Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh and this is This Podcast Will
Speaker 1: Kill You. You're tuning in to the latest episode of the
Speaker 1: tpw k Y book Club, a series where I bring
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Speaker 1: in the history of medicine to the evolution of human language,
Speaker 1: from how bacteria phases may help us in the fight
Speaker 1: against antibiotic resistance, to the promising future of regenerative medicine,
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Speaker 1: subscribed to exactly Write Media's YouTube channel so you never
Speaker 1: miss a new episode drop. The twentieth century was a
Speaker 1: time of profound scientific and technological progress, from transportation via
Speaker 1: horse drawn carriage to transoceanic airplanes, from telegrams to cell phones.
Speaker 1: From sky high infant mortality rates to vaccines for dozens
Speaker 1: of previously deadly infections. Over a mere one hundred years,
Speaker 1: people's lives drastically changed, mostly for the better. But progress
Speaker 1: comes at a cost. Sometimes that cost can only be
Speaker 1: tallied in retrospect, while other times it can be and
Speaker 1: thus preventable, but only if proper action is taken. When
Speaker 1: tetra ethyl leaded gasoline was developed by Thomas Midgley in
Speaker 1: the early nineteen twenties, it seemed like a miraculous and
Speaker 1: inexpensive solution allowing cars to drive faster and farther. There
Speaker 1: was just one small problem. Lead poisoning. While the manufacturers
Speaker 1: of leaded gasoline insisted that their product was entirely safe,
Speaker 1: other people, like occupational health pioneer Alice Hamilton, knew the
Speaker 1: truth that if this product was widely introduced, it would
Speaker 1: lead to a global lead poisoning pandemic. Despite these warnings,
Speaker 1: we of course know how the story ends. Leaded gasoline
Speaker 1: was sold around the world for decades before being banned,
Speaker 1: harming untold millions. How this toxic substance was permitted to
Speaker 1: be used in spite of ample evidence of its dangers
Speaker 1: carries a powerful lesson for our society today. In this
Speaker 1: week's episode, best selling author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins
Speaker 1: University Daniel Stone joins me to discuss the story of
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline and those who fought against it in his
Speaker 1: book American Poison, A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who
Speaker 1: Battled for Environmental Justice. His compelling storytelling transports readers back
Speaker 1: to the United States in the early nineteen twenties, when
Speaker 1: it seemed like anything was possible and technology would save
Speaker 1: the day while corporations grew very wealthy in the process.
Speaker 1: Stone then introduces us to an unsung hero of industrial medicine.
Speaker 1: Alice Hamilton, who fights for those who didn't have a voice,
Speaker 1: who were seen as expendable in the pursuit of progress.
Speaker 1: In Midgley and his letted Gasoline, she finds a formidable foe,
Speaker 1: and the resulting battle would leave permanent scars on the
Speaker 1: health of the entire world. The story of Alice Hamilton
Speaker 1: and letted Gasoline. It's difficult to take in knowing how
Speaker 1: things end, but it's one that we need to bear
Speaker 1: in mind, given our failure to learn from the past.
Speaker 1: What will be the next letted gasoline, the next asbestos,
Speaker 1: the next radiation, things viewed as miraculous in their early
Speaker 1: years but later found to be dangerous, deadly even will
Speaker 1: it be microplastics, p fasts, or so called forever chemicals,
Speaker 1: something else we don't yet know about. Unfortunately, we can't
Speaker 1: undo the harm that letted gasoline has already caused, but
Speaker 1: we can use its story as a roadmap for a
Speaker 1: better future. I am really excited to share this conversation
Speaker 1: with you all, so let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: get started. Daniel, thank you so much for joining me today.
Speaker 1: Thanks for having me in American Poison. You tell the
Speaker 1: story of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline and the woman who
Speaker 1: fought to bring its negative health effects to light. And
Speaker 1: you mentioned that you first came across the story of
Speaker 1: Alice Hamilton, or at least her name in a footnote.
Speaker 1: What made you decide to dig deeper into her story
Speaker 1: and where did it ultimately leave you?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was a footnote, which is sort of fitting
Speaker 2: for women of that era, right to be remembered, right
Speaker 2: in such a minor way like that. I teach environmental
Speaker 2: science and policy to graduate students, and I'm very steeped
Speaker 2: in environmental history. You know what started the environmental movement
Speaker 2: two hundred years ago, one hundred years ago? Who were
Speaker 2: these big people, these big events that made us start
Speaker 2: to care about the planet. And I teach this every semester.
Speaker 2: And about five or six years ago, I came across
Speaker 2: a footnote about Alice Hamilton, and I said, I've never
Speaker 2: heard of this person. Who is this? And so I
Speaker 2: googled her and read her whole Wikipedia page and I thought, Wow,
Speaker 2: this she was someone, someone real and someone influential that
Speaker 2: had completely escaped my view in the field and a
Speaker 2: lot of my colleagues too. So I dug deeper and
Speaker 2: deeper and was continually surprised at the sheer volume of
Speaker 2: work this woman had done for the benefit of humanity,
Speaker 2: really and got kind of not entirely forgotten, but certainly
Speaker 2: not celebrated to the extent she deserved.
Speaker 1: She is an incredible just a truly remarkable person, and
Speaker 1: her life journey is fascinating because it kind of takes
Speaker 1: us roundabout way where she didn't set out to become
Speaker 1: one of the leaders of this new field of industrial medicine,
Speaker 1: but yet that is ultimately what she did become. And
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, you know, if you could tell me more
Speaker 1: about the origins of this field and why it emerged
Speaker 1: when it did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I often describe her as the Aaron Brockovich of
Speaker 2: the early twentieth century, a woman who took on very
Speaker 2: powerful polluting industries and tried to dislodge them or derail
Speaker 2: them in ways that were dangerous. Sometimes she won, a
Speaker 2: lot of times she didn't, but she was vindicated over
Speaker 2: time in all of them. And so this is a
Speaker 2: woman who was born in Indiana in eighteen sixty nine,
Speaker 2: right after the Civil War. She grows up in a
Speaker 2: very wealthy family among a lot of sisters and cousins
Speaker 2: who are all taught basically to be helpful, you know,
Speaker 2: find your way to help people, whatever it is. Go
Speaker 2: into law, go into medicine, go into teaching, anything that
Speaker 2: you think could improve someone else's life, not just your own.
