Ch. 2. Fireworks at Forsyth: the fluoride deception by Christopher Bryson from archive.org

CHAPTER TWO 



babies. When the scientists gave fluoride to the baby rats following their 
birth, the animals had cognitive deficits, and exhibited retarded behavior. 
There were sex differences, too. Males appeared more sensitive to 
fluoride in the womb; females were more affected when exposed as 
weanlings or young adults. 

The two women told Jack Hein and Harold Hodge about the results. The 
men ordered them to repeat the experiments, this time on different rats. The 
team performed still more tests. Mullenix remembers that Harold Hodge 
kept asking her about the results, even though he was by now very ill. He 
had gone to his home in Maine but kept in contact by telephone. He asked 
every day. 

By 1990 the data were crystal clear. The women had tested more than 
five hundred rats. "I finally said we have got enough animals here for 
statistical significance, said Mullenix. There is a problem," she added. 

The two women talked endlessly about what they had found. Mullenix 
was a newcomer to fluoride research, but Pamela Den-Besten had spent her 
career studying the chemical. She suspected that they had made an 
explosive discovery and that dentists in particular would find the 
information important. My initial gut reaction was that this is really big, 
said DenBesten. Although the Forsyth rats had been given fluoride at a 
higher concentration than people normally drink in their water — an 
equivalent of 5 parts per million as opposed to 1 part per 
million — DenBesten also knew that many Americans are routinely exposed 
to higher levels of fluoride every day. For example, people who drink large 
amounts of water, such as athletes or laborers in the hot sun; people who 
consume certain foods or juices with high fluoride levels; children who use 
fluoride supplements from their dentists; some factory workers, as the 
result of workplace exposure; or certain sick people, all can end up 
consuming higher cumulative levels of fluoride. Those levels of 
consumption begin to approach — or can even surpass, for some 
groups — the same fluoride levels seen in the Forsyth rats. 

"If you have someone who has a medical condition, where they have 
diabetes insipidus where you drink lots of water, or kidney 
disease — anything that would alter how you process fluoride — then you 
could climb up to those levels, said DenBesten. She thought that the 
Forsyth research results would quickly be followed up by 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 13 



a whole series of additional experiments examining, for example, whether 
fluoride at even lower levels, 1 part per million, produced 
central-nervous-system effects. "I assumed it would take off on its own, 
that a lot of people would be very concerned, she added. 

Jack Hein was excited as well, remembers Mullenix. (Harold Hodge had 
died before she could get the final results to him.)' Hein said, I want you to 
go to Washington, Mullenix said. Go to the National Institute of Dental 
Research and give them a seminar. Tell them what you are finding. 

Jack Hein knew that if more research on the toxicity of low-dose 
fluoride was to be done, the government's National Institutes of Health and 
the U. S. Public Health Service needed to be involved. 

THE CAMPUS-STYLE GROUNDS of the federal National Institutes of 
Health (NIH), just north of Washington DC, have the leafy spaciousness of 
an Ivy League college. White-coated scientists and government 
bureaucrats in suits and ties stroll the tree-lined walkways that connect 
laboratories with office buildings. This is the headquarters of the U.S. 
governments efforts to coordinate health research around the country, with 
an annual budget of $23.4 billion forked out by US taxpayers. 2 The campus 
is the home of the different NIH divisions, such as the National Cancer 
Institute and the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR), as it was 
then known. (Today it is known as the National Institute of Dental and 
Craniofacial Research.) 

On October to, 1990, Phyllis Mullenix and Jack Hein arrived at the NIH 
campus to tell senior government scientists and policy makers about her 
fluoride research. As director of the nation's leading private dental-research 
institute, Jack Hein was well-known and respected at NIH. He had helped 
to arrange the Mullenix lecture. Mullenix was no stranger to public-health 
officials either. One of the Institutes' biggest divisions, the National Cancer 
Institute, had awarded her a grant that same year totaling over $600,000. 
The money was for a study to investigate the neurotoxic effects of some of 
the drugs and therapies used in treating childhood leukemia. Many of those 
drugs and radiation therapies can slow the leukemia but are so powerful 
that they often produce central-nervous-system effects and can retard 
childhood intelligence. The government 



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wanted Mullenix to use her new RAPID computer technology at Forsyth 
to measure the neurotoxicity of these drugs. 

