Ch. 3. Opposite Sides of the Atlantic: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

Opposite Sides of the Atlantic 



Copenhagen: Crucible of Discovery 

KAJ ELI ROHOLM had a passion for life and medicine. The son of a Danish 
sea captain and an immigrant Polish Jew, Roholm shone briefly as one of 
Europe's brightest stars. During the 1920S and 193os, when Copenhagen 
glowed as a crucible of scientific discov ery and Nils Bohr and a cadre of 
physicist disciples laid the theoretical foundation for nuclear fission, Kaj 
Roholm had advanced the healing arts.' 

"He was a very vital and lively person," remembered the 
ninety-five-year-old Georg Brun, who met Roholm almost a lifetime ago, 
when both were young doctors training in a Danish hospital. They had 
talked eagerly about politics, history, and medicine.' Although a handful of 
specialists around the world today remember Roholm for his "great and 
lasting" study of fluoride toxicity, he was also a pio neer in the use of 
biopsy samples to study the human liver, an expert in infectious and 
occupational diseases, and a tireless advocate for public health.' He was 
interested in everything, said Brun. 

As Copenhagen s Deputy Health Commissioner in the late 1930s, the 
thirty-eight-year-old led his fellow doctors in campaigns against diphtheria 
and venereal diseases and in campaigns to improve the health of newborn 
children. He harnessed modern media to his public-health agenda, 
producing films, radio advertisements, posters, and brochures; and he 
arranged for wartime distribution of a hundred thousand copies of his 
pamphlet, What 



OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC 



31 



Everyone Wants to Know about Infectious Diseases. When the Nazis 
marched into Denmark in April 1940, the doctor remained at his post. 
Although Copenhagen won the wartime reputation of a humane 
city — where Jews escaped much of the violence occurring in other 
occupied European cities — Roholm described occupation conditions 
as "awful." 5 

A quirk in the Earth s geology drew Roholm to fluoride. Virtually 
the entire worlds supply of the fluoride-containing mineral known as 
cryolite was found, at the time, in a single deposit beneath the 
Danish colony of Greenland. Cryolite is an Eskimo word meaning 
ice stone. Trade in the brilliant white rock had grown rapidly in the 
early twentieth century, after researchers learned that aluminum 
could be made more cheaply by using electricity to melt the ice stone 
in a glowing-hot pot, along with refined bauxite ore. A great river 
of this aluminum had armed soldiers with munitions and lightweight 
equipment during World War I. 

As the cryolite ships arrived in Denmark, the ice stones were hauled 
to the Oresund Chemical Works in Copenhagen, where a heavy cloud 
of cryolite dust filled the factory air and where a medical mystery 
preoccupied doctors. Inside the plant the Danish workers were stricken 
with multiple ailments, including a bizarre crippling of their skeletons 
known as poker back. Professor P. Flemming Moller of the 
Rigshospital suspected that fluoride was responsible; cryolite contains 
more than 50 percent fluoride. In 1932 Moller labeled the disease 
cryolite intoxication and suggested that a young doctoral candidate, 
Kaj Roholm, study the newly discovered condition: 

Roholm seized the challenge with the passion of youth. He lis- 
tened carefully to the complaints of the Copenhagen cryolite work- 
ers, examining them with the use of X-rays. He conducted his own 
laboratory experiments, feeding fluoride to pigs, rats, and dogs in 
order to study its biological effects. A shocking picture emerged of a 
chemical with a venomous and hydra-headed capacity for harm. 
Silently and insidiously fluoride stole into the workers' blood — from 
swallowed dust, Roholm reported, with the poison accumulating in 
teeth, bones, and quite possibly the workers kidneys and lungs.' 
Eighty-four percent of the workers at the cryolite plant had signs of 
osteosclerosis. Their bones sopped up fluoride like sponges, 
wreaking havoc on their skeletons, immobilizing spinal columns, 
malform- 



32 



CHAPTER THREE 



ing knees and hips, and even thickening some mens skulls. Half the 
employees had a lung condition known as pulmonary fibrosis and many 
suffered from an emphysema-like affliction." And in a disease process 
that resembled the effects of aging, the workers ligaments grew hard and 
sprouted bony spines, while their bones became lumpy and irregular in 
shape. 1 " Arthritic and rheumatic afflictions have a marked frequency 
among the employees, Roholm stated, and serious stomach problems were 
commonplace; several cryolite workers also had chronic skin rashes and 
pussy sores on their chest and back, especially in the summer. 