Speaker 2: Her path is through medicine. She becomes a doctor, which
Speaker 2: is pretty rare in those days for a woman. You
Speaker 2: had to be from a wealthy family to get into
Speaker 2: medical school and go to medical school. And so she
Speaker 2: becomes a doctor, and her first kind of twist in
Speaker 2: her path comes in the eighteen nineties when she's a doctor,
Speaker 2: but instead of being kind of a wealthy doctor who
Speaker 2: serves rich people only, she decides she wants to serve
Speaker 2: the poor, and she wants to serve marginalized people, immigrants,
Speaker 2: people who don't speak English. And this was very much
Speaker 2: not done in those days, to the extent that there
Speaker 2: was really only one place that took on this kind
Speaker 2: of work that had been started by Jane Adams in Chicago,
Speaker 2: and it was called Hull House. Hull House was kind
Speaker 2: of this melting pot of cultures and classes. They called
Speaker 2: it a bridge between the classes because it was a
Speaker 2: house where you know, people who didn't speak English, people
Speaker 2: who didn't know how to read, people who needed help
Speaker 2: getting jobs or their kids getting daycare while they went
Speaker 2: to their jobs. It all sort of happened in this house.
Speaker 2: We would now call this social work or social welfare work.
Speaker 2: It didn't have a name back then. But Alice Hamilton
Speaker 2: goes in and it's through here that she applies her
Speaker 2: medical skills and knowledge to helping improve people's lives, mostly babies,
Speaker 2: gets babies sick, but she also starts to notice that
Speaker 2: other people in the community are getting sick too, People
Speaker 2: have coughs, people have stomach issues, and she starts to
Speaker 2: drop patterns. Right, all of the men who have the
Speaker 2: same kind of like deep cough work in the same factory,
Speaker 2: and all the ones who have like the wrist problems
Speaker 2: are working in that other factory. And so she draws
Speaker 2: these kind of patterns that we now call epidemiology. Back then,
Speaker 2: it was called shoe leather epidemiology, because you'd literally have
Speaker 2: to go from factory to factory and put these patterns together.
Speaker 2: And eventually she do enough of this that she would
Speaker 2: have like a body of research that she would take
Speaker 2: to that factory or that boss or that industry and
Speaker 2: say this thing you're doing is dangerous and here's how
Speaker 2: or here's how to mitigate it or correct it. And
Speaker 2: that's what started the field called occupational hygiene occupational medicine.
Speaker 2: She really started it.
Speaker 1: Tell me more about the primary concerns about working conditions
Speaker 1: at the turn of the twentieth century. It was not
Speaker 1: a very safe place, or most most factories were not
Speaker 1: a very safe place to work. There was little oversight,
Speaker 1: you know, what were some of the prevailing concerns or
Speaker 1: things that emerged during that time that kind of drove
Speaker 1: interest in this field.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it was very dangerous to work in a factory
Speaker 2: and very underpaid. You know. There was no sense of
Speaker 2: what we now would call like workplace compensation or OSHA
Speaker 2: or like anyone inspecting anything dangerous. There were a series
Speaker 2: of like horrific accidents. There's one of the most famous
Speaker 2: is the Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York where
Speaker 2: they locked the doors and so all these people burned
Speaker 2: up in a building that should normally have had some
Speaker 2: safety precautions. But the biggest storytelling element to this was
Speaker 2: a book in nineteen oh six by a journalist named
Speaker 2: Upton Sinclair who wrote a novel called The Jungle. We've
Speaker 2: all heard of The Jungle now, and it was very
Speaker 2: lightly fictionalized, but it was kind of an expose of
Speaker 2: the pecking yards in Chicago, and the conditions he describes
Speaker 2: were so horrific to the extreme that it sort of
Speaker 2: woke up the upper classes in a way that they
Speaker 2: could just completely close their eyes to this like horrifying
Speaker 2: condition before, you know, like men burning alive, and people
Speaker 2: get their limbs chopped off and falling into vats and
Speaker 2: getting ground up with meat, you know, just like stomach churning,
Speaker 2: things that had never before gotten out in a big
Speaker 2: public way. And so this was an era, sort of
Speaker 2: first decade of the twentieth century, when people were newly
Speaker 2: confronting horrors in industrialization that had existed for a while
Speaker 2: but were sort of newly.
Speaker 1: Coming to light, right, right. And when Alice begins to
Speaker 1: dig into this field and she starts to observe these
Speaker 1: patterns that are coming out, especially in certain workers in
Speaker 1: certain factories, you know, these lead factory employees with these
Speaker 1: horrific coughs, she might not have realized that, yes, this
Speaker 1: was a problem that was at least decades old, but
Speaker 1: when it comes to lead. I mean this is a
Speaker 1: problem that is millennial, Like it's thousands of years people
Speaker 1: have been being exposed to lead and experiencing symptoms of
Speaker 1: lead poisoning. Could you briefly take me on a tour
Speaker 1: of like the highlights or low lights of the history
Speaker 1: of lead and in many ways that we've used it
Speaker 1: throughout human history.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, lead is as old as the planet itself.
Speaker 2: It's an element, it's found on the periodic table, it
Speaker 2: existed when the Earth was formed, and it also is
Speaker 2: created when uranium decays, So uranium decays into an isotope
Speaker 2: of lead. So we've had lead for longer than human
Speaker 2: history by a lot. But we've also had it for
Speaker 2: thousands of years in our use. And one of the
Speaker 2: most prominent uses or use eras was really the Roman Empire.
Speaker 2: And this was the time of again great sort of innovation,
Speaker 2: advances of inventions, and the Romans had a lot of
Speaker 2: things they liked to do with lead. Lead has these
Speaker 2: miraculous qualities where it doesn't road, it doesn't really break down,
Speaker 2: It adds texture, it adds brighter color, it adds sweeter
Speaker 2: taste to almost everything. So the Romans used it not
Speaker 2: only for their aqueducts and their plumbing. Of course, the
Speaker 2: word plumbing comes from the word plume boom in lead.
Speaker 2: That is why we call lead PB on the periodic table.
Speaker 2: Plumbing effectively is named for lead. The Romans also used
Speaker 2: it for their cooking utensils. They used it in the
Speaker 2: powders on people's faces and makeup. They put it in
Speaker 2: food to make it taste better, and of course they
Speaker 2: put it in paints or any type of colorization to
Speaker 2: make the colors brighter. This was a sort of miraculous use.
Speaker 2: This was the miracle element. I call it the plastic
Speaker 2: of its era, right, like you could basically do anything
Speaker 2: with it. It was transformative. But people started to notice
Speaker 2: that people who used it a lot started to have
Speaker 2: these effects. And this is a very long running debate
Speaker 2: in history of whether lead caused or contributed to, or
Speaker 2: was a major factor in the fall of the Roman Empire.
Speaker 1: What do you think? What's your take?
