Toxic Truth: A Scientist, a Doctor, and the Battle over Lead

by Lydia Denworth

They didn't start out as environmental warriors. Clair Patterson was a geochemist focused on determining the age of the Earth. Herbert Needleman was a pediatrician treating inner-city children. But in the chemistry lab and the hospital ward, they met a common lead. It was literally everywhere-in gasoline and paint, of course, but also in water pipes and food cans, toothpaste tubes and toys, ceramics and cosmetics, jewelry and batteries. Though few people worried about it at the time, lead was also toxic.

In Toxic Truth , journalist Lydia Denworth tells the little-known stories of these two men who were among the first to question the wisdom of filling the world with such a harmful metal. Denworth follows them from the ice and snow of Antarctica to the schoolyards of Philadelphia and Boston as they uncovered the enormity of the problem and demonstrated the irreparable harm lead was doing to children. In heated conferences and courtrooms, the halls of Congress and at the Environmental Protection Agency, the scientist and doctor were forced to defend their careers and reputations in the face of incredible industry opposition. It took courage, passion, and determination to prevail against entrenched corporate interests and politicized government bureaucracies. But Patterson, Needleman, and their allies did finally get the lead out - since it was removed from gasoline, paint, and food cans in the 1970s, the level of lead in Americans' bodies has dropped 90 percent. Their success offers a lesson in the dangers of putting economic priorities over public health, and a reminder of the way science-and individuals-can change the world.

The fundamental questions raised by this battle-what constitutes disease, how to measure scientific independence, and how to quantify acceptable risk-echo in every environmental issue of from the plastic used to make water bottles to greenhouse gas emissions. And the most basic question-how much do we need to know about what we put in our environment-is perhaps more relevant today than it has ever been.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, History, Medicine, Environment, Health

256 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2009

About the author

Lydia Denworth is a Brooklyn-based science journalist whose work is supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. A contributing writer for Scientific American and Psychology Today, she has also written for the Atlantic and the New York Times.

Reviews

[Charlene · Rating 5 out of 5]

Note to author: If you make a second addition, move the chapter about measuring lead levels to much later in the book. Having it so early set a tone for the book that made it feel like reading a textbook. Since the rest of the book is not textbook like, and is rather amazing, the initial tone set doesn't do justice to the book at all and will lose readership, which is a shame because the subject is so important and interesting, it should be a staple in people's book collection.

Review:

Don't be put off by the very first part of the book. It would have benefitted from better editing. Right off the bat, the author went into great depth about how lead is measured. Typically, I love when authors give a lot of detail about the science. In fact, when reading books about science, the more detail, the better. As a rule, I don't just want to know about what an atom is. I want to know about the quarks, their spin, and how the strong and weak forces help them create the world of matter we know. I don't just want to know that earth swallows tectonic plates. I want to know how much H+ that creates at the hydrothermal vents. I usually want to know it all. In this case, even I was put off a bit by the lead measuring techniques and wondered if perhaps this wasn't the book for me. It got much better. I suggest skipping the entire chapter on measuring lead levels and going back to it, if you desire, after you read the rest of the book.

The remainder of the book played out like a mystery. After introducing strange illness, later determined to be lead poisoning, the author detailed how scientists went about figuring out that lead was the culprit. There is a section on the men who worked with lead, and how it caused their deaths, that made me think about the book The Radium Girls that I had just read. So many unfortunate souls had to die so that we who live in the future could live a life with much lower adverse health risks. I also really enjoyed reading about how companies reacted to scientific data about the health concerns of lead. People making money from lead, not surprisingly, fought hard to stop any research and worked even harder minimizing the negative effects of lead on health. Even some researchers, who were warning the public about the dangers of lead, went over to the Darkside as soon as they were funded by the lead corporations and began singing the praises of lead. I know it is how the world works, but to see the specific ways in which powerful and wealthy human beings made the dollar far more important than human lives and human wellness is always so shocking.

