Ch. 1. Through the Looking Glass: The Fluoride Deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

CHAPTER ONE 



It used cameras to record changes in the pattern of behavior of laboratory 
animals that had been given tiny amounts of toxic chemicals. Computers 
then rapidly analyzed the data. By detecting how the animals behavior 
differed from that of similar control animals — that were not given the 
toxic agent — scientists were able to measure or quantify the extent to 
which a chemical affected the animals central nervous system. 

Previous such efforts had relied on subjective guesswork as to the 
severity of the chemical s toxic effect or on laborious and time-consuming 
efforts to quantify the changes the chemical made in behavior. The speed 
of the computers and the accuracy of the camera measurements in the 
Mullenix system, however, could potentially revolutionize the study of 
toxic chemicals. 

As her car flew along the Charles River that summer morning in 1982, 
Mullenix knew that her new job and the support of the prestigious Forsyth 
Dental Center would finally allow her to complete the work on her new 
system. 

Mullenix had caught the eye of Forsyth s director, John Jack Hein, 
some years earlier. He had attended one of her seminars at the Harvard 
Medical School, where she was a faculty member in the Department of 
Psychiatry. He had sat in the audience, dazzled, his mind racing. Hein 
remembers a very bright woman describing a revolutionary new 
technology, which he believed had the potential for transforming the 
science of neurotoxicology. She had the world by the tail, said Hein. 
There is nothing more exciting than a new methodology. ' 

Jack Hein wanted Mullenix to bring her new technology to For-syth and 
to set up a modern toxicology laboratory. It would be the first such dental 
toxicology center in the country. Many powerful chemicals are routinely 
employed in a dentists office, such as mercury, high-tensile plastics, 
anesthetics, and filling amalgams. Hein knew that an investigation of the 
toxicity of some of these materials was overdue. 

The Forsyth director's boyish enthusiasm helped to sell Mul-lenix on the 
move. I was very impressed with Dr. Hein, she said. He was like a kid in 
a candy store. He couldnt wait for us to use the new methodology and 
apply it to some of the materials dentists work with. 



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3 



Phyllis Mullenixs transfer to Forsyth was a move to one of Bos- 
tons most prestigious medical centers. The Forsyth Dental 
Infirmary for Children was established in 1910 to provide free 
dental care to Bostons poor children. By 1982, when Dr. Mullenix 
accepted Jack Heins invitation, the renamed Forsyth Dental Center 
was affiliated with Harvard Medical School and had become one of 
the best-known centers for dental research in the world. 

At the helm was Forsyth s director, Jack Hein, a well-known figure 
in American dental research. Hein had attended the University of 
Rochester in the 1950s, and there he had helped to develop the fluoride 
compound sodium monofluorophosphate (MFP). Colgate soon added 
MFP to its toothpaste, and Jack Hein became the company's dental 
director in 1995. When he came to Forsyth in 1962, Hein was part of 
the new order in reshaping American dentistry — a changing of the 
guard then taking place in many dental schools and research centers.' 
Like Jack Hein, the new generation of leaders was uniform in its 
support of fluorides use in dentistry.' 

Forsyth had read the tea leaves well. While a previous Forsyth 
director, Veikko O. Hurme, had been an outspoken opponent of 
adding fluoride to public water supplies, Jack Heins support came 
at the same time that Colgate poured cash into new facilities and 
fluoride research at Forsyth.' Additional funds came from research 
grants from other private corporations and from the federal National 
Institutes of Health (NIH). A sparkling new research annex, built in 
1970, doubled the size of the Forsyth Center, with funds from the 
NIH and major donors, such as Warner Lambert, Colgate 
Palmolive, and Lever Brothers.' 

Jack Hein s track record as a fund-raiser for the Forsyth Center 
and his support for fluoride's use in dentistry owed much to his 
membership in an informal old boy's club of scientists who had also 
once done research at the University of Rochester. The University 
had been a leading center for fluoride research in the 1950s and 1960s, 
with many of its graduate students taking leading roles in dental 
schools and research centers around the United States. 

