Getting the lead out

Cruising the Net I came across a blog post by Leisure Guy that was derived from a fascinating and informative book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson.
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In the late 1940s, a graduate student at the University of Chicago named Clair Patterson was using a new method of lead isotope measurement to try to get a definitive age for the Earth at last. Unfortunately all his samples came up contaminated — usually wildly so. Most contained something like two hundred times the levels of lead that would normally be expected to occur. Many years would pass before Patterson realized that the reason for this lay with a regrettable Ohio inventor named Thomas Midgley, Jr.

Midgley was an engineer by training, and the world would no doubt have been a safer place if he had stayed so. Instead, he developed an interest in the industrial applications of chemistry. In 1921, while working for the General Motors Research Corporation in Dayton, Ohio, he investigated a compound called tetraethyl lead (also known, confusingly, as lead tetraethyl), and discovered that it significantly reduced the juddering condition known as engine knock.

Even though lead was widely known to be dangerous, by the early years of the twentieth century it could be found in all manner of consumer products. Food came in cans sealed with lead solder. Water was often stored in lead-lined tanks. It was sprayed onto fruit as a pesticide in the form of lead arsenate. It even came as part of the packaging of toothpaste tubes. Hardly a product existed that didn’t bring a little lead into consumers’ lives. However, nothing gave it a greater and more lasting intimacy than its addition to gasoline.

Lead is a neurotoxin. Get too much of it and you can irreparably damage the brain and central nervous system. Among the many symptoms associated with overexposure are blindness, insomnia, kidney failure, hearing loss, cancer, palsies, and convulsions. In its most acute form it produces abrupt and terrifying hallucinations, disturbing to victims and onlookers alike, which generally then give way to coma and death. You really don’t want to get too much lead into your system.

On the other hand, lead was easy to extract and work, and almost embarrassingly profitable to produce industrially—and tetraethyl lead did indubitably stop engines from knocking. So in 1923 three of America’s largest corporations, General Motors, Du Pont, and Standard Oil of New Jersey, formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (later shortened to simply Ethyl Corporation) with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was willing to buy, and that proved to be a very great deal. They called their additive “ethyl” because it sounded friendlier and less toxic than “lead” and introduced it for public consumption (in more ways than most people realized) on February 1, 1923.

Almost at once production workers began to exhibit the staggered gait and confused faculties that mark the recently poisoned. Also almost at once, the Ethyl Corporation embarked on a policy of calm but yielding denial that would serve it well for decades. As Sharon Bertsch McGrayne notes in her absorbing history of industrial chemistry, Prometheans in the Lab, when employees at one plant developed irreversible delusions, a spokesman blandly informed reporters: “These men probably went insane because they worked too hard.” Altogether at least fifteen workers died in the early days of production of leaded gasoline, and untold numbers of others became ill, often violently so; the exact numbers are unknown because the company nearly always managed to hush up news of embarrassing leakages, spills, and poisonings. At times, however, suppressing the news became impossible, most notably in 1924 when in a matter of days five production workers died and thirty-five more were turned into permanent staggering wrecks at a single ill-ventilated facility.

As rumors circulated about the dangers of the new product, ethyl’s ebullient inventor, Thomas Midgley, decided to hold a demonstration for reporters to allay their concerns. As he chatted away about the company’s commitment to safety, he poured tetraethyl lead over his hands, then held a beaker of it to his nose for sixty seconds, claiming all the while that he could repeat the procedure daily without harm. In fact, Midgley knew only too well the perils of lead poisoning: he had himself been made seriously ill from overexposure a few months earlier and now, except when reassuring journalists, never went near the stuff if he could help it.

Buoyed by the success of leaded gasoline, Midgley now turned to another technological problem of the age. Refrigerators in the 1920s were often appallingly risky because they used dangerous gases that sometimes leaked. One leak from a refrigerator at a hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1929 killed more than a hundred people. Midgley set out to create a gas that was stable, nonflammable, noncorrosive, and safe to breathe. With an instinct for the regrettable that was almost uncanny, he invented chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs.