Fluoride probably poisoned the central nervous system as well. "The 
marked frequency of nervous disorders after employment has ceased might 
indicate that cryolite has a particularly harmful effect on the central 
nervous system, Roholm noted." He called the disease "fluorine 
intoxication" and suspected that it was fluorine's ability to poison 
enzymes — the chemical messengers that regulate much bodily 
activity — that made it a threat on so many biological fronts. We must 
assume that the effect of fluorine on protoplasm and on enzymatic 
processes is capable of causing profound changes in the metabolism of the 
organism, Roholm added.' 

The scientist also examined fluoride s effects on teeth. There had been 
scientific speculation since the nineteenth century that because ingested 
fluoride was deposited in teeth and bone, it was therefore necessary for 
healthy teeth. 13 A team at Johns Hopkins University tested that theory in 
1925, feeding rats fluoride, but found that it made their teeth weaker. 14 
Roholm found the same thing. The workers' teeth he studied were bad, and 
the worst teeth had the most fluoride in them. Lactating mothers in the 
Copenhagen factory had even poisoned their own children; since fluoride 
passed though their breast milk, children who had never been inside the 
plant developed mottled teeth — evidence that mother and child had been 
exposed to an industrial chemical.' 

Roholm's conclusions on fluoride and teeth were blunt. "The once 
general assumption that fluorine is necessary to the quality of the enamel 
rests upon an insufficient foundation. Our present knowledge most 
decidedly indicates that fluorine is not necessary to the quality of that 
tissue, but that on the contrary the enamel organ is electively sensitive to 
the deleterious effects of fluorine," he wrote 



33 



(emphasis in original)." His medical recommendation: "Cessation of the 
therapeutic use of fluorine compounds for children. ' In other words, more 
than sixty years ago the worlds leading fluoride scientist rejected the 
notion that fluoride was needed for stronger teeth, agreeing with earlier 
studies that found that fluoride weakened the enamel — and explicitly 
warning against giving fluoride to children. 

Roholm continued his investigation. He traveled to places where he 
suspected that similar such fluoride intoxication had occurred, and he read 
widely in the great libraries of Berlin and London. A clear picture emerged: 
the scientist saw how fluorides chemical potency had long caused 
problems in the natural world and that its usefulness to modern industry 
was increasingly causing problems in human affairs. 18 In Iceland he saw 
grazing sheep that were emaciated and crippled, their teeth weakened, with 
a disease called gaddur. Their forage had become contaminated with 
fluoride spewed into the biosphere from deep inside the earth during vol- 
canic eruptions. The disease especially injured young animals.' In the 
United States, such natural fluoride had plagued the westward-sweeping 
migrants in Texas, South Dakota, Arizona, and Colorado. These thirsty 
pioneers had sunk wells deep into the desert but drew water that was 
contaminated with fluoride. The poison produced an ugly tooth deformity 
known as Colorado Brown Stain or Texas Teeth. (Today that deformity is 
known by the medical term dental fluorosis and is an early indicator of 
systemic fluoride poisoning. A more severe form of poisoning, produced 
by earth-bound natural fluoride, known as crippling skeletal fluorosis, is 
also widespread in much of the Third World, where lack of nutrition often 
worsens the fluoride's effects.) 