In 1983, a year after Phyllis Mullenix arrived at Forsyth, director 
Hein introduced her to an elderly gentleman who had been Hein's 
professor and scientist mentor some thirty years earlier at the Uni v 
ersity of Rochester. The old man was a researcher with a distin- 



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guished national reputation — the first president of the Society of 
Toxicology, Mullenix learned, and the author of scores of academic papers 
and books. His name was Harold Carpenter Hodge, and his impeccable 
manners and formal dress left an indelible impression on Mullenix. 

I was impressed with Harold, she said. He was very gentlemanly. He 
would never say an inappropriate word, and he always wore a white lab 
coat. 

Hodge had recently retired from the University of San Francisco. Jack 
Hein had brought him to Forsyth for the prestige he would bring to 
Mullenix s new toxicology department, he said, and out of admiration for 
his former professor, who was then in his mid-seventies. "I thought it 
would be fun," Hein added. 

Mullenix grew fond of Hodge. He seemed almost grandfatherly, 
ambling into her laboratory, chatting as her young children frolicked 
alongside. Hodge was especially fascinated by the new computer system 
for testing chemical toxicity. He would fire endless questions at Mullenix 
and her colleague, Bill Kernan from Iowa State University, Mullenix 
remembered. He would quietly come up to my lab. And Harold would ask 
Why are you doing this? and What are you doing? and Bill [Kernan] 
would take great pains to explain every little scientific detail, showing him 
the rat pictures. 

By the early 1980s Jack Heins vision for the Forsyth Center included 
more than just dentistry. The canny fund-raiser believed that the new 
Mullenix technology could become another big money spinner for 
Forsyth — a winning weapon in the high-stakes field of toxic tort litigation, 
in which workers and communities allege they have been poisoned by 
chemicals. "It was an exciting new way of studying neurotoxicity, said 
Jack Hein, who would eventually assign Mullenix to spacious new offices 
and laboratories on the fourth floor of the Forsyth research annex. 

Neurotoxicology was still a young science. If someone claimed to have 
been hurt by a chemical in the workplace or had been exposed in a 
pollution incident, finding the scientific truth was extraordinarily difficult. 
Big courtroom awards against industry often hinged on the subjective 
opinion of a paid expert witness and the unpredictable emotions of a jury, 
said Mullenix. Industries did not like that. They felt that the answers were 
biased, and so the thought of 



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taking investigator bias out of the system was very exciting to them. 
They thought this would help [industry] in court, she added. 

The Computer Pattern Recognition System quickly attracted 
attention from other scientists, industry, and the media. The Wall 
Street Journal called the Mullenix technology precise and "objec- 
tive. Some of Americas biggest corporations opened their wallets. 
The medical director of the American Petroleum Institute personally 
gave $70,000 to Mullenix. Monsanto gave $25,000. Amoco and 
Mobil chipped in thousands more, while Digital Equipment Cor- 
poration donated most of the powerful computer equipment. 

Several oil and chemical companies such as Monsanto Co. are 
supporting research on the system, the Wall Street Journal reported. 
" Questions are being raised more frequently about whether there are 
behavioral effects attributable to chemicals, a Monsanto 
toxi-cologist, George Levinskas, told the newspaper. The Forsyth 
system has potential to give a better idea of the effects our 
chemicals might have," he added.' 

In a letter of recommendation, Myron A. Mehlman, the former 
head of toxicology for the Mobil Oil Corporation, who was then 
working for the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease 
Registry (ATSDR), called the Mullenix technology a milestone for 
testing low levels of exposure of chemicals for neurotoxicity for the 
21st Century.... The benefits of Professor Mullenix discovery to 
Forsyth are enormous and immeasurable. 9 

Industry trusted Phyllis Mullenix. Since the 1970s the toxicologist 
had earned large fees consulting on pollution issues and the legal 
requirements of the Clean Air Act. Hired by the American Petroleum 
Institute, for example, she'd acted as scientific coordinator for that 
lobby group, advising it on proposed and restrictive new EPA 
standards for ozone. "Whenever it got technical they would dance me 
out, she said. Every time EPA came out with another criteria 
document I would look for the errors." 

