-Caveat Lector- <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"> </A> -Cui Bono?- THE SECRET HISTORY OF LEAD PAGE 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 But There Is No Alternative Misrepresenting the Surgeon General's committee report findings and glossing over its call for further study, Ethyl medical consultant Robert Kehoe recalled in a 1928 article the government's abdication of its charge: "As it appeared from [the committee's] investigation that there was no evidence of immediate danger to the public health, it was thought that these necessarily expensive studies should not be repeated at present, at public expense, but that they should be continued at the expense of the industry most concerned, subject, however, to the supervision of the Public Health Service." His own study, Kehoe wrote unsurprisingly, failed to "show any evidence for the existence of such hazards." Others were less sanguine about the committee's report and Kehoe's summary of the evidence. Committee member Dr. David Edsall, dean of Harvard's School of Public Health, called the report incomplete and "half-baked." C.E.A. Winslow of Yale recommended that "the search for an investigation of antiknock compounds be continued intensively with the object of securing effective agents containing less poisonous metals (such as iron, nickel, tin, etc.) or no metals at all." Winslow unsuccessfully sought to have the committee mention alternatives to TEL in its final report, forwarding this recommendation to the PHS, along with correspondence from the Ford Motor Company. One letter to Winslow, which is missing from the PHS files in the National Archive but present in his Yale University archive, dated August 15, 1925, reads: Alcohols for motor fuel Further to my letter of June 19th: You may probably have observed the production of synthetic alcohol as brought by the Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik [BASF of I.G. Farben], now being produced in Germany at the rate of 60,000 gallons per month. Such alcohol is reported to be produced for between 10 cents and 20 cents per gallon and has much promise as a mixture with hydrocarbon [gasoline] fuels to eliminate knocking and carbonization. [signed] Wm. H. Smith, Ford Motor Co. Surgeon General Cumming was not interested in alternatives to lead, even though proof of their existence ought to have immediately thrown the veracity of all Ethyl utterances into question. Speaking in August 1925, for instance, Thomas Midgley had told a meeting of scientists, "So far as science knows at the present time, tetraethyl lead is the only material available which can bring about these [antiknock] results, which are of vital importance to the continued economic use by the general public of all automotive equipment, and unless a grave and inescapable hazard rests in the manufacture of tetraethyl lead, its abandonment cannot be justified." Midgley had conveniently overlooked his earlier, high-profile endorsement of ethanol, as would Kettering and the entire US press corps. Kettering was also forgetting Synthol, the octane-boosting alternative he had publicized just months earlier when it looked like Ethyl might be forced to close shop. With the government's de facto seal of approval in hand for TEL, Kettering never again mentioned Synthol. Summarizing his remarks before the Surgeon General's committee, the New York Times reported: "The experience of the company does not offer any promise that any such cheap and efficient anti-knock can be discovered to replace the lead." Uncle Sam Lends a Hand Far from heeding his committee's call for the initiation of further studies on the effects of widespread use of tetraethyl lead, the Surgeon General thrust himself quickly into the role of international cheerleader for Ethyl's lead gasoline additive. In 1928 England's Daily Mail quoted British scientists voicing fear over the potential public health hazard posed by TEL, which was soon to be introduced to the British market by the Anglo-American oil company brand Pratt's. Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, apprised Surgeon General Cumming of this development and received a warm, familiar response. "Your courtesy in keeping us informed of such developments is helpful and I am grateful for its continuance," Cumming replied, before contacting the British ministry. Soon thereafter, England's Ministry of Health would give TEL a clean bill of health, referring to American findings. This would be hard to jibe with a soon-to-be-published report in the British Medical Journal on "the slow, subtle, insidious saturation of the system by infinitesimal doses of lead extending over a long period of time," but Cumming wasn't through yet. Foreshadowing years of sterling service on behalf of Ethyl, the Surgeon General, the nation's highest-ranking medical officer, would put pen to paper again in 1928, encouraging New York City sanitary officials to lift the city's ban on the use of TEL-laced gasoline. "There are no good grounds" for the ban, he implored them. In 1931 Cumming would further assist Ethyl's overseas marketing efforts. Cabling the PHS offices from an international conference in Paris, the Surgeon General directed his minions to send the Swiss minister of health favorable reports on Ethyl. In 1932 the du Pont family would