Roholm saw that in the industrial world fluoride had become a bedrock 
for key manufacturing processes; 80 percent of the worlds supply of 
fluorspar, the most commonly used fluoride mineral, was used in metal 
smelting; steel, iron, beryllium, magnesium, lead, alu minum, copper, 
gold, silver, and nickel all used it in production' ( The word fluoride comes 
from the Latin root fluor meaning "to flux or to flow. Fluoride has the 
essential property of reducing the temperature at which molten metal is 
fluxed from superheated ore.) Brickworks, glass and enamel makers, and 
superphosphate 



34 



CHAPTER THREE 



fertilizer manufacturers each used raw materials that included enormous 
volumes of fluoride. And at DuPonts Kinetic Chemicals in New Jersey, 
scientists were giving birth to a new global industry of organic or 
carbon-based fluoride products, engineering man-made fluoride and 
carbon molecules to mass-produce a popular new refrigerant known as 
Freon. 

Roholm saw that what had long befallen the natural world was now 
increasingly happening to human beings, and by their own hand. 
Industry s growing appetite for fluoride presented a special threat to 
workers and surrounding communities. The Dane studied case after case 
in which factory fluoride hurt workers and contaminated surrounding 
areas — and where angry lawsuits had been launched for compensation. In 
Freiburg, Germany, for example, smelters had been compensating their 
neighbors for smoke-damaged vegetation since 1855. In 1907 it was 
finally confirmed that fluoride smoke from those smelters had poisoned 
nearby cattle." Similar damage to plants and cattle was seen elsewhere in 
Europe, near superphosphate fertilizer plants, brickworks, iron foundries, 
chemical factories, and copper smelters." But although the damage was 
widespread, information about its chemical cause was less available. The 
toxicity of fluorine compounds is considerable and little known in 
industry, Roholm wrote. 

Science was partly to blame, he suggested. The industrial revolution, for 
example, had been fueled with coal, which had darkened the skies over 
cities such as Pittsburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and London. But air 
pollution investigators had focused the blame for subsequent 
environmental damage and human injury on sulfur compounds rather than 
on the large quantities of fluoride frequently found in coal." 

Roholm suggested that even the century s worst industrial air pollution 
disaster to date, in Belgium's Meuse Valley — which killed sixty people and 
injured several thousand in December 1930 — had been caused by fluoride, 
not sulfur. During the Meuse Valley incident thousands of panicked local 
citizens had scrambled up hillsides to flee choking gases during three days 
of horror. Roholm proposed that fluoride from the nearby factories had 
been trapped by a temperature inversion, then dissolved in moisture and 
carried by particles of soot deep into the victims lungs." Roholm thought 
that disaster 



OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC 



35 



investigators had overlooked both the toxicity and the prevalence of 
fluoride pollution from nearby zinc, steel, and phosphate plants. He 
calculated that tens of thousands of pounds of the chemical were 
spilled each day from the local factories, etching windows, crippling 
cattle, damaging vegetation, and making citizen lawsuits in the Meuse 
Valley a well known phenomenon. ' 

Roholm singled out the new global aluminum industry. He studied 
a lawsuit against a Swiss manufacturer in which it was alleged that 
fluoride fallout during World War I had hurt cattle and vegetation. 
Animal injury was again found near an Italian aluminum plant in 
1935; the following year scientists found health problems inside a 
Norwegian aluminum smelter, where workers suffered sudden gastric 
pains and vomiting, bone changes, and symptoms resembling 
bronchial asthma.' A special position is occupied by aluminum 
works," Roholm wrote, "inasmuch as the damaged vegetation 
especially has caused secondary animal diseases. 28 He advocated 
government action: Factories giving off gaseous fluorine compounds 
should be required to take measures for their effective removal from 
chimney smoke. 29 

Roholm s monumental 364-page study, Fluorine Intoxication, was 
published in 1937 and was quickly translated into English. It 
contained references to 893 scientific articles on fluoride. The trust 
and cooperation of the Danish cryolite industry was necessary to 
make his study. Nevertheless, the book was a warning to corpora- 
tions: they must pay attention to their factory conditions and to the 
insidious — often misdiagnosed — effects of fluoride on workers. 
Roholm had several clear recommendations for employers and 
doctors, among them: 

• Recognition of chronic fluorine intoxication as an 
occupation disease rating for compensation. 