Mullenix is not apologetic for waltzing with industry. Anybody 
could take her to the ball, she said, explaining, "I did not look at myself 
as a public health individual. I was amazed that the EPA did such 
shoddy work writing a criteria document. I thought that at the very 
least those documents should be factual. 

At Harvard, Mullenix had been criticized by some academics 



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for her industry connections, a charge she calls ridiculous. Said Mullenix, 
No one group, be it government, academia or industry, can be right one 
hundred percent of the time. I dont see science as aligning yourself with 
one group. Industry can be right in one respect and they can be very wrong 
in another. 

And Mullenix had other consulting work — for companies such as Exxon, 
Mobil, 3M, and Boise Cascade. Companies including DuPont, Procter and 
Gamble, NutraSweet, Chevron, Colgate-Palmolive, and Eastman Kodak 
all wrote checks supporting a 1987 conference she held titled "Screening 
Programs for Behavioral Toxicity." 

Like many revolutionary ideas, the concept behind the Mul-lenix 
technology for studying central-nervous-system problems was simple. The 
spark of inspiration had come from Dr. Mullenix s graduate advisor at the 
University of Kansas Medical Center, Dr. Stata Norton. A slender and 
soft-spoken woman, Dr. Norton was one of the first prominent female 
toxicologists in the United States. She had won national recognition by 
demonstrating that there were "threshold" levels for the toxic effects of 
alcohol and low-level radia tion on the fetus. Now retired to her summer 
cottage, surrounded by lush Kansas farmland, Dr. Norton's face opened in a 
smile as she remembered her former student. Normally, she said, graduate 
students rotated through the various laboratories at the Medical Center. But 
there was something different about Phyllis Mullenix. 

"Phyllis came into my lab to do a short study — and she never left, " 
Norton recalled, laughing. 

Mullenix had a special willingness to grapple with complex new 
information, Norton said. When Norton was studying the effects of 
radiation on rats, Mullenix wanted to learn how the radiation had 
physically altered the rats' brains. She had never done that work before, 
Norton recalled, but her student stayed late at the lab, poring over medical 
journals, dissecting the rat's brains, and looking for tiny changes caused by 
the radiation. "I don't think she thought it was difficult, said Norton. She 
was happy to jump on the project and get with it." 

There was something else. Norton noticed her student had a fear -less 
quality and a willingness to challenge conventional wisdom. The professor 
found it refreshing. "It takes a certain personality to stand up and do 
something different. Science is full of that, all the way from 



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Galileo, Norton said. That doesn t mean you are right or you are 
wrong, but I can appreciate that in Phyllis because I am like that." 

In the mid-1970s Stata Norton was a pioneer in the new field of 
behavioral toxicology, inventing new ways for measuring the ways 
chemicals affected behavior. At first Norton studied mice that had 
been trained or conditioned to behave in certain ways by receiving 
food rewards. Some scientists believed that by studying disruptions 
in this "conditioned" behavior, they could most accurately measure 
the toxic effects of different chemicals. 

Norton was not so sure. One day, working with mice that had 
been trained to press a lever for food at precisely timed intervals, 
she suddenly wondered how the animals knew when to press the 
lever. "I looked in the box," she said. Inside she saw that each 
mouse seemed to measure the time between feeding by employing a 
sequence or pattern of simple activities such as sitting, scratching, 
or sniffing. "There was a rhythm," she explained. "They timed it by 
doing things." 