temporarily shift party allegiance and support to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's presidential bid with a sizable contribution to his campaign fund. The Democratic Administration was swift to return the favor. A year after FDR's inauguration, the Surgeon General would busy himself writing letters of introduction for Ethyl officials to public health counterparts in foreign countries. "This will introduce you to Mr. E.W. Webb, President of the Ethyl Gasoline Corp." the letters began. Cumming helpfully assured recipients that Webb had consulted with the PHS and that the PHS had found Ethyl an excellent product and given it a clean bill of health. He also fired off missives advancing Ethyl's cause with pesky state legislatures and public health authorities in the United States who were erecting regulatory hurdles. By 1936 Ethyl fluid would be added to 90 percent of gasoline sold in America--a resounding commercial success. But even this would not be enough. Responding to a complaint lodged by Ethyl that year, the Federal Trade Commission issued a restraining order preventing competitors from criticizing leaded gasoline in the commercial marketplace. Ethyl gasoline, the FTC order read, "is entirely safe to the health of motorists and the public...and is not a narcotic in its effect, a poisonous dope, or dangerous to the life or health of a customer, purchaser, user or the general public." The FTC's action on Ethyl's behalf came in the wake of an ad by the makers of unleaded Cushing Gasoline, who meekly proposed, "It stands on its own merits and needs no dangerous chemicals--hence you can offer it to your customers without doubt or fear." Ethylized Science Dr. Robert Kehoe of the University of Cincinnati, Ethyl's chief medical consultant, would express the opinion following the inconclusive 1926 report of the Surgeon General's committee (of which he was a member) that there was no basis for concluding that leaded fuels posed any health threat whatsoever. And while it is true that tetraethyl lead's opponents could point in 1924 to no exact scientific test of leaded gasoline emissions as incontrovertible proof of their hazards, there was a large body of evidence, dating back 3,000 years, that lead is poison. Though the principals must surely have been aware of this historical evidence, it will suffice to recap merely a few of the contemporaneous scientific descriptions of lead's poisonous effects. In 1910, for instance, Alice Hamilton completed a ground-breaking and widely reported study of the lead industries for the State of Illinois, finding pervasive worker poisoning and conditions markedly worse than in European industry. In 1914 Americans Henry Thomas and Kenneth Blackfan detailed pediatric lead-poisoning death in the case of a boy who ate white-lead paint bitten off a crib railing. By 1921, the year of Midgley's discovery of TEL as an octane-boosting gasoline additive, the weight of the evidence was such that America's National Lead Company, sworn enemy of the antilead movement, was forced to admit grudgingly that its product was indeed a poison, in all its many forms (e.g., carbonate of lead, lead oxides and sulfate and sulfide of lead). The following year, the League of Nations would recommend banning white-lead paints for interior use on health grounds, as many European countries had already done. Establishing a pattern of tolerance for this most dangerous element, the United States declined to adopt the league's resolution. The bankruptcy of TEL supporters' medical opinion was exposed at the time by Yandell Henderson and others. Harvard's Dr. Edsall testified at the Surgeon General's conference: For 100 years and more observations have been made as to the effect of having a noteworthy amount of lead dust around in any occupation.... It is not a question, then, whether there is or is not a hazard.... I am disposed to believe that the hazard is a noteworthy one. How severe I am not prepared to say. The only way in which one can determine how serious it is would be through a very large number of extremely carefully carried-out observations as to what the effects are upon a large number of human beings. By 1928, emboldened by a refreshingly compliant government and TEL's effective victory before the Surgeon General, National Lead and St. Joseph's Lead would form the Lead Industries Association to take back the ground ceded with National Lead's 1921 admission. "Of late the lead industries have been receiving much undesirable publicity," LIA reminded its members, as if it had forgotten in the intervening years that its product was a deadly poison. For years to come, the LIA, on whose board Du Pont and Ethyl officers served, would carefully gather, fund, support and disseminate propaganda supporting its pro-lead views, fighting all who would stand in its way. This disinformation, along with the lack of an adequate regulatory framework and the expense and difficulty of scientifically proving lead's insidious impact--bought manufacturers of lead paint and lead gasoline more than fifty years of unjust deserts. The Kehoe Rule Ethyl president Earle Webb once listed Robert Kehoe as one of three men without whom Ethyl could not have done what it did, and surely this must be so. Hired by Kettering in 1924 on behalf of GM to study hazards of