Seldom has an industrial product been more swiftly or unfortunately embraced. CFCs went into production in the early 1930s and found a thousand applications in everything from car air conditioners to deodorant sprays before it was noticed, half a century later, that they were devouring the ozone in the stratosphere. As you will be aware, this was not a good thing.

Ozone is a form of oxygen in which each molecule bears three atoms of oxygen instead of two. It is a bit of a chemical oddity in that at ground level it is a pollutant, while way up in the stratosphere it is beneficial, since it soaks up dangerous ultraviolet radiation. Beneficial ozone is not terribly abundant, however. If it were distributed evenly throughout the stratosphere, it would form a layer just one eighth of an inch or so thick. That is why it is so easily disturbed, and why such disturbances don’t take long to become critical.

Chlorofluorocarbons are also not very abundant—they constitute only about one part per billion of the atmosphere as a whole—but they are extravagantly destructive. One pound of CFCs can capture and annihilate seventy thousand pounds of atmospheric ozone. CFRCs also hang around for a very long time—about a century on average—wreaking havoc all the while. They are also great heat sponges. A single CFC molecule is about ten thousand times more efficient at exacerbating greenhouse effects than a molecule of carbon dioxide—and carbon dioxide is of course no slouch itself as a greenhouse gas. In sort, chlorofluorocarbons may ultimately prove to be just about the worst invention of the twentieth century.

Midgley never knew this because he died long before anyone realized how destructive CFCs were. His death was itself memorably unusual. After becoming crippled with polio, Midgley invented a contraption involving a series of motorized pulleys that automatically raised or turned him in bed. In 1944, he became entangled in the cords as the machine went into action and was strangled.

. . . and what about Clair Patterson, mentioned at the start of this article?

Well, Patterson tackled the nagging question of all that lead in the atmosphere. He was astounded to find that what little was known about the effects of lead on humans was almost invariable wrong or misleading — and not surprisingly, he discovered, since for forty years every study of lead’s effects had been funded exclusively by manufacturers of lead additives.

In one such study, a doctor who had no specialized training in chemical pathology understood a five-year program in which volunteers were asked to breathe in or swallow lead in elevated quantities. Then their urine and feces were tested. Unfortunately, as the doctor appears not to have known, lead is not excreted as a waste product. Rather, it accumulates in the bones and blood — that’s what makes it so dangerous — and neither bone nor blood was tested. In consequence, lead was given a clean bill of health. [But surely he must have realized that, with all that lead going in and none coming out, the volunteers must be accumulating the lead? – LG]

Patterson quickly established that we had a lot of lead in the atmosphere — still do, in fact, since lead never goes away — and that about 90 percent of it appeared to come from automobile exhaust pipes, but he couldn’t prove it. What he needed was a way to compare lead levels in the atmosphere now with the levels that existed before 1923, when tetraethyl lead was introduced. It occurred to him that ice cores could provide the answer.

It was known that snowfall in places like Greenland accumulates into discrete annual layers (because seasonal temperature differences produce slight changes in coloration from winter to summer). By counting back through these layers and measure the amount of lead in each, he could work out global lead concentrations at any time for hundreds, or even thousands, of years. The notion became the foundation of ice core studies, on which much modern climatological work is based.

What Patterson found was that before 1923 there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since that time its level had climbed steadily and dangerously. He now made it his life’s quest to get lead taken out of gasoline. To that end, he became a constant and often vocal critic of the lead industry and its interests.

It would prove to be a hellish campaign. Ethyl was a powerful global corporation with many friends in high places. (Among its directors have been Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell and Gilbert Grosvenor of the National Geographic Society.) Patterson suddenly found research funding withdrawn or difficult to acquire. The American Petroleum Institute canceled a research contract with him, as did the United States Public Health Service, a supposedly neutral government institution.

