ideologies of the different participants were clearly and repeatedly laid out and provide an important forum in which we can evaluate the scientific, political, economic, and intellectual issues surrounding this controversy,” Rosner and Markowitz observe. “In the words of one participant, the conference gathered together in one room ‘two diametrically opposed conceptions. The men engaged in industry, chemists, and engineers, take it as a matter of course that a little thing like industrial poisoning should not be allowed to stand in the way of a great industrial advance. On the other hand, the sanitary experts take it as a matter of course that the first consideration is the health of the people.’ ”35
Frank Howard of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation provided industry’s viewpoint. “Our continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization,” he told the conference, describing the discovery of leaded gasoline as a “gift of God. . . . Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?” he asked. “I think it would be an unheard-of blunder if we should abandon a thing of this kind merely because of our fears.”36
Not everyone shared this faith, however. Yandell Henderson, the Yale physiologist who had criticized the Bureau of Mines study, warned presciently that as the automobile industry expanded, hundreds of thousands of pounds of lead would be deposited in the streets of every major city of America. “The conditions would grow worse so gradually and the development of lead poisoning will come on so insidiously . . . that leaded gasoline will be in nearly universal use and large numbers of cars will have been sold . . . before the public and the government awaken to the situation,” Henderson said.37
In fact, even Henderson’s warning turns out to be a gross underestimate. By the mid-1970s, 90 percent of the gasoline used for automobiles in the United States was formulated with ethyl. During the 60 years that leaded gasoline was used in the United States, some 30 million tons of lead was released from automobile exhausts. “When many cars were getting just ten miles to a gallon in stop-and-go traffic, a busy intersection might have gotten as much as four or five tons of lead dumped on it in a year,” notes Howard Mielke, an environmental toxicologist and lead expert at the College of Pharmacy at Xavier University of Louisiana, in New Orleans. “That’s roughly equal to having a lead smelter at every major intersection in the United States. As a result, there is a very, very large reservoir of lead in soil.”38
Industry trade associations, in particular the Lead Industry Association, vigilantly responded to research that might have alerted the public to lead’s environmental risks. In 1939, Dr. Randolph Byers, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital, tracked the development of 20 children who had been treated successfully for lead poisoning. He found that even though they had been cured of their acute symptoms, many were experiencing profound learning disabilities and showed evid
ence of personality disorders. The lead industry responded by threatening Byers with a million-dollar lawsuit. In 1955, a study of Philadelphia tenements revealed that the city’s children were becoming ill and dying from eating chips of lead-based paint. This, too, failed to have any appreciable impact on public perceptions or public policy. In the 1960s, the lead industry tried to have a scientist fired from the California Institute of Technology after his research indicated that leaded gasoline posed a risk to public health. “It really is a sorry track record of dirty tricks and dirty science to promote the broader use of lead,” says Don Ryan of the Alliance to End Childhood Lead Poisoning.39
The Industrial Hygiene Foundation, which had previously risen to the defense of the “dusty trades” in the matter of silicosis, also helped to disseminate the pro-lead writings of the Kettering Foundation’s Robert Kehoe. It argued against the need for government regulations on lead, and railed against those who “exaggerate and dramatize accidental occurrences and alleged injurious effects which have not been established.”40 IHF’s complaint reflected a common industry approach to environmental as opposed to occupational health risks. High-level, occupational exposures like the “house of butterflies” poisonings create obvious, acute responses. The effect of lower-level environmental exposures, however, is typically less obvious and harder to establish scientifically beyond all reasonable doubt. A commonsense precautionary approach would have aimed at preventing even low-level exposures, but in the absence of absolute proof of harm, industry preferred to characterize such precautions as extreme, unscientific, and unnecessary. Thanks to this industry campaign, the first U.S. government regulations on gasoline lead emissions were not issued until 1973. For children, whose developing bodies are much more sensitive to lead than are adults’, even those regulations would prove inadequate.
Faster Cars, Slower Kids
The dangers of lead exposure first came to the attention of Herbert Needleman in the 1950s, while he was still a student in medical school. To help cover his tuition, Needleman took a summer job as a day laborer at DuPont’s chemical plant in Deepwater, New Jersey. He noticed that one group of older workers kept to themselves, moving and speaking slowly and awkwardly, spending their breaks staring into space. His coworkers told him that they were the survivors of the “house of butterflies”—deeply damaged, but still able to work.
Needleman began reading the available literature on lead poisoning and was struck in particular by the work that Byers had done decades earlier showing long-term effects of lead on children. In 1974, he undertook his own study of 2,500 first- and second-graders. Lead tends to accumulate in bones and teeth, and by testing children’s “baby teeth,” he was able to determine which kids had experienced higher-than-average lead exposures. The results, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1979, were explosive, showing impaired mental development even at levels of exposure that had previously been considered safe. In addition to having lower intelligence, lead-exposed children are more likely to be hyperactive, suffer from attention deficits, or engage in violent behavior and delinquency.
“The paper was devastating to the lead industry and came at a critical time,” observes writer Thomas A. Lewis. “A federal ban on lead in household paint had taken effect in 1977. Exposure to lead in the workplace had come under strict monitoring and remediation requirements under the 1978 Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA). . . . Needleman’s work suggested that far more stringent regulations were needed.”
Industry’s experts, of course, disagreed—in particular, Dr. Claire Ernhart, a developmental psychologist at Case Western University who has received substantial grants from the industry-funded International Lead Zinc Research Organization. Ernhart also serves periodically as a courtroom “expert witness” for defendants in cases involving lead contamination and cleanup. In 1982, for, example, she testified in favor of the lead industry before an EPA panel that was contemplating phasing out all leaded gasoline. More recently, she served as an expert witness for a land-lord who was sued after a young girl developed severe brain damage as a result of ingesting lead paint.
