Toxic Truths: A Book Review

I just finished reading Toxic Truth: A Scientist, A Doctor, and the Battle Over Lead, by Lydia Denworth. I highly recommend this book. It is fascinating, well-researched, and frightening. Prior to the 1970s, lead was big business in this country.

It has been well-known since ancient times, and scientifically understood since the 1830s, that lead is dangerous, even fatal, at high concentrations. This hasn't stopped people from using lead for all kinds of applications, from plumbing to paint to gasoline.

In 1904, Australian doctors A. Jefferis Turner and John Lockhart Gibson, after more than ten years of treating lead-poisoned children in Queensland, Australia, were able to determine that lead paint was the common source of the poisoning in all the children. Dr. Gibson "believed his findings would soon put an end to the epidemic." However, "as one pediatrician said, American doctors seemed to think the Australians 'primitive or addlepated by the heat.'" Toxic Truth is the story of how a scientist and a doctor, fifty years later, would put an end to that complacency.

The connections Toxic Truths draws between poor behavior at school and high lead levels, juvenile delinquency and high lead levels, are truly frightening and eye-opening. One of the first scientists to study the pervasiveness of lead in our environment (almost all put there by humans), Clair Patterson, believed that the only safe level of lead in humans and the environment was zero. Many other scientists thought he was crazy, but the cutting-edge science today is beginning to draw the same conclusion.

Despite that, and despite the removal of lead from food cans (they used to be soldered with lead and are now welded) and gasoline, lead is still pervasive in our environment, mainly present in old lead paint. The wholescale abatement of lead from homes has never taken place, mainly because the main groups responsible for such abatement, namely the former lead industry, particularly paint companies, and landlords, have lobbied very strongly against such abatement.

For anyone over the age of 30, this book will probably not come as such a shock. I think that even then, however, you will find the book extremely interesting for the detailed portraits it presents of two key scientists, Clair Patterson and Harold Needleman. They didn't work together for most of their careers, and they had surprising backgrounds to work in studying lead (Patterson was a chemist focused on nuclear physics, and Patterson was a physician) but they were some of the most influential scientists in the effort to ban lead as a common chemical.

Sometimes, when not thinking of toys from China, we think of lead as a problem of the past. Toxic Truths will show you the truth. I highly recommend this book.

Cross-posted at MotherTalkers.