Speaker 2: It's unmistakable that the rich people used it most, especially
Speaker 2: the emperors, and many of them are very well known
Speaker 2: to have gone crazy, like really crazy, like one of
Speaker 2: them appointed a horse as a console, or one would
Speaker 2: be like drooling and all of their you know, so
Speaker 2: these effects that we now know are caused by lead
Speaker 2: poisoning were seen back then. Of course, there were a
Speaker 2: lot of other things going out at the time, but yeah,
Speaker 2: it definitely contributed, is my opinion. Flash forward, you know,
Speaker 2: hundreds of years, and we see some of these same
Speaker 2: things repeat, especially in the nineteenth century here in America.
Speaker 2: Led you know, makes great pipes, it makes makeup brighter,
Speaker 2: it makes colors on walls and paint even brighter. So
Speaker 2: we start to basically repeat the same mistakes and start
Speaker 2: to see the same effects also, So we have this
Speaker 2: long history with this same element that what's interesting, I
Speaker 2: think is it started really with rich people who enjoyed
Speaker 2: the benefits of lead the most thousands of years ago,
Speaker 2: and over time it migrates to basically a poison that
Speaker 2: is the domain and inflicted upon the lower classes and
Speaker 2: people who are less seen in the shadows.
Speaker 1: Let's take a quick break and when we get back,
Speaker 1: there's still so much to discuss. Welcome back everyone. I've
Speaker 1: been chatting with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison,
Speaker 1: A Deadly Invention and the Woman who Battled for environmental justice.
Speaker 1: Let's get back into things. We all know today that
Speaker 1: lead is a poison It is a toxin. What are
Speaker 1: some of the health effects that it's associated with or
Speaker 1: some of the symptom of lead poisoning.
Speaker 2: Mostly neurological breakdown. Lead has this effect on cells where
Speaker 2: it causes cells to basically atrophy prematurely. There's a lot
Speaker 2: of reasons why, biological reasons, but it's been poisonous to
Speaker 2: every living organism for this reason. It affects cellular growth.
Speaker 2: It chiefly affects the brain, and that's why people start to,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of slur their words or struggle to
Speaker 2: keep thoughts straight. In some cases, even mild poisoning, we
Speaker 2: see lack of impulse control or struggle to keep emotions,
Speaker 2: you know, together, like all of these effects from very
Speaker 2: slight exposure up to lead poisoning, which of course can
Speaker 2: kill you.
Speaker 1: Prior to the introduction of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline, which
Speaker 1: we'll get to, and Alice Hamilton's recognition starting to dawn
Speaker 1: on her these connections between lead and health. What was
Speaker 1: widely known or what was known in medical circles about
Speaker 1: the time toxicity of lead was it considered that might
Speaker 1: be a little bit bad or no amount is safe?
Speaker 2: Great question. So lead was a well known poison even
Speaker 2: in those days, but there was debate over how much
Speaker 2: did it take to poison someone. And it was kind
Speaker 2: of like black or white. It was like you either
Speaker 2: didn't have lead poisoning or you did. Binary and so
Speaker 2: there was some number and there was a lot of
Speaker 2: debate over what the number was. It was like, at
Speaker 2: what point does too much lead make you go crazy?
Speaker 2: And as long as you stay under that number, it's fine,
Speaker 2: you know, totally fine. And that was like the prevailing
Speaker 2: scientific opinion in those days. A lot of debate over
Speaker 2: what was that threshold. The lead industry argued the threshold
Speaker 2: was pretty high. Other people argued the threshold was pretty low.
Speaker 2: Today we know that the threshold is zero. There is
Speaker 2: no amount of lead that is safe. Tiny amounts have
Speaker 2: some effect on.
Speaker 1: Us, right, And so now turning to the other main
Speaker 1: character of the story, which is Thomas Midgley Junior. He
Speaker 1: introduced the world to tetra ethyl leaded gasoline. When he
Speaker 1: developed this idea or this this product. How much was
Speaker 1: lead used in the US, Like just trying to get
Speaker 1: a picture of like how much did the introduction of
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline change how much lead was used.
Speaker 2: We used a lot of lead, certainly not to the
Speaker 2: degree that we used later much more. But yeah, plumbing
Speaker 2: and paint were the main two uses in the economy.
Speaker 2: But this was also the time of the Industrial Revolution,
Speaker 2: where we had a lot of new chemical uses, you know,
Speaker 2: a lot of new elements that were put into use
Speaker 2: in a new way to spark you know, chemical reactions
Speaker 2: or to expedite the way things were made. So lead
Speaker 2: was not like the dominant thing we used in those days.
Speaker 2: It was kind of in the background, one element of many.
Speaker 2: I often think of it like like we use a
Speaker 2: lot of things today to grow our food and fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides.
Speaker 2: Lead was one of those types of things that we
Speaker 2: used in our industrial machine. It wasn't the worst, it
Speaker 2: wasn't the best. It just was there, and that's why
Speaker 2: it didn't really pop out immediately to Thomas Midgley as
Speaker 2: possible in gasoline. He had to work toward it and
Speaker 2: discover it.
Speaker 1: And what is the difference between organic lead and tetra
Speaker 1: ethyl lead? Is there any difference in the health effects
Speaker 1: or like the way that it seeps into the environment, Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell me about lead.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so lead has two main states, organic and inorganic.
Speaker 2: Tetra ethyl. Lead comes from an organic state, but the
Speaker 2: tetra ethyl part is four ethyl compounds that are attached
Speaker 2: on the sides, and so those are you know, ethyl
Speaker 2: is its own kind of compound when you attach it
Speaker 2: to lead. What it basically does is it allows lead
Speaker 2: to dissolve in a gallon of gasoline. So you think
Speaker 2: of sort of mixing, maybe like apple juice and orange juice.
Speaker 2: You want them to mix evenly together, but if one
Speaker 2: of them can't really mix, it'll just settle to the bottom. Right,
Speaker 2: So the tetra ethyl allows the lead to dissolve, and
Speaker 2: that was like the main innovation of it that used lead.
Speaker 2: I mean, lead is still lead, but it was evenly
Speaker 2: distributed and evenly burned in a car's engine.