• Prohibition against employment of females and young people 
on work with fluorine compounds developing dust or vapor. 

• Demand that industrial establishments should neutralize 
waste products containing fluorine. 30 

• A prohibition against the presence of fluorine in patent 
medicine may be necessary.' 



36 



CHAPTER THREE 



Pittsburgh 1935 

IT WAS A May morning in Pittsburgh, and a watery spring sun struggled 
through the smoky haze. Inside his office at the Mellon Institute, the 
director, Ray Weidlein, put down his newspaper in satisfaction. Several 
dailies had picked up a press release he had recently issued: 

New attack on Tooth Decay ... to be carried on at the Mellon Institute 
headlined a May 1, 1935, example in the Youngstown (OH) Telegram. 
Mellon researchers had "found evidence that the presence of a factor in the 
diet at a crucial period of tooth formation leads to the development of teeth 
resistant to decay, the newspaper proclaimed. A Mellon scientist, Gerald J. 
Cox, was to lead the hunt for the mysterious factor improving teeth, and 
Pittsburgh s well-known Buhl Foundation would fund the research on 
rodents.' 

Since tooth decay was a major problem in the industrialized United 
States, the story must have seemed liked good news to most readers, and 
especially to dentists. But the headlines were certainly welcome good press 
for Ray Weidlein. Several of the big industrial corporations who funded the 
Mellon Institute s work had recently been dragged through the pages of the 
nation s media with some very unflattering stories — and were increasingly 
under attack from Congress and the courts. That spring Time magazine was 
one of sev eral papers and magazines that had carried accounts of the 
horrific events at Gauley Bridge in West Virginia, where several hundred 
mostly black migrant miners had died from silicosis contracted while 
drilling a tunnel for the Union Carbide Company during 1931-1932. News 
of what would be America's worst industrial disaster to date had filtered 
out from Appalachia slowly, but by 1935 the West Virginia deaths had 
become a full-blown national scandal. Hundreds of lawsuits had been filed 
against Union Carbide and its contractors. Reporters were daily 
scrutinizing the often appalling rates of occupational illness in other 
industries. And sympathetic citizen juries were regularly awarding millions 
of dollars to injured workers, provoking a fullblown financial emergency 
for several leading industrial corporations — and panic among their 
insurers. In January Congress would hold hearings, and Gauley Bridge 
would, for many Americans, come to symbolize a callous disregard by 
powerful corporations for workers health.' 



OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC 



37 



Ray Weidlein and the Mellon Institute were in full crisis mode that 
spring of 1935, helping Union Carbide and other top corporations 
contain public outrage over the workplace carnage — and head off 
draconian legislation for better pollution control inside factories. The 
corporate strategy was clear: get dominion over basic science, wrestle 
control of health information from labor groups, and in turn, reinvest 
that medical expertise in the hands of industry-anointed specialists. 
These steps were seen as the anti-toxin for the agitation against 
private enterprise, according to one of Weidlein s correspondents." 
The besieged corporations organized a lobbying group known as the 
Air Hygiene Foundation because, as the group noted, "sound laws 
must be based on sound facts"; and, perhaps more importantly, 
because "half a billion dollars in damage suits have been filed against 
employers in occupational 
disease claims." 35 

Headquartered at the Mellon Institute, in 1937 the Air Hygiene 
Foundation had a membership list sporting many of the best-known 
names in industry, including Johns-Manville, Westinghouse, Mon 
santo, U.S. Steel, Union Carbide, Alcoa, and DuPont. And for the 
better part of the next thirty years the organization — later renamed the 
Industrial Hygiene Foundation — would profoundly shape the public 
debate over air pollution, goading members to voluntarily improve 
work conditions inside their factories, thus avoiding legal mandates, 
and sponsoring medical research that bolstered industry's medicolegal 
position in the courtroom. Such research, much of it done at the 
Mellon Institute, was important from both medical and legal 
standpoints in the preparation of court cases," Ray Weidlein stated. 36 

