Market facilitators and their cronies
are trying their best to obfuscate the deadly contamination in food as general degradation
of environment and hence by this warped logic poor multibillion dollar companies shouldn’t
be held responsible, one crony even suggests why don’t we feed these to poor
people instead of wasting. There is intense jockeying going on get into the
right book of moneybags and hence benefits. Let’s make things clear: food contaminated
with lead beyond permissible level is dangerous for human health, whatever may
be the logic. Secondly it is expected from the rich companies to use
technologies to remove these dangerous contaminants rather than blaming
polluted environment, and yes if they are not able to make more profit then try
something else to multiply money. At the end of the day it is about doubling
the money (whatever is the charade of investment and other compelling jargons).
The other day I was reading an article by Madhav Gadgil, these lines, that is
attributed to World Bank (Vice President) in 1991, were striking and should
help put things in perspective “The
measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone
earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view, a
given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with
the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the
economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country
is impeccable and we should face up to that.”
This article by Mr. Madhav is
quite interesting (to read it in regrettable newspaper being the only hiccup,
maybe few years down the line these arbitrators will be obsolete, as a reader I
wouldn’t mind paying him directly. Miniscule amounts will add on). I was aware
of TEL and how it was pushed, but I wasn’t aware that “…It is now definitely established that alcohol can be blended with
gasoline to produce a suitable motor fuel…concluded that alcohol-gasoline
blends can ‘withstand high compression without producing knock.’ But alcohol
cannot be patented and cannot bring large profits to companies. So, all
discussion of its potential was deliberately suppressed, and TEL pushed with
vigour”. But there is more to it, apart from Surgeon-General Robert Kehoe who
undertook forceful advocacy of TEL despite awareness of dangers, there was
another fellow named Thomas Midgley –the inventor of TEL (the godforsaken fellow
also invented CFCs –ozone depleting and major green house gas). Midgley conducted
live demonstration of inhaling TEL in front of reporters, it need be noted that
he was seriously ill due to exposure only a few months back, and was fully
aware of perilous effect of lead.
Lead was ‘embarrassingly profitable
to produce industrially’. So in 1923 three of Americas largest corporations General
Motors, Du Pont and Standard Oil formed a joint enterprise called the Ethyl Gasoline
Corporation with a view to making as much tetraethyl lead as the world was
willing to buy…they called their additive ‘ethyl’ because it sounded friendlier
and less than lead, and introduced it for public consumption. It should
also be noted that production workers, almost immediately began to experience the
effects of poisoning, irreversible delusions, and deaths were reported. But the
spokesman of company blandly informed the reporters “These men probably went
insane because they worked too hard” (as documented by Sharon Mcgaryne in Prometheans
in the Lab, a book on history of industrial chemistry). This background should
help us understand the complicity of big corporation and their greed. 
Madhav writes about one Clair
Patterson, a brilliant young geochemist who “systematically investigated levels
of lead in rocks, rivers and sea water, ocean sediments, the atmosphere and the
biosphere. He demonstrated that over the last few centuries, the levels of lead
in the remains of marine organisms incorporated in sediments had gone up a
hundredfold. The obvious conclusion was that the prevailing levels of lead in
the human body were a result of pollution, and were not natural levels at all,
as Kehoe had been claiming so far. Patterson provided clinching evidence of
this when human teeth and bones from ancient burials turned out to have just
one-thousandth the amount of lead as teeth and bones of modern-day humans”. It took
full 20 years after the publication of his paper that the U.S. government was
finally forced to ban TEL. In the meanwhile they tried everything to discredit Patterson.
Clair Patterson’s contribution is
significant and it needs to be told in its entirety. Though his intent was to
find the definitive age of Earth, which he did succeed and that in itself was
remarkable effort. He was using a new method of ‘lead isotope measurement’, and
that is what led him to the atmospheric lead. Patterson found that before 1923
there was almost no lead in the atmosphere, and that since then lead has climbed
steadily and dangerously. Readers will note that 1923 was also the year when Ethyl
Gasoline Corporation was set up. Patterson made his life’s quest to get lead
out of petrol, he became a constant and often vocal critic of lead industry. Ethyl Gasoline Corporation was a powerful
global corporation with many friends in high places. Patterson suddenly found
research funding withdrawn. The American Petroleum Institute cancelled research
contract with him, so did Union States Public Health Service, a supposedly neutral
government body. Ethyl Gasoline Corporation even offered to endow a chair at
Caltech ‘if Patterson was sent packing’ (as reported by Jamie Kitman in The Nation). He was excluded from
National research council panel appointed to investigate atmospheric lead
poisoning, though he was a leading expert in this field. To his credit
Patterson never wavered, and eventually because of his efforts Clean Air Act of
1971 was introduced, and finally to the removal of leaded petrol from US in
1986. It took many more years for it to be applied in chronically corrupt
countries like India. The lead in paints was removed only recently.
All the above information is
input from a remarkable book A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill
Bryson I was reading a month back. This is one book that is strongly suggested.
I wanted to buy it almost a decade back when it was published, but somehow couldn’t
and then the thought fettered. Few months back I was watching Fareed Zakaria ‘GPS’
wherein he suggested this book. Couldn’t get it in Mysore or Bangalore (?) and
finally bought it from Khan Market Delhi, worth the effort and the read. Bill Bryson
definitely has the way of explaining things, and it is compelling to read the stories
behind the inventions, discoveries so on. Bryson writes “Clair Patterson died in 1995. He didn’t win a Nobel Prize for his work.
Geologists never do. Nor, more puzzlingly, did he gain any fame or even much
attention from half a century of consistent and increasingly selfless
achievement. A good case could be made that he was the most influential
geologist of the twentieth century. Yet who has ever heard of Clair Patterson? Most
geology textbooks don’t mention him. Two recent popular books on the history of
the dating of the 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 woman”. Apart from being an outstanding
geologist his effort to remove lead from atmosphere in itself makes this man
a prodigious soul.