Speaker 1: Okay, So now let's talk about that development, like how
Speaker 1: did Midgley come up upon this idea? And you know
Speaker 1: what problem ultimately was he looking to solve with tetrathyl
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2: Cars in those days were the biggest innovation in maybe
Speaker 2: human history. They were so exciting. Cars had been invented
Speaker 2: in kind of like the eighteen seventies and eighties, but
Speaker 2: it wasn't until the eighteen nineties that people start to
Speaker 2: see them more on roads, and not until the early
Speaker 2: twentieth century where you know, you start to see your
Speaker 2: neighbor's flying cars and you could afford a car, and
Speaker 2: Henry Forward's assembly line cars are rolling off. But the
Speaker 2: problem cars had was basically a maximum amount of power
Speaker 2: that would come from the internal combustion engine. The engine
Speaker 2: would burn gasoline, but the engines would burn it inefficiently
Speaker 2: or incompletely. They wouldn't burn all of the gasoline, and
Speaker 2: so over time you'd get this sort of build up
Speaker 2: of residue and what they call premature combustion. And the
Speaker 2: problem that did was that, you know, the engine can
Speaker 2: only run so powerfully before it would kind of reach
Speaker 2: its maximum and kind of stall out. This was known
Speaker 2: as engine knock because when this happened, the engine would
Speaker 2: make this like loud clanging sound that would announce to
Speaker 2: everybody on the road you know that your car was
Speaker 2: having this problem. And again it was like a ceiling
Speaker 2: in the growth of car power, and so everyone wanted
Speaker 2: to figure out this problem of engine knock. How can
Speaker 2: we innovate our way past this or figure out how
Speaker 2: to make cars more powerful. And the answer was, we
Speaker 2: could make gasoline burn better. So how do you make
Speaker 2: it burn better? Well, the idea was gasoline has an
Speaker 2: quality called octane, and that basically refers to how hot
Speaker 2: it can burn. And in those days the octane was
Speaker 2: like in the sixties, low seventies, that was high octane.
Speaker 2: Today our lowest octane when you buy gas is eighty five, right,
Speaker 2: So it's like a big, big room for growth. And
Speaker 2: so the idea was to how do you raise the
Speaker 2: octane of gasoline to make it, you know, burn better?
Speaker 2: And the answer was, we add something to it. But
Speaker 2: what do we add to it? You know, what compound,
Speaker 2: what element, what chemical can we add to it that
Speaker 2: makes it burn better? And so this was what was
Speaker 2: really the goose for Thomas Midgley. He was a chemist
Speaker 2: and he wanted to be the one to solve engine knock.
Speaker 2: And so he goes to work in his lab and
Speaker 2: he tries all sorts of you know, anything that's lying around.
Speaker 2: He tries you know, iodine, he tries chlorine, he tries
Speaker 2: you know, pure hydrogen, anything he can, and some of
Speaker 2: them work better than others. He has this test engine
Speaker 2: that he feeds everything into and sees how they run.
Speaker 2: You know, when he puts these things in and he
Speaker 2: tries really smelly compounds, he tries really expensive ones. He
Speaker 2: tries two of them mixed together, and it's really a
Speaker 2: goose chase, that's how he describes it. And he's looking
Speaker 2: at the periodic table and trying to figure out what
Speaker 2: will work and what won't.
Speaker 1: But that he's just like tracing down the elements like, hmm,
Speaker 1: we'll see process of elimination.
Speaker 2: Yes, although you know the periodic table, the way it's arranged,
Speaker 2: of course, is by quality. So you know, if you
Speaker 2: look at what kind of worked in one row and
Speaker 2: compare it against what kind of worked in another row,
Speaker 2: it's like treasure map. You could kind of like guess
Speaker 2: which direction you need to go. And so this took
Speaker 2: almost three years for him to run through everything, and
Speaker 2: finally he gets in nineteen twenty one. He gets to
Speaker 2: lead and he tries it with this tetra ethyl component
Speaker 2: to it, and it works right, and it worked. Wow,
Speaker 2: it really works. And then he tries to reduce it.
Speaker 2: What's the minimum amount we need and it's a very
Speaker 2: small amount. It's basically like a drop into a gallon
Speaker 2: of gasoline, very small amount. Now what's interesting here is
Speaker 2: there were other compounds at the time that could also
Speaker 2: eliminate engine knock, and the most well known of all
Speaker 2: of them was ethanol. Ethanol is like alcohol basically, you know,
Speaker 2: you put a little bit in, it increases the octane
Speaker 2: and engine ot goes away. But ethanol comes from like cells,
Speaker 2: so you need it from like wood, you know, pulp
Speaker 2: or plants that are that are burned in the field
Speaker 2: or whatnot. And there just wasn't enough of that stuff.
Speaker 2: Now we could have made more of that stuff, but
Speaker 2: the other problem with ethanol is that you couldn't patent it.
Speaker 2: Because everybody could make ethanol on their farms, you couldn't
Speaker 2: file a patent on ethanol. So that's why Midgeley and
Speaker 2: his bosses at General Motors are not interested in pursuing
Speaker 2: ethanol at all. And when tetra ethyl lead works, they're
Speaker 2: ready to pursue that and market it as as much
Speaker 2: and as fast as possible.
Speaker 1: Oh God, that's just like depressing. It's so depressing. There
Speaker 1: are so many elements, but it's like, oh, here are
Speaker 1: some other options that maybe don't lead to widespread poisoning,
Speaker 1: but because there were voices warning about the dangers of
Speaker 1: lead or leaded gasoline at the time, and Midgley himself
Speaker 1: experiences lead poisoning, and yet this doesn't really seem to
Speaker 1: alarm him or make him take a step back and go, whoa,
Speaker 1: this might be bad on a wide scale. Why is that?
Speaker 1: And is the answer just capitalism?
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, that's one. It's a big reason. But Mitchley
Speaker 2: kind of had this interesting thing happen to him, and
Speaker 2: you just alluded to it in nineteen twenty one. You know,
Speaker 2: he had been working with lead now for like six
Speaker 2: months every day in the lab in large quantity, and
Speaker 2: he gets lead poisoning, right, and he you know, feels
Speaker 2: the effects and his wrists and in his breathing and
Speaker 2: his brain and he has to go down to Florida
Speaker 2: to recover, you know, in the fresh air for months.
Speaker 2: And this is very well known. It's not like a
Speaker 2: secret either. And he's writing letters back to his bosses
Speaker 2: saying like, you know, I had too much lead. I
Speaker 2: need to recover. But one reaction could have been, wow,
Speaker 2: this has gotten out of hand, Like this is clearly
Speaker 2: a poison we should stop and do something else. But
Speaker 2: his reading of the situation was, well, I work with
Speaker 2: lead every day. Of course, yes, I got lead poisoning.
Speaker 2: You know. It's like I'm a fireman who works in
Speaker 2: a burning building. Of course I'm the first to get burned.