In 1981, Ernhart formally accused Needleman of flawed research, leading to a two-year EPA investigation by a panel of six outside experts. After reviewing and reanalyzing his data, the panel found some inconsequential statistical errors and concluded that his data was insufficient to support the hypothesis that low levels of lead impaired children. The panel also concluded that Ernhart’s data was insufficient to refute Needleman’s hypothesis, but Ernhart had the benefit of a coordinated PR campaign on her side. The firm of Hill & Knowlton—then the world’s largest PR firm—“papered the world” with a draft copy of the EPA panel’s report, in the words of EPA senior scientist Joel Schwartz. Copies were sent to journalists throughout the United States, accompanied by a cover letter claiming that the EPA advisory panel had rejected Needleman’s findings. In fact, Needleman’s point-by-point response to the EPA panel’s criticisms was so persuasive that the agency ended up reversing its position and adopting his findings as part of the basis for restricting lead in gasoline. Hill & Knowlton stood their course. “To this day they are circulating the draft report,” Schwartz noted in 1992.41
In 1991, Needleman was scheduled to testify against a lead smelter in a Superfund case involving the cleanup of lead tailings. Ernhart and another psychologist, Sandra Scarr, were hired as expert witnesses for the defense. The case was settled out of court but sparked a renewed attack on Needleman’s credibility. In a letter to the National Institutes of Health, Ernhart and Scarr charged him with scientific misconduct and threw in a new claim that Needleman had “failed to cooperate” with the earlier investigation. His university convened a new inquiry, and although it found “no evidence of fraud, falsification or plagiarism,” it added that it could not “exclude the possibility of research misconduct” and recommended further investigation. The process dragged into 1992, when Needleman requested and obtained an open hearing so that he could publicly confront his accusers. During two days of testimony, Needleman brought forth other scientists to testify on his behalf, including Joel Schwartz from the EPA.
The charges by Ernhart and Scarr were based on arcane statistical details. Essentially, they were claiming that he had manipulated variables in his data to produce a biased, anti-lead result. Needleman’s scientific defenders, however, showed that even when those variables were taken out of the analysis, the result would be essentially identical to the conclusion that Needleman had published in 1979—namely, that for every 10 parts per million increase of lead in a child’s tooth there was a two-point drop in IQ. After two months of deliberation, the full hearing board concluded that no evidence suggested scientific misconduct, although it added that Needleman’s research methods had been “sub-standard.” Outraged, Needleman filed a lawsuit to force the university to retract this finding.
The matter was referred to the federal Office of Research Integrity for yet another hearing. Nearly two years later, ORI found him innocent of intentional scientific misconduct, again noting that he had made “numerous errors and misstatements,” mostly of a statistical nature that did not affect his conclusions—the same result, in other words, as that of the previous 1981 investigation. After 13 years of harassment, he had managed, more or less, to clear his name. Nevertheless, he said in 1995, “The misrepresentation is still being used by people in the lead industry to try to discredit my work.”42
“When U.S. callers dial an (800) lead industry hotline, they are sent a thick packet of information, including a quasi-scientific paper that questions the work of [lead researcher] Ellen Silbergeld and others, and a Wall Street Journal story about the integrity charges brought against Needleman; a more recent Journal article by the same reporter, describing Needleman’s vindication before NIH, is not included,” noted Common Cause magazine in 1992. “The packets are issued by Edelman Public Relations Worldwide, which is under contract to the Lead Industries Association.”43
Winners and Losers
Herbert Needleman’s work is a success story, relatively speaking. His research has been confirmed by dozens of separate scientific studies conducted by other researchers and has become generally accepted. Thanks to federal regulations that followed from this research, the amount of lead in gasoline in the United States has dropped 99.8 percent from pre-1970s levels. The amount of lead found in the blood of Americans has also dropped dramatically.
Even today, however, the average North American carries between 100 and 500 times as much lead in his or her blood as our preindustrial ancestors. In cities where there has been a high density of automobile traffic, adults have blood-lead levels of about 20 to 25 micrograms per deciliter—roughly half the level at which lead exposure leads to impairment of peripheral nerves. No other toxic chemical has accumulated in humans to average levels that are this close to the threshold for overt chemical poisoning. How has this affected us? Has it made us less intelligent, less rational? As the lead industry will be the first to tell you, it is difficult if not impossible to answer these questions with any degree of scientific precision.
What we do know is that the lead industry continues to lobby, even today, against measures such as an excise tax on lead that would discourage its use and generate funds to help clean up its toxic legacy. Cleanup is needed because some three million tons of lead remain on the walls of homes that were built and painted prior to 1970. Another five million tons is found in the soil near busy roadways. Lead from batteries ends up in waste dumps and incinerators and enters people’s drinking water through the lead in plumbing fixtures. Opposition to a cleanup comes from a diverse array of economic forces: the National Association of Water Companies, which doesn’t want to replace lead pipes; the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Home Builders, which want to avoid the costs of cleaning up lead-painted homes; the electronics, plumbing, and ceramics industries, all of which use lead in their products. “The war over lead, like so many consumer and environmental problems, is largely waged out of public view, in the bureaucratic and congressional trenches,” observes Common Cause. “It is at this unglamorous level that industry goes head to head with government rule makers, wearing down their resistance and often winning through brute persistence.” 44 It is a war, in other words, in which advocates for public health are perpetually outnumbered and outmaneuvered by expert hired guns whose mission, it seems, is literally to pump the public full of lead.
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