AMERICAN POISON

A crusader takes on toxins.

Science writer Stone investigates the life and work of physician Alice Hamilton (1869-1970) and inventor Thomas Midgley Jr. (1889-1944), who became pitted against one another in the controversy over lead toxicity. As a young doctor, Hamilton lived at activist Jane Addams’ Hull House in Chicago, making house calls to poor families, during which she noted that men who worked near animal pens in stockyards suffered high rates of pneumonia, and those who worked in steel mills suffered from “a peculiar brain fogginess” caused by breathing carbon monoxide. These observations led to her extensive research into industrial poisons, making her an expert in the field. In 1910, invited to join a commission to investigate 29 known poisons, she focused on lead. The commission’s findings about lead toxicity led to significant reform: Bosses in Illinois were required to compensate workers affected by poisonous fumes, gases, and dust. But toxins transcended the workplace after Midgley, intent on improving fuel combustion, invented an anti-knock tetraethyl leaded fuel. A significant breakthrough for the automotive industry, the leaded fuel “would mean their cars could run cleaner and go farther and, in the process, boost the allure of the automobile.” Although automotive workers—and even Midgley himself—began suffering lead poisoning, he and the industry insisted on its safety, funding inadequate studies to bolster their claims. While Hamilton and other scientists disputed those findings, companies engaged in a strategy that still continues: “doubt, denial, and delay.” Stone’s informative history, populated with corporate shills, lazy investigators, and upstanding scientists, serves as a cautionary—and somewhat optimistic—tale. Hamilton, he notes, has been vindicated “on the dangers of low-dose poisoning from mercury, radium, asbestos, and carbon monoxide.” And the public has grown rightly suspicious of governments’ and corporations’ “sweeping guarantees.”

Entertaining and eye-opening.