TEL manufacturing plants, the young toxicologist quickly demonstrated the unerring instinct for pleasing one's masters that guarantees one employment of a more lasting nature. In 1925 he was appointed chief medical consultant of the Ethyl Corporation and remained in the post until his retirement in 1958. But it was in Kehoe's day job, as the outspoken director of the Kettering Laboratory--founded with an initial $130,000 gift from GM, Du Pont and Ethyl at the University of Cincinnati, where the lead industry paid Kehoe's salary for half a century--that he really rose to the challenge of promoting TEL. Against Kehoe's lab and decades of its pseudo-science, the general and unfunded concerns of the public health community were doomed for close to fifty years. As Kehoe told a Senate committee with rare accuracy in 1966, "at present, this [Kettering] Laboratory is the only source of new information on this subject [occupational and public health standards for lead] and its conclusions have a wide influence in this country and abroad in shaping the point of view and the activities, with respect to this question, of those who are responsible for industrial and public hygiene." Working on Ethyl's behalf and as a consultant to the lead industry until shortly before his death in 1992, at 99, Kehoe put in exceptionally good innings. (His lab would also certify the safety of the refrigerant Freon, subject of another environmentally insensitive GM patent that would earn hundreds of millions before it was outlawed.) Summing up the findings of a lifetime, Kehoe told Congress that he and his colleagues "had been looking for 30 years for evidence of bad effects from leaded gasoline in the general population and had found none." The credibility of his research had already been undercut and would soon be destroyed. But for many years, Kehoe's findings had been vouched for by semi-private organizations, including the American Public Health Association and the American Medical Association. Although they never undertook to investigate or independently verify his findings, their lap-dog approvals served to bulk up the scholarship in a field that was sparsely scholared. Kehoe's central belief--criticized by medical authorities from Yale, Harvard and Columbia at the Surgeon General's original 1925 conference and thoroughly discredited today, though still embraced by the lead-additive industry--was that lead appeared naturally in the human body; that the high blood-lead levels his test subjects exhibited were normal and healthy. In fact, independent researchers later realized, Kehoe's control patients--the ones who wouldn't be exposed to leaded gas in his studies--were invariably already saturated with lead, which had the effect of making exposed persons' high lead load appear less worrisome. Such later findings confirmed the assertions of Yandell Henderson and others who criticized Kehoe's methodology in 1925 before the Surgeon General's conference. Harvard's Dr. Edsall had reminded the Surgeon General, "In spite of what Dr. Kehoe has just said, I thin that his work will have to be neglected for the reason that the finding of lead in such a large proportion of control people means that however carefully these observations were made there was something wrong technically." Late in his career, Kehoe contended that lead levels in gasoline could--and should--be raised. In recent years, a new generation of academics has singled out Robert Kehoe as the father of a rule, or paradigm, of profound importance, one that was to govern American industry and its parade of hazardous products for much of the twentieth century. By relying on what Jerome Nriagu of the University of Michigan has called the cascading uncertainty rule ("There is always uncertainty to be found in a world of imperfect information"), the lead industry and makers and marketers of TEL gasoline additives were able to argue in 1925: "You say it's dangerous. We say it's not. Prove us wrong." (Or, as Nriagu prefers, "Show me the data.") They still do. As a result, Ethyl had its cake and ate it, several times. If the company's substance checked out as safe, then it would have been shown to have behaved responsibly. If not, it would take an eternity to prove, during which time the company could keep challenging test results and calling for more data. "Both possible outcomes," the historian Alan Loeb has written, "accommodated Ethyl. The general public was dealt all the risk and Ethyl and its owners were insulated from responsibility. To the extent that there was a health consequence, the Kehoe rule placed the burden upon the public." In the past fifty years, nuclear power, tobacco, chemical, asbestos, coal, pesticide and automobile interests have adopted strategies similar to the one developed by Kehoe. Clutching most of the technology and all of the research capital in their own hands, they'll say "Prove us wrong, and we'll change." But confronted with damning evidence, they'll repeatedly challenge the methodology of the studies or the bias of researchers. All of which takes time. When these defenses fail, the whole notion of extrapolating from test results on animals might be questioned. As Professor Herbert Needleman of the University of Pittsburgh has observed, because toxins are not tested on humans, this effectively