Speaker 2: But everybody else who works in making this stuff or
Speaker 2: burning it in their cars, it's going to encounter it
Speaker 2: in such small quantities, much smaller that they won't have
Speaker 2: nearly the effects that I did. So that's how he
Speaker 2: does these sort of mental gymnastics to rationalize. Oh and
Speaker 2: by the way, it's going to make us a lot
Speaker 2: of money too. We just have to be more careful
Speaker 2: to make sure that I or no one else gets sick.
Speaker 1: Again, let's take a quick break here. We'll be back
Speaker 1: before you know it. Welcome back, everyone, I'm here chatting
Speaker 1: with Daniel Stone about his book American Poison. Let's get
Speaker 1: into some more qui questions. As you mentioned, his goal
Speaker 1: in life was to be an inventor, and if this
Speaker 1: is his invention and the thing that he has valued for,
Speaker 1: then suddenly it's like, oh, actually, this is going to
Speaker 1: harm more people, and it's wrapped up in his identity,
Speaker 1: like he's not going to want to reject that.
Speaker 2: Now, it was very much a runaway train kind of situation.
Speaker 2: I mean he had invested so much time, so much effort,
Speaker 2: and you know, his reputation was wrapped up in its succeeding.
Speaker 2: So it's hard to get off a train moving that
Speaker 2: fast once it leaves the station. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And once it was introduced, tetra ethyl leaded gasoline
Speaker 1: really just enjoyed instant popularity. Right, It was like everyone
Speaker 1: loved it. But then there were some hiccups along the way.
Speaker 1: In nineteen twenty four, you tell the story of these
Speaker 1: like these lurid reports that came out about these five
Speaker 1: workers in New Jersey, I think who died from stream
Speaker 1: lead poisoning. And it was this incident that ultimately got
Speaker 1: Alice kind of involved in the fight against leaded gasoline.
Speaker 1: Can you tell me a little bit more about the
Speaker 1: context of that story and the effect that it had.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, leaded gasoline was very popular, you know when
Speaker 2: it was released because it came with this great technological leap.
Speaker 2: Not only would it solve engine knock, it would allow
Speaker 2: your car to be more powerful, it would allow you
Speaker 2: to travel further and faster. I mean, it was kind
Speaker 2: of one of those like you know, a big advance
Speaker 2: in your iPhone like these days that like it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem like there's any downside. It's great, you know, it
Speaker 2: makes life better. And it wasn't until nineteen twenty four when,
Speaker 2: as you mentioned, these four men, five men in New
Speaker 2: York work in a manufacturing plant that's making large quantities
Speaker 2: of tetra ethy lead and they go vividly insane. And
Speaker 2: this is like the wording of the reports at the
Speaker 2: time when these men would like go crazy at work,
Speaker 2: you know, start fighting with people or acting like wild animals,
Speaker 2: and then like you know, they put in be put
Speaker 2: into strait jackets and hauled away to an acydylum, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's what they did in those days. But because
Speaker 2: it was New York and because all of these men died,
Speaker 2: the media environment was so like ravenous there for a
Speaker 2: story and for what seemed like a conspiracy or a
Speaker 2: great big mystery. No one knew why these men went crazy,
Speaker 2: No one knew what they were working with. So these
Speaker 2: reporters hounded it for days and days and days, and
Speaker 2: all of their reports get syndicated out to papers in
Speaker 2: the country, and so everyone starts to worry what were
Speaker 2: they working with? And when it comes out that they
Speaker 2: were working with tetra ethyl lead that was being put
Speaker 2: into gasoline, you know a lot of people said, oh
Speaker 2: my god, you know, could I be next? Could this
Speaker 2: happen to me? And so it led to this great
Speaker 2: reckoning of is this too dangerous? And the government got
Speaker 2: involved in Alice Hamilton very much led the effort that yeah,
Speaker 2: we've known for thousands of years lad is dangerous and
Speaker 2: this is not an exception. This is a bad idea,
Speaker 2: and the industries should find something else.
Speaker 1: Why do you think that story marked a turning point
Speaker 1: for her?
Speaker 2: Well, she was used to inspecting industries and factories and
Speaker 2: finding sick men all the time. I mean she had
Speaker 2: been doing this for almost thirty years at this point.
Speaker 2: What was different here was that it became such a
Speaker 2: big media story. So what had traditionally been sort of
Speaker 2: the domain of scientific journals and small reports and you know,
Speaker 2: her reports for you know, state governments, had suddenly become
Speaker 2: a national media storm. She also realized that unlike you know,
Speaker 2: the work she had done in factories that you know,
Speaker 2: she could see men getting sick from maybe not wearing
Speaker 2: gloves or not wearing masks or you know, working with
Speaker 2: dangerous chemicals. Something like tetra ethletic gasoline had the potential
Speaker 2: to affect everybody, right, I mean, this was a problem
Speaker 2: that could affect millions and possibly billions around the world
Speaker 2: if it wasn't kept in check or regulated early.
Speaker 1: Alongside this reaction from Alice, what we see with this
Speaker 1: story that is kind of remarkable is the is how
Speaker 1: the companies responded and just like this you kind of
Speaker 1: talk about this period of time not just to this story,
Speaker 1: but to the story that these early warning cries about
Speaker 1: the dangers of tetra ethyl letted gasoline in these businesses
Speaker 1: that are producing it ethyl mainly saying oh, there's no
Speaker 1: problem with this whatsoever. Like it becomes not just like
Speaker 1: a defensive campaign, but just almost like an aggressive like
Speaker 1: stop hassling us about this. These are lies, just a
Speaker 1: really no accountability whatsoever. Were they among the first to
Speaker 1: kind of utilize this corporate denial?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this was an era in American history
Speaker 2: when business was booming, right, This was the nineteen twenties
Speaker 2: when everything was growing and everything was exciting, and businesses
Speaker 2: and culture and fashion and dancing and you know, everything
Speaker 2: was sort of happening at the same time, and so,
Speaker 2: you know, an American company, especially one that was succeeding
Speaker 2: and making a lot of money and making people's lives better.
Speaker 2: You know, the effect of the government on a company
Speaker 2: like that. You know, it's not just that the government
Speaker 2: couldn't really do much, but they also didn't want to.
Speaker 2: They didn't want to, you know, get too deeply involved
Speaker 2: and pull everyone back. So you know, there's kind of
Speaker 2: a lack of regulation to begin with. But there's also
Speaker 2: this public relations campaign also where Ethyl because they're making
Speaker 2: a lot of money selling ethyl gasoline, starts to engage
Speaker 2: in pr and some of the earliest form of corporate pr.