As Patterson increasingly became a liability to his institution, the school trustees were repeatedly pressed by lead industry officials to shut him up or let him go. According to Jamie Lincoln Kitman, writing in The Nation in 2000, Ethyl executives allegedly offered to endow a chair at Caltech “if Patterson was sent packing.” Absurdly, he was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel appointed to investigate the dangers of atmospheric lead poisoning even though he was by now unquestionably the leading expert on atmospheric lead.

To his great credit, Patterson never wavered or buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago. The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, “forty-four years after most of Europe,” as McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.

As for the other scourge left to us by Thomas Midgley, chlorofluorocarbons, they were banned in 1974 in the United States, but they are tenacious little devils and any that you loosed into the atmosphere before then (in your deodorants or hair sprays, for instance) will almost certainly be around and devouring ozone long after you have shuffled off. Worse, we are still introducing huge amounts of CFCs into the atmosphere every year. According to Wayne Biddle, 60 million pounds of the stuff, worth $1.5 billion, still finds its way onto the market every year. So who is making it? We are — that is to say, many of our large corporations are still making it at their plants overseas. It will not be banned in Third World countries until 2010.

Clair Patterson died in 1995. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize for his work. Most geology textbooks don’t mention him. Two recent popular books on the history of the dating of Earth actually manage to misspell his name. In early 2001, a reviewer of one of these books in the journal Nature made the additional, rather astounding error of thinking Patterson was a woman.
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I think I've discovered a book worth having in my little library, A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson. I'm off for the Oxford Bookstore.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Score one for the Digital Journal

This morning I read an interesting story on Jan Wong, the former Globe and Mail Beijing correspondent who was fired after writing an op-ed piece linking violence in Quebec schools to the province's language policy.

I will admit right off that I was not a fan of Ms. Wong when she worked at the Globe. I found her Lunch With Jan Wong columns not so much brutally honest as just plain nasty. Why celebrities ever agreed to dine with her, I don't know.

That said, she wrote well and she delivered the stories and columns that the Globe clearly wanted. When she originally wrote her op-ed piece that would lead to her leaving, the heads at the paper stood behind her, choosing to run the article.

But, if I don't think a lot of Wong's writing, I think even less of a lot of what is said, or should I say shouted, in the House of Commons. The piece evoked the knee-jerk reaction one would expect and many members demanded an apology. Wong held her position. The Globe folded.

The national paper ran an editorial condemning her controversial column. The Digital Journal reporter, Jason Li, quotes Wong: "I was so broken-hearted when I saw that,” she sighed, and called Edward Greenspon’s assertion in the Globe editorial, “a piece of crap, if you want my mild opinion.”

Wong was hung out to dry and in leaving was asked to sign a gag order in return for a sweetened severence package. Wong signed but managed to have the gag order time limited. The gag order has now expired and Wong is speaking out.

Wong held an interview session at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, the other day and the report by Jason Li in the Digital Journal is quite interesting. But, what is more interesting is the lack of reporting in the MSM.

A search of Canoe for "Jan Wong" returned no results. A search of The Canadian Press for "Jan Wong" returned the message, "Your search did not match any documents." A seach of the Globe and Mail turned up lots of stuff on and by "Jan Wong", but nothing that I could find on her recent statements about her being gagged by the paper. I searched "gag order" on the Globe site with no better luck.

Score one for the Digital Journal.

Addendum: In researching this piece, I came across other pieces written by Jan Wong, other than her dining stuff. She can be an exceedingly strong writer and excellent reporter. I guess I just don't like inviting a pit bull to dinner. I think the Globe misused her formidable talents.

Canadian Rivers at Risk

Today marks the first day that I have filed a story on the Digital Journal. I read the report released by the World Wildlife Fund Canada and then wrote an article, similar to a newspaper report. You can find it under the headline, "Canadian Rivers at Risk."

The Digital Journal is attempt to operate an on-line digital newspaper with citizen journalists writing the stories and sharing in the profits of the operation.