means that no agent can ever be demonstrated as toxic to industry's satisfaction. Today, application of the Kehoe Rule has special meaning, as multinational corporations seek to introduce myriad genetically engineered crops and products prior to rigorous independent scientific testing. Once again, the burden of proof is being subtly shifted to the doubters, with the entire world cast in the role of guinea pig. In 1925 Haven Emerson, a Columbia professor of public health and former New York health commissioner, said of the TEL experience, "Up to the present time we have almost invariably got our first inkling of a new industrial chemical hazard by some human catastrophe... it seems rather pitiable in a country of such wealth in means and knowledge that we had to wait for a series of human catastrophes to develop the demand for a series of animal experiments." Lead Paint vs. Lead Gas Working alongside Kehoe at first was the Lead Industries Association. Formed primarily to fight restrictions on the use of lead paint, the LIA was also ready to serve as a sort of all-purpose lead-issue obfuscator. Though it wouldn't fund much actual research, the LIA would underwrite the original studies at Harvard in the twenties that isolated a new pseudo-psychological malady named "pica," the so-called unnatural impulse of some small children, mostly nonwhite, to stick lead paint chips in their mouths. Much to LIA's chagrin, Kehoe would break ranks with them on the subject of lead paint, judging their product indefensible in light of all small children's tendency to put things in their mouths. Coming from the lead-happy Kehoe, this was a grim diagnosis indeed. Happily for the doctor, in 1958 LIA and the former American Zinc Institute founded another industry advocacy group, the International Lead Zinc Research Organization, with an eye to promoting global use of the lead additive in fuel and protecting makers of cadmium, the toxic zinc relation often found in batteries. Kehoe and Ethyl would find a happier home at ILZRO, which would fund the occasional scientific study. Dr. Paul Mushak, visiting professor of pediatric toxicology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told The Nation that the industry has tended to underwrite research toward the margins of relevant issues, so as to avoid discovering something it might not like. Kehoe's split with LIA and the lead-paint camp was, oddly, beneficial for both parties. Ever since, the lead-paint and lead-gasoline interests have been able to point the finger at one another when assessing their own responsibility for the global lead-pollution problem, buying more time to sell their products and more time to distance themselves from potential liability. Ethyl Changes Hand By the late thirties Ethyl had sewed up the US market, as noted, and was making major inroads in Europe. After World War II, Third World markets would begin to be opened. On the surface things looked pretty good for the company, which by now had blanketed the earth with its "gift of God." As "The Ethyl Story," an insert in the Ethyl corporation's annual report for 1963, observed with enthusiasm, "today, lead alkyl antiknock compounds are used in more than 98 percent of all gasoline sold in the United States and in billions of gallons more sold in the rest of the world. Leaded gasoline is available at 200,000 service stations in this country and thousands of others around the globe." Strange it was, then, that in 1962 GM and Standard suddenly dumped the Ethyl Corporation on the market. Even more surprising to many was the buyer, the tiny Albermarle Paper Manufacturing Company of Richmond, Virginia, and the structure of the deal: It was the modern world's first recorded leveraged buyout. Albemarle, owned by the Gottwald family, had acquired Ethyl, eighteen times its size, with $200 million of borrowed money, making the front page of the New York Times. "It was like a Mom and Pop grocery buying the A&P!" remarked an incredulous Monroe Jackson Rathbone, Standard Oil of New Jersey's president, after presumably taking a back seat in the negotiations. No one who's talking knows why GM wanted out of Ethyl in 1962. Ethyl's official historian notes dryly that profits were flat in the late fifties. The company's TEL patents had expired in 1947, and this allowed Nalco, PPG and Houston Chemical to get into the TEL game on the back of Ethyl's yeoman work. But Ethyl was still the 800-pound gorilla in the tetraethyl arena; overall, profits were pleasingly plump and Ethyl's annual reports were upbeat. A more important factor may have been the sense that antitrust was in the air, with the du Pont family being ordered by the government during this period to divest billions in GM shares. Ethyl's incestuous paternity and its unseemly relations with Nazi Germany during World War II (see sidebar) were reasons to avoid closer scrutiny by a nosy government. And, just perhaps, GM might have known something heavy was coming. Ethyl's new owners would, in fact, soon find themselves staring at more worrisome smoke signals than a patch of duff profits. In July 1943 the Los Angeles Times reported the city's first major smog episode. In 1950 Dr. Arie Haagen-Smit reported that the interaction of hydrocarbons (HC) and oxides of nitrogen (NOX) caused smog in Los Angeles. By 1953 