An example of the Foundation's success in influencing the contest 
over air pollution and occupational hazards was the effort to "inves 
tigate" asbestos. One of the Foundation's members, 
Johns-Manville, was a top asbestos producer. The tiny fibers had been 
linked to ill health in workers since 1918. But as late as 1967 Dr. Paul 
Gross was using the Industrial Hygiene Foundation's laboratory 
to conduct influential medical research, permitting Foundation 
members to dispute the claim that asbestos fibers were uniquely 
dangerous. His conclusions were erroneous — reportedly 
suspected as such even by his fellow Mellon scientists — yet 
corporate profits and worker 



38 



CHAPTER THREE 



pain were prolonged for a generation while the Mellon Institute continued 
grinding out its industry-backed "research." " We can blame todays flood 
of death and disease in asbestos workers — and the $54 billion in court 
awards against industry — at least partly on the Air Hygiene Foundation 
and the long-ago diligence of the Mellon Institute and its director, Dr. E. R. 
Weidlein. 39 

If Ray Weidlein smiled over the press release heralding Coxs dental 
studies that May morning in 1935, it may have been because no newspaper 
had spotted some important connections — between the tooth research at 
the Mellon Institute and the corporations funding the Air Hygiene 
Foundation lobby group, which was also run, of course, out of the Mellon 
Institute. By the early 1930s a tidal wave of new information about the 
health risk from low-level fluoride exposure was also filling medical 
libraries. Several members of the Air Hygiene Foundation were paying 
particularly close attention. As with silicosis and asbestos claims, big 
corporations were potentially at risk for massive corporate legal 
liability — for the harm caused to workers and communities by industrial 
fluoride exposure. 40 

One Foundation member had particular reason to worry. Tall and 
athletic, the chief scientist for the aluminum manufacturer Alcoa, Francis 
Frary, had studied in Berlin, was fluent in several languages, and would 
personally translate Kaj Roholms fluoride research. 41 Con ditions inside 
Alcoa s smelting plants were brutal, with exposure to chemical agents 
(especially fluorides and carcinogens and, to a lesser degree alumina dusts 
and asbestos insulating materials)" a frequent hazard for workers, 
according to the historian George David Smith. " The effects of fluoride 
emissions was a particular concern of Frary's," Smith noted 42 During the 
1920s and 1930s, African American workers were imported from the Deep 
South for the "killing potroom labor" inside one plant in the company town 
of Alcoa, Tennessee. And at the Niagara Falls plant in upstate New York, 
where Alcoa's mostly immigrant workers were shipped in by train, a health 
study would later confirm that crippled workers were the result of a fluo- 
ride dust hazard that had existed at the plant for years. 43 

Francis Frary was a member of an elite fraternity of officials running 
corporate research labs, a fraternity that would chart the nation's scientific 
progress during the period between the two World Wars. Other members of 
this close-knit group included Charles Ket- 



OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC 



39 



tering, director of research for General Motors, and the research 
directors of U.S. Steel and DuPont." Those people all knew each 
other; it was a small, relatively select group who headed research labs, 
noted the historian Margaret Graham. 45 

Fluoride's threat to corporate America was laid out in an exhaus 
tive review of the new medical information about fluoride's harmful 
effects, published in 1933 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. A 
senior toxicologist, Floyd DeEds, warned of the growing risk from 
industrial fluoride pollution. "Only recently, that is within the last ten 
years," he stated, "has the serious nature of fluorine toxicity been 
realized, particularly with regard to chronic intoxication [a medical 
term for poisoning]. Like Kaj Roholm, the government scientist 
singled out the aluminum 
industry. 46 