Speaker 2: It happens in the story where you know, they try
Speaker 2: to explain to people, well, you know, actually you're not
Speaker 2: working in a factory, so you're only going to encounter
Speaker 2: a much smaller amount of this stuff. It's like, you know,
Speaker 2: less than a drop per gallon. It's going to be
Speaker 2: burned up entirely in the engine. Nothing comes out dirty,
Speaker 2: don't worry. And this gets up the question of whose
Speaker 2: job is it to disprove that?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: The industry is not motivated, you know, certainly does not
Speaker 2: have the incentives to diminish its own success. But also
Speaker 2: whose job is it then to be skeptical or to
Speaker 2: find counter evidence or to create counter evidence with scientific studies.
Speaker 2: And that was also a problem that was new in
Speaker 2: this era, that the burden of proof really fell to
Speaker 2: the public.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you know, part of part of the reaction
Speaker 1: to that was Alice Hamilton and colleagues kind of coming
Speaker 1: together and going, we have a problem with these these
Speaker 1: you know, corporate produced studies showing that Letted gasoline is
Speaker 1: perfectly safe and it's wonderful and no problem whatsoever. And they,
Speaker 1: you know, they're pointing out the flaws. Ultimately, as you mention,
Speaker 1: the US government gets involved, and there's this conference where
Speaker 1: the US Surgeon General calls together everyone a little bit
Speaker 1: seems a little slightly biased towards ethel And the outcome
Speaker 1: ultimately was that a committee should be formed to conduct like,
Speaker 1: one more study. All right, one more study. Let's see
Speaker 1: is Letted gasoline safe or not? Tell me more about
Speaker 1: the outcome of this study and some of the problems
Speaker 1: to begin with, just leading up to whether this was
Speaker 1: actually a study that could do the job that it
Speaker 1: was commissioned to do. Essentially.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So this conference in May of nineteen twenty five
Speaker 2: was really thought to be the end of the argument. Right,
Speaker 2: let's get everybody in a room on all sides of
Speaker 2: this matter and figure out what's right, what's wrong, and
Speaker 2: what we should do from here. Very nice idea, right,
Speaker 2: And so the Surgeon General brings everyone together and he
Speaker 2: arranges this conference, but he arranges it kind of selectively
Speaker 2: where instead of like you know, a trial, where like
Speaker 2: the prosecution goes first and then the defense defends itself,
Speaker 2: he allows ethel which is really the defendant in this case,
Speaker 2: it's not a trial, but the defendant to speak first,
Speaker 2: and they they kind of filibuster the whole morning with
Speaker 2: all of their corporate favorable information and their corporate studies
Speaker 2: and anything they can say to promote it. And that
Speaker 2: leaves all of the doctors and the scientists and the
Speaker 2: opponents of this idea, like Alice Hamilton, to go in
Speaker 2: the afternoon. And so not only were they sort of
Speaker 2: diminished in the structure of the conference, but Alice Hamilton
Speaker 2: is also further diminished as a woman among these male
Speaker 2: scientists at this conference, so she doesn't really speak till
Speaker 2: the very end. So that alone stacks sort of what
Speaker 2: comes next. And as you mentioned, you know, the idea is,
Speaker 2: let's have one more study that's conducted by professional scientists
Speaker 2: who are not engaged with the industry at all, which
Speaker 2: is also a very nice idea, but you know, ultimately
Speaker 2: there's not a lot of funding for this kind of study.
Speaker 2: The scientists who are asked to do it, they don't
Speaker 2: have a lot of time outside of their jobs. So
Speaker 2: this study that normally should be you know, take two
Speaker 2: to three years, really be done across the country and
Speaker 2: involved a lot of people, you know, sampling, a control
Speaker 2: group whatnot, is really crammed into like four months and
Speaker 2: looked at just kind of one little factor that at
Speaker 2: the end is not positive or negative, but is inconclusive,
Speaker 2: and inconclusive ultimately means there's no evidence that it's dangerous,
Speaker 2: and so inconclusive means it's safe. And that's how it's
Speaker 2: sort of steered by the industry outside of that review.
Speaker 1: With this inconclusive results of this study, then letted gasoline
Speaker 1: essentially gets the AOK, not just in the US, but
Speaker 1: really around the world. So how did letted gasoline end
Speaker 1: up across the entire globe despite the fact that it
Speaker 1: was known to be a toxic substance.
Speaker 2: Well, once it sort of got out of that government
Speaker 2: review without any major blemishes and which was spun into
Speaker 2: it being completely safe, that stamp of approval from the
Speaker 2: government effectively was its credence around the world, and so
Speaker 2: foreign governments basically said, oh, the US government did a
Speaker 2: review of this, they didn't find it was dangerous, so
Speaker 2: we'll take it too, And they wanted to sell it
Speaker 2: in other countries because the same reason here it made
Speaker 2: cars more powerful. It solved this big problem. Ethel also
Speaker 2: underpriced it. They started to reduce the price of it
Speaker 2: over time so that more and more people would use
Speaker 2: it as volume play. Eventually until kind of the early
Speaker 2: nineteen thirties when ethyl gasoline, this brand name is just
Speaker 2: becomes gasoline, and gasoline almost everywhere has tetra ethyl lead
Speaker 2: in it without it even being in the name.
Speaker 1: It's chilling. But of course we don't have leaded gasoline today,
Speaker 1: and there were some pretty incredible steps. The story that
Speaker 1: you tell of the recognition of just how widespread lead
Speaker 1: like the distribution of lead is from leaded gasoline. Tell
Speaker 1: me about Claire Patterson and how his search for the
Speaker 1: age of the Earth ultimately uncovered lead contamination on this
Speaker 1: global scale.
Speaker 2: This is a wild story. So after ethyl gasoline sort
Speaker 2: of blankets its way across the country and eventually the world,
Speaker 2: it's just everywhere, and it is for a few decades
Speaker 2: until the nineteen fifties when this scientist at Caltech in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles. His name's Claire Patterson. He's a geologist, a geochemist,
Speaker 2: so he's not really related to industrial chemicals at all.
Speaker 2: But his goal in his doctoral dissertation is to find
Speaker 2: the age of the Earth. He wants to discover how
Speaker 2: all the Earth is. No one's ever known it's It
Speaker 2: would be a huge breakthrough in geology. And so he
Speaker 2: undergoes to try to date uranium. And uranium breaks down
Speaker 2: into lead. So if you could sort of take an
Speaker 2: ore of uranium or i'm sorry, of lead and count
Speaker 2: you know how much of the element uranium is still
Speaker 2: in it, you can sort of work backwards and try
Speaker 2: to date the Earth that way by comparing it to
Speaker 2: the rate of decay. And so he starts to do this,
Speaker 2: and he has a mass spectrometer which he uses and
Speaker 2: you know, to look at chemical elements and samples and
Speaker 2: he tries to get a reading, and he can't get
Speaker 2: a reading because it's too noisy. That's what they call it,
Speaker 2: when there's too much you know, stuff in the sample
Speaker 2: that obscures what he's trying to see. Much too much noise.