Norton began her own experiments. She wondered if, by study- 
ing changes in this rhythm of "patterned" behavior during the time 
between feeding — as opposed to studying disruptions in the condi- 
tioned behavior exhibited for food rewards — she could get a more 
sensitive measurement of the toxicity of chemicals. Norton and 
Mullenix took thousands of photographs of rats that had been given 
a chemical poison and compared them with similar photographs of 
healthy "control" rats. They were able to detect changes in the 
sequences of the rats' behavior, even at very low levels of chemical 
poisoning. "We were all very excited," said Norton. 

The spirit of independence and free inquiry in Stata Norton's 
laboratory inspired Phyllis Mullenix. It was the kind of environ- 
ment she had grown up in. Her mother, Olive Mullenix, was a 
Missouri schoolteacher who'd ridden sixteen miles on horseback to 
her one-room schoolhouse each day and made her "own" money 
selling fireworks from a roadside stand. Her father, "Shockey" 
Mullenix (he had a shock of white hair), had left the farm with a 
dream to become a doctor. He settled for the workaholic life of a 
gas-station entrepreneur and trader in the small town of Kirksville, 
Missouri and the hope that his three children would realize his 
dreams. The son became a nuclear physicist for the Department of 
Energy; another 



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daughter was a corporate Washington lawyer; and the youngest, Phyllis, 
the Harvard toxicologist. 

In the late 1970s the Environmental Protection Agency grew interested 
in the Kansas research. The federal agency wanted a new way of measuring 
the human effects of low-level chemical contamination. The head of the 
EPAs neurotoxicology division, Lawrence Reiter, visited Stata Norton s 
laboratory. Phyllis Mullenix told him that the key to the success of the new 
technique was to speed up the time-consuming process of analyzing each 
frame of film. Mullenix thought that computers could do the job faster. The 
EPA agreed, and Mullenix became a consultant on a $4 million 
government grant awarded to Iowa State computer experts Bill Kernan and 
Dave Hopper. Kernan had worked previously for the Defense Department, 
writing some of its most elegant and sophisticated software. 

I was to train the physicist, said Mullenix. The physicist would train 
the computer. 

Developing the Computer Pattern Recognition System, as Mulle-nix s 
technology became known, took almost thirty years. Dr. Norton had begun 
studying her rats in the 1960s. When she passed the baton to Phyllis 
Mullenix in the 1970s, computers were barely powerful enough to handle 
the vast data-processing requirements for detecting subtle behavior 
changes and measuring chemical poisoning. 

In Boston in the mid-1980s Mullenix grew incredibly busy. She now 
had two young daughters. She was consulting for industry. Her husband, 
Rick, was completing training as an air-traffic controller. And her father 
was seriously ill with emphysema 1500 miles away in Kirksville, Missouri. 

Her Forsyth laboratory buzzed with activity. The new computers were 
hooked up by telephone to big data-processing units at Iowa State. By late 
1987 the Computer Pattern Recognition System was almost ready. Forsyth 
printed brochures, touting a system that promised to "prevent needless 
exposure of the general public to the dangers of neurotoxicity, and industry 
to exaggerated litigation claims." Mullenix soon became a national 
pitchwoman for Forsyth, proclaiming a new day for corporations that 
feared lawsuits from workers and communities for chemical exposures. "I 
was hopped all over the country giving seminars on how this 
computerization was going to help the industrial situation, she said. 



THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS 



9 



Director Jack Hein was anxious to illustrate the sensitivity of the 
new machine. He suggested that Mullenix start with fluoride, giving 
small doses to rats and testing them in the equipment. The longtime 
fluoride supporter wanted to test fluoride first, he said, in order to 
bolster the chemicals public image. I was really interested in proving 
there were no negative effects," Hein said. "It seemed like a good way 
of negating the antifluoridationist arguments." 

Mullenix shrugged. She didn't much care about fluoride. 
Secretly she thought that fluoride was a waste of her time and that 
Jack Hein was overreacting. "At Harvard the rule is publish or 
perish. And I didn't think that I would come up with anything that 
would be worth publishing," she said. "I'm used to studying 
hard-core neu-rotoxic substances, drugs like anticonvulsants, 
radiation, where it can totally distort the brain. I never heard 
anything about fluoride, except TV commercials that it is good for 
your teeth." 