DeEds also noted that in 1931 several researchers had, for the first 
time, linked the ugly blotching or mottling seen on teeth in several 
areas of the United States to naturally occurring fluoride in water 
supplies. 47 This new dental information appears to have rung an 
alarm bell for industry. Quietly Alcoa scientists made their own 
investigations. It was not just natures fluoride that stained teeth, they 
discovered; the company found tooth mottling in children living near 
Alcoa s big aluminum plant in Massena, New York. Crucially, 
however, Alcoa s chemists reported that there was no naturally 
occurring fluoride in the local water. 48 A potential source of the 
fluoride staining children's teeth in Massena was obvious: there was 
little or no pollution control on many early aluminum plants, and 
elsewhere around the country the fluoride waste from these industries 
was routinely dumped in 
nearby rivers. 

Mottled teeth in children had become a potential red flag, warning 
citizens and workers of industrial fluoride pollution — and pointing 
directly to a man-made hazard the media had not yet dis-covered. 50 
With public outrage over Gauley Bridge reaching a crescendo in 
1935, several powerful industrial corporations now held their breath, 
hoping to avoid a fresh epidemic of worker lawsuits that this time 
were for fluoride exposure. The potential for litigation against 
industry was mapped for all to see by blotchy marks on Children's 
teeth, evidence of "neighborhood fluorisis" in action.' 

Alcoa s research director, Francis Frary, took action. In September 
1935 he approached Gerald Cox, a Mellon Institute researcher, 



40 



CHAPTER THREE 



at the American Chemical Society's Pittsburgh meeting. Frary now had a 
suggestion that would ultimately transform the public perception of 
fluoride." Though Frary was preoccupied with the "killing" hazards facing 
his Alcoa employees, and the aluminum industry faced lawsuits from 
farmers whose cattle had been injured in the vicinity of the smelters, Frary 
took it upon himself to make a generous suggestion to the Mellon 
researcher. Had Cox ever considered that good teeth might be caused by 
fluoride? 

Cox understood that Frary was suggesting that he include fluoride in his 
tooth-decay study. Although this suggestion flew in the face of the results 
from the dental study at Johns Hopkins a decade earlier — which had 
showed that fluoride hurt teeth — nevertheless the Alcoa man's proposal 
was "the first time I ever gave fluorine a thought," Cox later told historian 
Donald McNeil. 53 

The great makeover of fluoride's image had begun. By August 1936 the 
Mellon researcher had given laboratory rats some fluoride and announced 
that the chemical was the mystery "factor" protecting teeth. In 1937 Ray 
Weidlein and Cox published details of their fluoride "discovery" in the 
scientific press. And the following year Cox declared in the Journal of the 
American Medical Association that "the case [for fluoride] should be regarded 
as proved.' Virtually overnight, the Mellon Institute rats had put a smiling 
face on what had been a scientifically recognized environmental and 
workplace poisons' 

The Kettering Laboratory 

FRANCIS FRARY WAS not the only industry scientist who had grown 
interested in children's teeth during those Depression years. In April 1936 
his colleague Charles Kettering, vice president and director of research at 
General Motors, quietly held a meeting in GM's Detroit offices with a 
delegation from the American Dental Association (ADA) and Captain C. 
T. Messner of the U.S. Public Health Service." Kettering seemed an 
unlikely candidate for an interest in teeth; he had become famous and 
wealthy by inventing the electric starter for the automobile. But 
Kettering's laboratory in Dayton, Ohio, was also the birthplace of two 
industrial chemicals that would haunt the twentieth century. And like 
Alcoa's Francis Frary, Kettering was in a unique position to see the health 
risk that 



OPPOSITE SIDES OF THE ATLANTIC 



41 



fluorides posed to American workers — and the potential liability 
facing DuPont and General Motors.' 