Overwhelmingly though, scientists agreed about the harmful effects of lead. One scientists calculated how much "natural" lead a hominid would have in their blood. That is, with just the noxious gas spilling out of volcanoes and the lead that existed prior to humans freeing lead from the earth and releasing it as a waste product into the atmosphere, how much lead would a body have? How much lead can a body ingest before it gets poisoned?

Lead has been really helpful in building society, particularly for helping our engines run. Old engines used to knock and not work very well. Scientists worked with heavier and heavier metals, adding the metals to the engine fuel, until it ran smoothly. It turned out that since lead was a particularly heavy metal, it did the best job of fixing our early engine problems. Soon consumers used leaded fuel as a matter of course. The lead that was expelled from the engines and released into the atmosphere got taken up by oceans and plants. It ended up in the soil. In short, all that progress was great for getting around but terrible for our well being. It was particularly terrible for developing brains. The younger a person was when exposed to lead and the more lead exposure, the worse their symptoms.


The fight to bring science to the forefront, to limit the amount of lead allowed in the atmosphere reminds me a lot of the current climate change "debate". Corporate leaders began spreading the message that lead in the body was natural, since bodies typically have some lead from non-man made sources such as volcanoes. The problem is that the preindustrial level of lead is extremely low. Post leaded gas, leaded paint, and other industrial contributors, resulted in the rise of levels in the body rose to an alarming degree. Such high levels cause neurological symptoms (and like before, the younger the age upon exposure, the worse the damage and the more exposure, the more damage). When science began to prevail in it became undeniable that high lead in the atmosphere created a massive health crisis, and the corporations could no longer float the argument that lead was not harmful, they began to fight with each other. For example, "Most of the lead comes from paint!," to which the paint industry responded, "No, it comes from leaded gasoline! Those guys, and not our safe paint, is the problem." It was intensely interesting to read about the various techniques the lead industry employed to keep being allowed to fill the air and soil with this poison.

Don't get me wrong. I love tech. I love progress. I fully understand that waste products in general are a side effect of progress. I understand that it's difficult to find ways to still have the progress while keeping the planet clean. I am under no delusion that it's even possible. We would have to go back to pre-civilization, where we travel from cave to cave foraging for food along the way. We would have to give up the production of clothing, housing, transportation, and more importantly hospitals and universities that have contributed to our better overall health. I am merely saying that it is necessary to fight to keep levels of harmful substances as low as humanly possible. Society is engaging in a fight now about the use of coal, a substance that causes cancer and shortens lifespan by years. In America, we try not to use it (well that was before Trump and his magic "clean" coal. LOL) or we put expensive filters on it when we do use it. In china, the air is so polluted and toxic, the people now have to wear surgical masks to simply walk around. Even though we farm out our coal projects, that pollution makes it way back to us. Clouds pick up the waste products emitted from burning coal and carries it around the world, including to the USA. So even though our levels of coal waste are not as high as the waste in China, where it is extremely concentrated, we are still polluting our own land when we outsource. We are certainly polluting the entire planet. The oceans and plants can only soak up so much coal. This was true for lead. The planet could only absorb so much lead. The rest got absorbed by us. Human bodies were not the only bodies to absorb lead. Animal bodies, including the fish in the sea, absorbed lead. When human bodies ate other animals bodies, they increased lead absorption by that much more. Food was also packed in lead cans. When we ate food from those cans, it raised levels of lead in human bodies all the more. The food industry, just like the fuel and paint industry, argued that lead was safe. Baby food manufacturers seemed to be the exception. Arguing would tarnish their image. No one like baby killers. Baby food manufacturers changed their practices voluntarily and right away.