Hein introduced her to another young dental researcher, Pamela 
DenBesten, who had recently arrived at Forsyth. DenBesten was 
studying the white and yellow blotches, or mottling, on tooth enamel 
caused by fluoride known as dental fluorosis. Although Mullenix was 
lukewarm to the idea of using fluoride to test for central-ner- 
vous-system effects, DenBesten was more curious. She had noticed 
that when she gave fluoride to rats for her tooth-enamel studies, they 
did not behave "normally." While it was usually easy to pick up 
laboratory rats, the animals that had been fed fluoride would " 
practically jump out of the cage," DenBesten said. 

The two women worked well together. Phyllis would often 
bring her two young daughters to work, and the Mullenix 
laboratory on the fourth floor became a sanctuary from the 
predominantly male atmosphere at Forsyth. DenBesten knew that 
Phyllis Mullenix had few friends at Forsyth. Many of the other 
researchers were hostile to the plainspoken toxicologist. 
DenBesten describes it as "gender-discrimination type stuff." 10 

Another Forsyth scientist, Dr. Karen Snapp, quickly made 
friends with Phyllis Mullenix. "I was always told that Phyllis was 
the batty woman up in the tower on the fourth floor, said Snapp. 
I ran into her at lunch one day in the cafeteria. We started chatting, 
then we went out and had a coke together. Snapp found Mullenix 
refreshing, both for the quality of her science and her plainspoken 



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manner. She didnt bow down to the powers that be at Forsyth. A lot of 
people put up fronts and are very pious, and Phyllis was not that way at 
all — that is what I liked about her. She was very honest, very 
straightforward, you knew exactly where you stood, Snapp explained. 

Snapp was also impressed with the rigor Mullenix brought to her 
scientific experiments. She was very, very thorough. She at times had no 
idea what the outcome of an experiment was going to be. If she did an 
experiment and didn't get the result she thought she should get, she'd repeat 
it to make sure it was right, and [if the unexpected data held up] it s like, 
well — we change the hypothesis. 

If Phyllis Mullenix was at first nonchalant about testing fluoride for 
central-nervous-system effects, that was not the attitude of perhaps the 
oldest boy at the Forsyth Center. She found that Dr. Harold Hodge, the 
affable old man in the freshly pressed lab coat, took what then seemed an 
almost obsessive interest in her fluoride work, firing endless questions 
about her methodology. 

He wanted to push me to do certain fluoride studies, and do this and do 
that, and how can I help? said Mullenix. 



2 



Fireworks at Forsyth 



The two white-coated scientists stared at each other, startled. High above 
Boston, surrounded by computer terminals and data printouts and the 
bright lights of a modern toxicology laboratory, Phyllis Mullenix and 
Pamela DenBesten fell suddenly silent. Only the white rats in their cages 
scuttered and sniffed. The information slowly sank in. The scientists had 
repeated their experiment and, once again, the results were the same. They 
laughed, nervously. 

"Oh shit," Dr. Phyllis Mullenix finally blurted out. "We are going to 
piss off every dentist in the country." 

BY 1989 th Mullenix team was getting its first results from the fluoride 
experiments. They had been gathering data for two years, giving the rats 
moderate amounts of fluoride, monitoring them in their cages, and then 
analyzing the data in the RAPID computer system, as her new technology 
was known. But something was wrong. The results seemed strange. 

"Data was coming back that made me shake my head," said Mul-lenix. 
It wasnt at all what we expected. Mullenix had expected that giving 
fluoride in drinking water would show no effect on the rats' behavior and 
central nervous system. Mullenix wondered if the problem was a bug in the 
new machinery. The team launched an exhaustive series of control 
experiments, which showed that the RAPID computers were working fine. 
All the results were "amazingly consistent," said Mullenix. 

Fluoride added to their drinking water produced a variety of effects in 
the Forsyth rats. Pregnant rats gave birth to hyperactive