Most of the stories seem to be re-writes of stories running in the MSM but some are not, and everyone is getting experience writing and learning to meet deadlines. In a few cases, the Digital Journal has scooped Sun Media, the main news chain that I follow.

I must note that I sorely missed having an editor. I wrote "to meet out" when I meant "to meet our." I put in words and phrases that I later edited out. And I didn't properly link my quotes to my sources.

Being a one man band means hitting some truly sour notes. (Then again, the newspapers have jettisoned a lot of their editors. Which is why we read stuff like, "Since my eye operation, I can sea very well." Unfortunately, the operation didn't improve the writer's spelling.)

Update to Factory Farming Post

There has been an update and new link added to the post looking into factory farming and how it relates to health. They don't call it swine flu for nothing.

If you haven't read the post, please do. It has been popular around the world. Not sure if popular is the correct word but it attracts a steady stream of hits. Hit it soon, while all the links are still connected.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Fuzzy Bears, Warm Memories, Cold Winters

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I just have to learn to read the fine print. I am now submitting news stories to Digital Journal. One part of the contractual agreement stipulates that stories posted to their site must be digitally unique.

So, please click here to read my little piece on fuzzy bears, warm memories and cold winters. It is worth linking over. This piece has been popular.


Check out the Digital Journal site, while you are there. It is an interesting concept and I believe it is Canadian.


Cheers,
Rockinon.

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I thank the Sault Ste. Marie Horticultural Society for the information used to write this post.

Evolution-devolution of cities

Kodachrome 64 is dead. It changed my photography career. - By Camilo Jose Vergara - Slate Magazine

Click on the above sentence and then click launch below the picture to observe the changes made to one, small nondescript building in Chicago over the passing of years. The building may be uninteresting but the changes certainly are not. The building's surface changes, a window appears (more likely reappears), the entry door changes and razor wire comes and razor wire goes.

If you look at the far left side of the earliest photos you will notice a small home. It appears to have burned and then to have been demolished. The home presents another story, a sidebar to the main story, you might say. It is a little story ending badly for the structure and, in the short term, for the neighbourhood.

Camilo Jose Vergara obviously loves cities. He has spent a great deal of his life documenting urban change in some of America's greatest cities. To be more accurate, he has carefully documented urban decay in America. I googled Vergara and found another interesting strip of photos. <= Note: you must click on the line "ENTER HARLEM, NY DATABASE."

Taken over a 4 year period, Vergara documents the transformation of a once beautiful building with stained glass, twin double door entries, and ornate woodwork into a building patiently awaiting the wrecking ball.

The way we treat our cities — towns and villages, too — is truly sad. There are some important lessons in these photos. These images may come from the States but Canadians should not feel too smug. Often, we have simply not documented the slow motion disaster remaking our urban world.

My genes made me do it!

This post is going to be about a common sexual myth but maybe it should be about intelligence, the intelligence needed to get through a modern day. This morning I wanted to scream, "Bring back the horse and buggy era!" This is the third time I have written and posted this piece. The third! I have just got to learn to think "back-up." Even better, I should simply learn to think.
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Whenever I hear someone blame their actions on their genes, I cringe. I have an especially strong reaction when I hear someone, but often a woman, supposedly resorting to science in excusing the actions of a cheating man. "Men are natural Don Juans, " these people say. "It's in their genes." Nature intended men to be lovers, to go forth and multiply.

I cringe, but I cringe silently. I have no comeback. I think these people are way off base but they are espousing an evolutionary position taught even in high schools. The discussion adds levity to science classes struggling to hold student interest.

Then I read Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation. The good doctor, actually Olivia Judson, an evolutionary biologist who writes for many well known publications, goes to great lengths to show how this is a law of nature that isn't. To be blunt, this notion is nonsense.

Judson tell us, "The man who first lent scientific respectability to this notion was named A.J. Bateman. In 1948, he published a paper . . . in which he claimed to have proved that males have evolved to make love and females to make babies."

Bateman "proclaimed with a flourish, males (including humans) are natural philanderers while females (again including humans) are naturally chaste."