Speaker 2: So he started, Okay, I need to clean up my lab.
Speaker 2: So he starts to clean up his lab and scrub
Speaker 2: this and scrub that and make sure all the samples
Speaker 2: are clean. And there's still too much noise, like a
Speaker 2: lot of noise, and most of it's lead and he
Speaker 2: can't figure out why, and so you know, eventually, over
Speaker 2: time he spends years doing this. He has his whole
Speaker 2: building repiped with non lead pikes, He removes the gaskets
Speaker 2: from his windows, anything that might include just a tiny
Speaker 2: bit of lead, and you know, he starts to restrict
Speaker 2: who can come in the lab and what they have
Speaker 2: to wear and has matsuits whatnot. And eventually he gets
Speaker 2: a clear reading. And Claire Patterson is the man we
Speaker 2: can thank for dating the Earth to four point five
Speaker 2: billion years old. That was his finding. Today we think
Speaker 2: of it like four point six, but it was very close.
Speaker 2: So after he makes this breakthrough in the field of geology,
Speaker 2: he starts to one, why was there so much lead
Speaker 2: in all these noisy samples? Where's all this lead coming from?
Speaker 2: And there was actually a pretty easy way to find out.
Speaker 2: He goes to Greenland, and in Greenland you could take
Speaker 2: ice cores, and ice has a way of forming by year,
Speaker 2: so like in the winter, the snowfalls. In the summer,
Speaker 2: you know, there's like a layer of dust, and then
Speaker 2: the next winter, more ice, next summer, more dust, and
Speaker 2: so you could really see year by year changes in
Speaker 2: the atmosphere. And he looks at all the cores and
Speaker 2: he goes year by year and he discovers that all
Speaker 2: this lead really started in nineteen twenty one, And it
Speaker 2: wasn't hard to piece together what happened in nineteen twenty one.
Speaker 2: It was the release, the creation and then eventual release
Speaker 2: of tetra ethyl leaded gasoline.
Speaker 1: I mean, what a sobering moment to see that just
Speaker 1: night and day, like just this tremendous rise, and the
Speaker 1: implications of that were also huge. And when did that
Speaker 1: sort of the widespread health implications of this global lead contamination.
Speaker 1: When was that realized and when did that then translate
Speaker 1: into Okay, we have to do something about leaded gasoline.
Speaker 2: Now, yeah, so he sort of passes the baton in
Speaker 2: a non official way to a pediatrician, a doctor who
Speaker 2: works with children named Herbert Needleman worked in Philadelphia who
Speaker 2: worked with kids, and he noticed, you know, after this
Speaker 2: sort of lead disclosure is made about how much lead
Speaker 2: there is in the world and where it came from,
Speaker 2: Herbert Needleman notices that their children that work near his,
Speaker 2: that play near his clinic, that have these weird neurological
Speaker 2: effects right like, they're really tired, really lethargic. They don't
Speaker 2: want to play, they don't you know, they don't behave
Speaker 2: like kids normally would. So he starts to wonder what's
Speaker 2: going on. And normally, in this case, you would, you know,
Speaker 2: the best thing would be to inspect their bones, take
Speaker 2: biopsies from their bones and see how much lead is
Speaker 2: in them. You can't do that with kids, or really
Speaker 2: with anyone, you know, with too many people. But he
Speaker 2: decides to collect baby teeth. You know, teeth have lead
Speaker 2: accumulation also, So he starts to offer like a silver
Speaker 2: dollar to any kid in Philadelphia who will give him
Speaker 2: one of their teeth that falls out, and he collects
Speaker 2: a lot of them. And it's here where he starts
Speaker 2: to find these jaw dropping patterns of lead exposure. That
Speaker 2: children who lived on busy roads had much higher lead
Speaker 2: in their boat and their teeth than children who lived elsewhere,
Speaker 2: and this started to yield other discoveries, like children who
Speaker 2: had high lead exposure were also much harder to keep
Speaker 2: focused in class, and as they got older, these kids
Speaker 2: were more likely to engage in reckless behavior. And so
Speaker 2: over time this body of research grows and the same
Speaker 2: patterns are found all over the country and effectively the world.
Speaker 2: That counties with high lead exposure, you know, have higher
Speaker 2: crime than ones with low lead exposure. And as lead
Speaker 2: changed over time, so did crime loosely change with it,
Speaker 2: And so you have this connection, a relationship between lead
Speaker 2: and crime, lead and reckless behavior that today we now
Speaker 2: know as the lead crime hypothesis in criminology.
Speaker 1: Was anyone ultimately held accountable for the widespread use of
Speaker 1: leaded gasoline?
Speaker 2: No, no one ever, not in a court case. No
Speaker 2: one has ever gone to jail for any of it.
Speaker 2: What effectively ended ethyl gasoline and leaded gas entirely was
Speaker 2: not regulation. It wasn't this budding environmental movement not even
Speaker 2: these discoveries about its danger. It was a new innovation entirely.
Speaker 2: It was a new innovation put on cars starting in
Speaker 2: the nineteen seventies, known as the catalytic converter. Right, we
Speaker 2: all have them now, and it would reduce the emissions
Speaker 2: of all sorts of bad pollution and gases that would
Speaker 2: come out, but lead would gunk it all up. So
Speaker 2: no one wanted lead in their gasoline anymore because it
Speaker 2: would mess up their catalytic converter, and that alone was
Speaker 2: enough to dramatically reduce the amount of lead. And Ethyl
Speaker 2: Corporation tried to fight the catalytic converter as you would expect,
Speaker 2: of course, you know, they disrupted the market in the
Speaker 2: nineteen twenties with their innovation and were eventually disrupted themselves
Speaker 2: fifty years later by another It's.
Speaker 1: The law of nature. Yes, this isn't really part of
Speaker 1: the story, but I do just want to ask you
Speaker 1: to tell me a little bit more about Midgley's other
Speaker 1: tragic invention that would then just his legacy is kind
Speaker 1: of ridiculous. First leaded gasoline and then chloroflor carbons.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, So Thomas Mitchley's very celebrated after he discovers
Speaker 2: ethyl gasoline. I mean, it's not only transformative to the
Speaker 2: auto industry, but everybody loves it, and every little royalty,
Speaker 2: even three cents on every gallon of gasoline make General
Speaker 2: motors hundreds of millions of dollars, So he's a very
Speaker 2: wealthy man in that. On that score, he's also still
Speaker 2: a really good chemist. He's really good at hunting and
Speaker 2: pecking and finding, you know, chemical solutions to the world's problems.