Fluoride and lead were twin pillars on which the great wealth of 
both DuPont and General Motors was built. In 1921 Kettering's sci- 
entists had discovered that lead added to gasoline increased engine 
efficiency And in 1928 they patented the fluoride-based Freon gas, 
which was much less toxic at room temperature than were earlier 
refrigerants. But those twin pillars had shaky foundations. Tetra ethyl 
lead (TEL) was so toxic that it killed several of DuPont's New Jersey 
refinery workers, attracted a rash of ugly newspaper headlines, 
and almost resulted in the lucrative product's being banned from the 
market." Similarly, Freon sales quickly stalled following pro-tests 
from the American Standards Association and the New York City Fire 
Department, when it was discovered that when Freon was exposed to 
flame, it decomposed into the nightmarish phosgene and hydrogen 
fluoride gases.' 9 (Phosgene was the same poison gas that had been 
used to monstrous effect in the trenches of World War I.) 

GM and DuPont moved quickly to protect their new products. They 
hired a young scientist at the University of Cincinnati, Robert Arthur 
Kehoe, to perform safety studies on lead at GM's in-house laboratory. 
Kehoe's research — which asserted that lead was found naturally in 
human blood and that there was a "threshold" level below which no ill 
effect would be caused — helped to placate the U.S. Surgeon General 
and "single-handedly spared the leaded gasoline industry from federal 
regulation in the 1920s," according to the historian Lynne Snyder. 60 
"Kehoe's first contract had salvaged a billion dollar industry," wrote 
another Kettering scientist, Dr. William Ashe. 61 The 
thirty-two-year-old was rewarded in 1925 with an appointment as the 
medical director of the Ethyl Corporation, which marketed leaded 
gasoline. 62 

In 1930 Kehoe rode to the rescue again, performing toxicity stud 
ies on Freon. That same year the Ethyl Corporation, DuPont, and the 
Frigidaire Division of General Motors founded a laboratory at the 
University of Cincinnati with a $130,000 donation. It was named the 
Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology; a new building was 
erected, and Kehoe was installed as director. 

The dangers of using a potential poison gas in the home — and the 
risk to firefighters in particular — may have seemed obvious, 



42 



CHAPTER THREE 



but Kehoe argued that a blaze would rapidly disperse any poison that might 
be created, presenting little risk. Thus even from a fire fighting point of 
view . . . the decomposition of [Freon] is not to be regarded as of great 
consequence, he stated.' (More than sixty years after his clash with New 
York firefighters Kehoe s toxic shadow haunted them in the aftermath of 
the World Trade Center terror attack." Following the buildings collapse, 
rescue workers feared that two enormous tanks of Freon gas that had once 
fed the towers air-conditioning system would rupture and burn in the 
still-smoldering rubble, spewing acid and poison over downtown 
Manhattan.' Although there have been numerous previous reports of 
phosgene poisoning from Freon, mercifully the refrigerant never burned at 
Ground Zero.") 

Kehoe s assurances helped to win the day. A joint venture between GM 
and DuPont, known as Kinetic Chemicals, quickly erected two massive 
Freon manufacturing facilities at DuPont s plant in Deep-water, New 
Jersey. Although Kettering scientists soon measured high levels of 
fluoride in DuPont s New Jersey workers, Freon sales soared from 1.2 to 
18.7 million pounds between 1931 and 1943. Freon became the main 
refrigerant in homes and industry and grossed an estimated $35 million in 
revenue during this period.' 

But new experiments soon discovered just how precarious DuPont s 
exploitation of fluorides might be. The Kettering Laboratory found that 
hydrofluoric acid — the raw material needed to make Freon and the same 
gas produced when the refrigerant was burned — was toxic in very low 
doses." The scientists did not report a level below which toxic effects were 
not seen. The danger to workers who breathed the gas on a daily basis was 
clear. The gas was stealthy. Even at a level that could not be detected by 
smell, it caused "exceptional" injury, including lung hemorrhage, liver dam 
-age, and striking evidences of kidney damage. Animals died when 
exposed to a dose of just 15.2 milligrams per cubic meter ( about 19 parts 
per million). 

