Re-reposting this comment
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 by
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo from the 2021 HN discussion
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 of this Smithsonian article on leaded gasoline
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/leaded-gas-poison-... . The MentalFloss article about Clair Patterson is especially good. Pasting the comment in full (again, this is heymijo's work not mine):
> Two beliefs became entrenched:
1. that lead is natural to the human body, and
2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campai...
[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...
> Two beliefs became entrenched:
1. that lead is natural to the human body, and
2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed
Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]
A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.
So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.
Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Cameron_Patterson#Campai...
[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-sc...