Speaker 2: And one of the big problems in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 2: was refrigeration, which effectively is the same as air conditioning.
Speaker 2: It's the same technology. Refrigeration works in this kind of
Speaker 2: like chemical circle where you evaporate a gas that gives
Speaker 2: off cold air, and then you cycle that gas back through.
Speaker 2: You turn it into a liquid so it could evaporate
Speaker 2: again and just keep cycling through. But the gas is
Speaker 2: kind of really important to get the right one, and
Speaker 2: we didn't have the right one until the thirties, and
Speaker 2: so Thomas Midgley decided he was going to find the
Speaker 2: best refrigerant gas. And it takes him not long at all,
Speaker 2: I mean less than a week to basically hunt through
Speaker 2: his periodic table discover it, and it's the gas that
Speaker 2: eventually became known as free on refrigerant one thirty four A.
Speaker 2: The effect is transformative. I mean this effects refrigeration, changes,
Speaker 2: air conditioning. Refrigeration alone, you know, helps keep medicine and
Speaker 2: food safe much longer. It extends the human life span.
Speaker 2: I mean, these are enormous advances. But free on and
Speaker 2: the chemicals in it also cause a slow erosion of
Speaker 2: the ozone layer, and we don't really know this until
Speaker 2: decades later when someone's you know, some British scientists are like,
Speaker 2: why is there a big hole above Antarctica? What's going on?
Speaker 2: And they trace it back to one of the compounds
Speaker 2: in free on, known as chlorofluorocarbons, we call them CFCs,
Speaker 2: that destroy some of the elements up there, and eventually
Speaker 2: we rein it in and we eliminate the use of
Speaker 2: free on in that same form, and the ozone layer
Speaker 2: is actually on pace I think to close within the
Speaker 2: next like two or three decades. But still it's a
Speaker 2: dramatic and horrifying effect and damage done to the planet,
Speaker 2: and it's sort of striking that the same guy, one
Speaker 2: guy did both of these things. Letted gasoline that poisoned
Speaker 2: millions of people around the world. It's uncountable how many
Speaker 2: were affected at least in some way by letted gasoline
Speaker 2: and also the hole in the ozone layer. I think
Speaker 2: New Scientist magazine while I was researching, they call Midgeley
Speaker 2: the single most destructive organism in the history of the planet.
Speaker 1: I mean, I yes, yes, it is. To compare like
Speaker 1: that his legacy with Alice Hamilton's, it's a very striking
Speaker 1: legacy difference there, Like what impact do you leave on
Speaker 1: the world? And I kind of want to like bring
Speaker 1: this full circle by talking about today. You know, the
Speaker 1: story of leaded gasoline is one that is familiar, right,
Speaker 1: and some of the elements are very familiar where there's
Speaker 1: this negative health effect, it's ignored for a long time.
Speaker 1: After people like Alice Hamilton push for the truth to
Speaker 1: get out there, finally something is done about it. You know,
Speaker 1: things like asbestos, radiation, arsenic this, chlorophoric carbons, tobacco, you know,
Speaker 1: other toxins once hailed as miraculous then are seen as harmful.
Speaker 1: Where do you think that this is playing out today? Like,
Speaker 1: have we learned any lessons?
Speaker 2: Oh? I mean, it's everywhere today. This is a very
Speaker 2: common cycle. You know, we saw it not only with
Speaker 2: leaded gasoline, but with cigarettes, industrial pesticides. You know, we
Speaker 2: see it today with a lot of microplastics. I think
Speaker 2: we've kind of been over adult and how we've advanced
Speaker 2: the use of plastics and put them in everything that
Speaker 2: we'll probably rain in or regret later. We also have PFA's,
Speaker 2: the so called permanent chemicals forever chemicals that are used
Speaker 2: in almost every consumer product now that again make life better, easier,
Speaker 2: They're exciting and also you know, linked to health effects
Speaker 2: and general pollution of the planet. There's also non industrial
Speaker 2: things that I think we'll also look back on with
Speaker 2: a measure of regret. One of the big ones I
Speaker 2: think is social media, right, which has like transformed the
Speaker 2: world and benefited all of our lives in a lot
Speaker 2: of ways. But I think fifty one hundred years from now,
Speaker 2: we'll look back and say, wow, that was done very fast,
Speaker 2: very recklessly, with not enough guardrails, and you know, really
Speaker 2: affected not only a generation of teenagers, but you know,
Speaker 2: also changed our discourse, our politics, our governance, our economy
Speaker 2: in ways that maybe we have done differently. So I
Speaker 2: think there are all these things that are being tested
Speaker 2: in real time on the public, which in many ways
Speaker 2: are you know, how things happen, how innovation happens. But
Speaker 2: without sort of the close supervision and watchful eye of
Speaker 2: a responsible party and you know, a sense of regulation,
Speaker 2: these things could get out of hand. And this story
Speaker 2: shows us, you know, kind of a parable of what happened.
Speaker 1: If only we could just make sure that we listen
Speaker 1: to it, and he'd you know, use history as a
Speaker 1: guidance to things that we don't have to repeat to
Speaker 1: learn again these lessons over and over again.
Speaker 2: I think there are Alice Hamilton's all around us at
Speaker 2: the moment who are trying to warn us. Many of
Speaker 2: them are screaming at the top of their lives like stop,
Speaker 2: don't do this. But you know, they're working in a
Speaker 2: very complicated ecosystem of ideas, of technology, of innovation, with
Speaker 2: many competing interests and incentives, and it's a very hard
Speaker 2: case to make, so time is usually what makes the
Speaker 2: cases stronger and more clarifying.
Speaker 1: Well, Daniel, thank you so much for taking the time
Speaker 1: to chat today. This was so enlightening. I mean, this
Speaker 1: story is depressing, but also there are moments of hope
Speaker 1: that I think are really important.
Speaker 2: So thanks, thanks Erin, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: A big thank you again to Daniel Stone for taking
Speaker 1: the time to chat with me. I still can't get
Speaker 1: over the story of Letted Gasoline, and Midgley and Hamilton
Speaker 1: and just the legacies that we leave behind. If you
Speaker 1: enjoyed today's episode and would like to learn more, check
Speaker 1: out our website this podcas cast will kill you dot com.
Speaker 1: We're I'll post a link to where you can find
Speaker 1: American Poison, a Deadly invention, and the Woman Who Battled
Speaker 1: for environmental justice, as well as a link to Daniel's
Speaker 1: website where you can find his other incredible work. And
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