automobiles would be identified as the region's largest source of hydrocarbons. Though they may or may not have known it in 1962, the makers of TEL would soon be staring down the barrel of a gun--the anti-air pollution movement. * * * American auto makers saw the threat that air pollution posed to their business. In the mid-fifties they'd concluded a formal but secret agreement among themselves to license pollution-control technologies jointly and not publicize discoveries in the area without prior approval of all the signatories, a pre-emptive strike against those who would pressure them to install costly emissions controls. The effect of their pact would be to stifle the development of these much-needed devices and technologies. When their agreement came to the Justice Department's attention in 1969, the fallout from the exposure of their perfidy and mounting awareness of the nation's out-of-control smog problem would guarantee passage of air-pollution laws that would eventually put lead out of business in America. By this time, the legislative mood had changed as it pertained to the automobile, fueled in large measure by the work--and persecution, by GM--of a young lawyer and Congressional aide named Ralph Nader, who, after raising serious questions about auto safety, had been followed and harassed by GM's private detectives. Crucially, too, by 1969 the entire Kehoe view of natural human lead burdens had been knocked out--with one punch--by Dr. Clair Patterson, a California Institute of Technology geochemist. A onetime member of the Manhattan Project, Patterson is widely credited with giving us our most accurate estimate of the earth's age--4.55 billion years. With the publication in 1965 of his seminal work, "Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man," in the Archives of Environmental Health, the scientific world had its hardest proof ever that high background lead levels in industrial lands were man-made and endemic. Noticing heavy planetary lead contamination in the process of establishing the age of the planet, Patterson detailed how industrial man had raised his lead burden 100 times and levels of atmospheric lead 1,000 times. Kehoe's rule of error ended in a flash. Kehoe held his head high in his remarks to Edmund Muskie's Congressional clean air subcommittee in 1966, but Patterson had turned him into an academic train wreck. Unlike Kehoe, Patterson utilized state-of-the-art methods to avoid subject contamination with background lead. Analyzing the 1,600-year-old bones of pre-Columbian humans, he showed that the twentieth-century human lead burden was seriously elevated. Though Patterson's work was widely hailed by the scientific community (it was the reason Kehoe was humored, rather than respected, by the Muskie committee), the paper earned the professor a visit from representatives of the Ethyl corporation, who, in Patterson's words, tried to "buy me out through research support that would yield results favorable to their cause." Instead of joining forces with Ethyl, Patterson delivered a lecture assailing the company's activities and predicting the demise of their TEL operation. Following these events, his longstanding contract with the Public Health Service was not renewed, nor was a substantial contract with the American Petroleum Institute. Members of the board of trustees at Cal Tech leaned on the chairman of his department to fire him. Others have alleged that Ethyl offered to endow a chair at Cal Tech if Patterson was sent packing. In January 1969 the four major US auto companies and their trade association--along with seven manufacturers of trucks and cabs, listed as co-conspirators--were accused by the Justice Department of conspiracy to delay development and use of devices to control air pollution from cars, based on their secret agreement. Though they would settle the government's suit in September by agreeing to terminate their compact as well as all joint research, publicity or lobbying on emissions issues, Detroit's position vis-�-vis air pollution had been severely compromised. Ethyl was on its own now, and it was fair and easy game to take the fall. On January 14, 1970, GM president Ed Cole announced to a flabbergasted audience the company's intention to meet pending clean-air laws with catalytic converters beginning in 1974. Attached to automotive exhaust systems, these devices trap many harmful emissions. However, the catalysts' active element, platinum, is expensive, a real problem when it is rendered instantly inoperative (and the car undrivable) by the lead in "ethylized" gasoline. Farewell, then, leaded gasoline. Ethyl was livid. As an authorized corporate biographer wrote some years later, "Here was General Motors, which had fathered the additive, calling for its demise! And it struck some people as incongruous--not to use a harsher word--for General Motors to sell half of what was essentially a lead additive firm for many millions and then to advocate annihilation of the lead antiknock business." "'Get the lead out' has become a slogan in every household," Lawrence Blanchard Jr., an Ethyl exec, complained. "I still stay awake some nights trying to figure out how we got into this mess." <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are not allowed. 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