Judson says Bateman's position when it came to sex was that "males produce lots of tiny, cheap sperm whereas females produce a few large, expensive eggs . . . one man could easily fertilize all the eggs of many females." Men who have many women are just following a genetic imperative.

Bateman's principal, as it is known, has been all the rage for decades. Feminists invoke it, scientists expound on it, and many a silver tongued Lothario has sought shelter in its core belief: men are cads, women are saints. It is just the way of the world.

Unfortunately, according to Judson, "Bateman's principal has a fundamental flaw: it's wrong. In most species, girls are more strumpet than saint. Rather than mating once, they'll mate with several fellows, and often with far, far more than necessary just to fertilize their eggs."

Take a deep breath, guys, it gets worse. When my wife read the first post, she had daggers in her eyes when she glanced from the computer monitor to me: "Woman are not, are not . . . I'm not even going to dignify this with a response. Harrumph!"

Never "harrumph" me. It sends me googling, researching. And this is where this whole discussions takes a nasty turn.

I discovered the following: In Stuttgart, Germany, a man hired his neighbour to get his wife pregnant.

It seems a 29-year-old husband and his former beauty queen wife wanted a child badly, but the husband was told by a doctor that he was sterile. So, he hired his neighbour to impregnate the queen. Since the neighbour was already married and the father of two children, plus looked very much like our cuckold-husband-to-be, the plan seemed good. The neighbourhood stud was paid $2,500 for the job and for three evenings a week for the next six months, he tried desperately, a total of 72 different times, to deliver on his promise.

However, when the young wife failed to get pregnant after six months, the husband was not understanding and insisted that his neighbour have a medical examination, which he did. The doctor's announcement was that the neighbour was also sterile. This news shocked everyone except the neighbour's wife, who was forced to confess that the stud was not the real father of their two children.

At last report, the husband is suing for breach of contract in an effort to get his money back. (From the post 10 Most Bizarre Paternity Stories.)

Funny? Yes. Uncommon? Not as uncommon as you might think. It is a frequent enough occurrence that it even has a couple of names: The children's rights movement calls it "child identity fraud", while the father's rights movement calls it "paternity fraud".

Beginning in the 1980s, the development of sophisticated genetic techniques enabled biologists to investigate paternity and what they discovered was something astonishing, something no one had predicted - namely that, from stick insects to chimpanzees, females are hardly ever faithful.

I'm going to give the last word on paternity fraud to Heather Draper who wrote in the Journal of Medical Ethics: "Paternity testing might be an effective test of genetic relatedness and infidelity, but it is an ineffective test of fatherhood." Scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, and compassion, love, humanity trumps genes.

So men, take the advice of Dr. Tatiana (Olivia Judson) and don't be a lazy partner, give your woman a hand with the child care, be a loving supporter, give of yourself.

If you want to get into the lady's genes, maybe you should take your cue from the black vultures which apparently have a strong social convention supporting monogamy. These birds insist that sex be conducted in the privacy of the nest and they won't tolerate lewd behaviour in public. Who'd have thought?
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For an interesting read, check out Dr. Tatiana's Sex Advice To All Creation by Olivia Judson. It is bawdy, ribald and extremely funny --- and educational to boot.

Addendum: I'm a bit of a romantic, maybe it's genetic, but I must be fair and mention that Judson on page 164 addresses the question of monogamy in humans. "Do individual humans, just like individual crickets and fruit flies, differ in their genetic predisposition toward monogamy?"

"Perhaps it will turn out," she continues, "that men with large testicles (anticipating a high risk of sperm competition) are prone to seducing other men's wives and have difficulty forming lasting bonds whereas men with small testicles (anticipating a low risk of sperm competition) are prone to sexual fidelity . . . But for now, this is all conjecture . . . "

Lastly, an aside to my wife, "Which ever way this goes, honey, I'm one of those fellows whose genetics indicate that I came into the world anticipating a low risk of competition. You can relax."