That toxicity data was published in September 1935. Six months later 
Charles Kettering met with the American Dental Association. The Freon 
magnate quickly became a member of the ADAs three-person Advisory 
Committee on Research in Dental Caries. That Committee, in turn, 
shepherded publication of Dental 



Opposite sides of the Atlantic 



43 



Caries — a compendium of dental research from around the world that 
included several references to Gerald Coxs work at the Mellon 
Institute as well as that of other fluoride promoters. Neither Charles 
Kettering s interests in selling industrial fluorides nor the potential 
health risk from fluorides to U.S. workers were ever disclosed to 
readers of Dental Caries. Nor were dentists told that the General 
Motors vice president might have personally funded a portion of the 
ADAs activities." In a letter dated March 16, 1937, the ADAs 
chairman, P. C. Lowery, somewhat cryptically promised Kett that he 
will "secure sufficient information" so that the General Motors vice 
president could, in turn, "furnish the $25,000." In other words, the 
millionaire industrialist with one of the greatest personal stakes in the 
commercial exploitation of fluorides was quietly donating to the dental 
organization that would shortly become one of the most aggressive 
boosters of fluoride s use in dentistry. 7 " 

A third connection between industry and some of the earliest 
attempts to link fluoride with dental health can be found in the actions 
of Andrew W. Mellon, who was U.S. Treasury Secretary from 1921 to 
1932. The silver-haired smelter and Pittsburgh banker was also a 
founder of Alcoa and one of its biggest stockholders. In 1930 he 
intervened in efforts to have the Public Health Service support 
researchers at the University of Arizona who were then surveying 
naturally occurring tooth mottling." (The U.S. Public Health Service 
[PHS] was then a division of the Treasury Department.) Mellon s 
economic interest was clear. Fluoride s legal threat to industry could 
now be seen, literally, in children's smiles. However, linking dental 
mottling to naturally occurring fluoride, in areas far from industry, 
helped to deflect attention from the bad teeth and the myriad other 
health effects caused by industrial fluoride pollution." A young PHS 
researcher named H. Trendley Dean was promptly "ordered" to study 
fluoride. He soon confirmed that natural fluoride in water supplies 
produced dental mottling." But like the industry scientists before him, 
Dean also developed "a hunch that fluoride prevented dental 
cavities. 74 (Following this hunch, Dean later found that natural fluoride 
in the local water supplies apparently correlated with fewer cavities; 
these findings, although much criticized for their scientific method, 
eventually became a foundation for artificial water fluoridation.)' 



44 



CHAPTER THREE 



Dean departed from Washington in the fall of 193 1 to study fluoride and 
tooth decay throughout communities in the South and Midwest. His 
departure planted a seed for the governments fluoride policies. Several 
years later, another seed would take root. On September 29, 1939, Gerald 
Cox, the researcher at the Mellon Institute, made his most radical 
suggestion yet at a meeting of the American Water Works Association in 
Johnstown, Pennsylvania. His suggestion took place at a historic moment. 
The world stood on the precipice of another world war. German tanks had 
just entered Poland. Aluminum aircraft and steel armor plate would be 
critical in the coming conflict. Pittsburgh's great blast furnaces and alu- 
minum pot lines, grown cold during the Depression, were being stoked 
anew, throwing a fresh funereal smoke against the autumn sky. Workers 
were already flooding war factories, eager for work. Cox proposed that 
America should now consider adding fluoride to the public water supply. 

Until then, health authorities had sought only to remove fluoride from 
water; now, the Mellon man told the Water Works Association, "The 
present trend toward complete removal of fluorine from water and food 
may need some reversal.' 

It would take a global conflagration, a nuclear bomb, and an Olympian 
flip-flop by the Public Health Service for water fluori-dation to take 
hold — yet Gerald Coxs 1935 rat study and Deans population 
investigations would be the germ for a vaccine providing a marvelous new 
immunity in the postwar years. Touted as a childhood protection against 
dental cavities, water fluoridation would also secretly help to inoculate 
American industry against a torrent of fresh lawsuits from workers and 
communities poisoned by wartime industrial fluoride emissions. 



4 



General Groves's Problem