Landing in the history books for discovering just one new thing about the universe is impressive enough. Clair Cameron Patterson, though? The mind reels thinking how different the planet would be now if Patterson hadn’t built his clean room, then fought to ward off one of Thomas Midgley’s more haunting creations.
Today’s Moment of Science… the lead that binds us.
After getting his masters degree in nine months, Clair Patterson went to work on the atomic bomb in 1944. His mass spec was put to work isolating the highly useful and a smidge radioactive uranium-235. After the bombs were dropped, feeling the weight of what he’d been accessory to, he left to pursue his PhD. He jumped from finding ways to end the planet to searching for its origin story.
How do you determine the age of a planet, exactly? Cut it open and look for rings? Check its glabella lines? Phone up Hawaii for the long form birth certificate?
Uranium decays into lead at a steady rate because radioactive elements are sneaky buggers. This means that when you find a chunk of uranium with some lead in it, age can be determined by measuring the ratio of uranium to lead.
Sounds simple enough. Get a uranium sample from a meteorite, analyze, throw Earth its super sweet zillionth birthday party.
The amount of lead in Patterson’s samples didn’t track. It kept measuring high, like either they’d misjudged the planet’s age or there was a source of contamination. When blanks that were supposed to be lead free tested positive for lead, Patterson’s suspicion that it was environmental contamination solidified.
Patterson didn’t merely clean up contamination to get an answer. He built a fortress from it. In the Ultra Clean Lab of his own creation, he was able to properly analyze a sample in 1953, determining that Earth was 4.5 billion years old.
But about all that fucking lead.
Workers were getting sick in tetraethyl lead (TEL) factories, and I don’t mean a sniffle. They were jumping out of windows. Some said it felt like bugs crawled under their skin. They were hallucinating. They were dying.
A headline in the New York Times began “ODD GAS KILLS ONE, MAKES FOUR INSANE.” The four also died. Incidents like this continued through our history with TEL.
Robert Kehoe, a toxicologist who made a handsome living telling people lead was safe, investigated one of the plants where workers were getting sick. He concluded lead was the problem, but that installing fans would fix everything.
Dr. Clair Patterson did not fucking build an Ultra Clean Room just to have some asshole claim you could get rid of lead by blowing on it.
Patterson collected samples. From mountain tops and ocean depths, the picture became clear. Car exhaust had scattered about a thousand times more lead into the atmosphere than naturally occurred. It also raised the amount of lead in humans significantly.
Kehoe would argue this was our naturally occurring lead level. Patterson was an alarmist, he would successfully claim for years. Kehoe’s refrain was that they needed more evidence to prove it was dangerous, not that he needed more evidence to show it was safe.
This feels vaguely familiar. I’m trying to think of a time in recent memory when half a million Americans died in a year from an invisible monster and a bunch of capitalists were like “show us proof it’s killing people” and they still didn’t believe it even after all the fucking death.
Can’t put my finger on it.
It was only after Patterson drilled into the ice cores in Greenland that he had proof of how much lower our atmospheric lead was centuries ago. The ice core acted as a timeline of when lead use waxed and waned through history. Lead levels climbed and fell with the Roman Empire. It climbed again with industrial use after the 900s and then dropped after the Black Death wiped out a third of the population of Europe.
By far, the highest spike was after the widespread adoption of cars in the last few decades, unwittingly aerosolizing poison.
The fight to get rid of lead was an uphill battle. Even knowing for centuries that it was dangerous. Even with all the workers who had lost their minds and their lives at multiple factories. Even with the fucker who invented tetraethyl lead getting lead poisoning.
Kehoe and Patterson both testified to a congressional panel in 1966. Kehoe told his rehearsed lies, and Patterson confirmed what they were slow to accept; it’s the lead, stupid.
Unleaded gasoline became widely available in the 1970s, and legislation from that decade started to reduce its use. Though it was all but gone by then, it took until 1996 for lead to be banned.
(It’s still used though, and isn’t that the stuff of nightmares?)
This has been your Moment of Science, wondering what we’ll figure out has been killing us thirty years too late.
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