What is extremely, in fact I would argue the most, interesting about lead is that when young bodies suck it up, it does not simply cause sickness; it can be a significant cause of criminality. This was sadly not covered in the book but, imo, is probably the most interesting research going on today that involves lead. You might ask how this can even be. Lead affects the brain, especially the developing brain, in such a way that the prefrontal cortex, that has the job of controlling impulses, is damaged by lead exposure. The child is then saddled with impulse control. They cannot make appropriate decisions. The frontal lobe is so very important for executive function-- planning, paying attention, understanding outcomes, controlling impulses that want to make you do the wrong thing. When this region of the brain is compromised, those children grow into teens and adults who cannot control impulses that other people have a much easier time controlling. This is especially true for children who grew up in houses located in poorer areas. It takes money to update and remodel houses (this was covered in the book). Families without money have to let their children be exposed to lead paint that chips or degrades over time, setting the lead free to be breathed or swallowed into tiny bodies. Kids touch walls and window sills all the time. They pick up traces of lead and then put fingers in their mouths. Lead can be breathed in as well. All of this contributes to much higher levels of lead than the body can process. Lead makes its way to the brain, another parts of the body, and does significant damage. Even families who had some money to update, but not enough to hire professionals, unknowingly put their families at risk. Sanding walls or window sills grinds the lead up into very small dust particles that are breathed in and swallowed, resulting in much higher levels of lead in the body.

One other story that deserves a mention is about how Patterson, a scientist who had been studying health effects of lead, used lead to determine the age of Earth. He was so excited by his discovery, he had to go to the emergency room because his heart was beating so fast he thought he was having a heart attack. He was not:)

[Mark Isaak · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging and generally thorough narrative of the battle against the pervasive damages from lead, primarily following the two people most responsible for leading the fight, Claire Patterson (geochemist) and Herb Needleman (medical doctor). What I think was missing was more description of the history of lead in other countries (Denworth notes that other countries banned leaded indoor paint decades before the US did, but says practically nothing about leaded gas in other countries). Also, I think she could have better emphasized that the battle is not over; the millions of tons of lead that were spread across the earth do not disappear overnight; they still exist, especially on old houses; and lead levels in children are probably still enough, in many places, to cause permanent lowering of IQ. Still, the book is extremely valuable for the wealth of material -- about scientific procedure, medicine, politics, big business, and personalities -- that it does contain.

[Willis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I came across this book after watching the Cosmos series featuring Neil DeGrasse Tyson on Disney+. You can tell that the Cosmos episode that talks about Clair Patterson is based on this book. Interesting to see how Clair Patterson used his knowledge of chemistry that he was using for astronimical purposes to show that lead levels were increasing because of leaded gasoline and other lead based products.

[Savannah’s Shelf · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75⭐️ this was really good and super interesting if you don’t know about Clair Patterson and Herbert Needleman and why we’re not still riddled with lead I’d highly recommend it! I do think this dragged a bit especially in the second half it just seemed a bit too much of the nitty gritty details but it was still very good.

[Helen Guo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic book that demonstrated courage, persistence and personal responsibility of very noble men. How they fought, and in the end fundamentally protected many future generations from lead poisoning and powerful industries is a modern Goliath story.

[DJ Williams · Rating 2 out of 5]

the writing style of this book is annoying and faux-relatable in the same way as a lot of other pop-science books of its ilk. didn't stop it from being kind of dry and boring.

[nikita · Rating 3 out of 5]

Informative, but not very engaging from a storytelling perspective.

[Tim Giauque · Rating 4 out of 5]

Judging only by its title, Toxic Truth sounds like some kind of political polemic, maybe something denouncing vaccines or antidepressants, doesn't it? Fortunately, the book is better than its title.

It's actually about Clair Patterson, a geochemist who set out to determine the age of the Earth, and ran into problems when he found that his measurements were unreliable due to environmental lead contamination. So he developed and built the world's first clean-room laboratory, solved the age-of-the-Earth problem, and set out to quantify the extent of the contamination issue and measure its impact on human health.

As Patterson's body of evidence builds, the petroleum and lead industries apply pressure to attempt to discredit him, his science, and his acolytes, and the book really takes a turn. The corporate suits say and do some really appalling things to try to fight the inevitable destruction of their industry. It's really disgusting to see how these people casually brush aside the clear evidence of their destructive behavior, particularly when it's young children who suffer the most.

I was first made aware of Patterson by the excellent updated Cosmos series, in the episode “The Clean Room.” I love these kinds of books – accounts of actual events that very few people know about.

[Jessie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read a blog post from Lydia Denworth, responding to backlash over new lead regulations, here:
http://www.beaconbroadside.com/broads...