To present her fluoride data, Mullenix and Hein had flown from Boston, 
arriving a little early. Hein met up with some old friends from NIDR, while 
Mullenix strolled into the main hospital building on the Bethesda campus, 
killing time before her seminar. In the hallway, the scientist started to 
giggle. On the wall was a colorful posterboard display, recently mounted 
by NIH officials, titled The Miracle of Fluoride. 

"I thought how odd," remembered Mullenix. "It's 1990 and they are 
talking about the miracle of fluoride, and now I'm going to tell them that 
their fluoride is causing a neurotoxicity that is worse than that induced by 
some cases of amphetamines or radiation. I'm here to tell them that fluoride 
is neurotoxic." 

She read on. Ironically, her trip to Washington fell on the historic 
fortieth anniversary of the Public Health Service's endorsement of 
community water fluoridation. Mullenix knew little about fluoride's history. 
The chemical had long been the great white hope of the NIDR, once 
promising to vanquish blackened teeth in much the same way that 
antibiotics had been a magic bullet for doctors in the second half of the 
twentieth century, beating back disease and infection. 

Terrible teeth had stalked the developed world since the industrial 
revolution, when the whole -grain and fiber diet of an earlier agrarian era 
was often replaced by a poorer urban fare, including increased quantities of 
refined carbohydrates and sugars.' Cavities are produced when bacteria in 
the mouth ferment such sugars and carbohydrates, attacking tooth enamel, 
with the resulting acid penetrating into the tooth's core. Hope of a simple 
fix for bad teeth arrived in the 1930s, when a Public Health Service dental 
researcher named Dr. H. Trendley Dean reported finding fewer dental 
cavities in some parts of the United States, where there is natural fluoride in 
the water supply. Dean's studies became the scientific underpinning for 
artificial water fluoridation, which was begun in the 1940s and 1950s. 
Dean also became the first head of the NIDR. By the 1960s and 1970s, with 
rates of tooth decay in free fall across the United States, dental officials 
pointed a proud finger at the fluoride added to water and toothpaste. NIDR 
officials revered H. Trendley Dean as the father of fluoridation." 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



15 



"It was a major discovery by the Institute, said Jack Hein. 

But opposition to fluoridation had been intense from the start. The 
postwar decline in rates of dental decay in developed nations had also 
occurred in communities where fluoride was not added to drinking 
water and had begun in some cases before the arrival of fluoride 
toothpaste.' Widespread use of antibiotics, better nutrition, improved 
oral hygiene, and increased access to dental care were also cited as 
reasons. And while medical and scientific resistance to fluoridation 
had been fierce and well-argued — the grassroots popular opposition 
was in many ways a precursor of todays environmental 
movement — Mullenix found the NIH's posterboard account of 
antifluoridation history to be oddly scornful. "They made a joke about 
antifluoridationists all being little old ladies in tennis shoes," she said. 
"That stuck in my mind." 

Since Deans day laboratory studies have forced a revolution in 
official thinking about how fluoride works.' While early researchers 
speculated that swallowed fluoride was incorporated "systemi-cally" 
into tooth enamel even before the tooth erupted in a child's 
mouth — making it more resistant to decay — scientists now believe 
that fluoride acts almost exclusively from outside the tooth, or "topi- 
cally" (such a "topical" effect has always been the explanation for how 
fluoride toothpaste functions, too). This new research says that 
fluoride defends teeth by slowing the harmful "demineralization" of 
calcium and phosphate from tooth enamel, which can leave teeth 
vulnerable to cavities. Fluoride also helps to remineralize enamel by 
laying down fresh crystal layers of calcium and a durable fluoride 
compound known as fluorapatite. And there is a third "killer" effect, in 
which the acid produced from fermenting food combines with fluoride, 
forming hydrogen fluoride (HF). This powerful chemical can then 
penetrate cell membranes, interfering with enzyme activity, and 
rendering bad bacteria impotent.' 

I still believe that fluoride works, says the Canadian dental 
researcher turned critic of water fluoridation, Dr. Hardy Limeback. 
It works topically. 

But these new ideas have not quenched the old debate. Dental 
officials now argue that water fluoridation produces a lifelong benefit 
not just for children; by bathing all teeth in water, officials argue, 
fluoride is continually repairing and protecting tooth enamel in 



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teeth of all ages. Critics worry, however, that if hydrogen fluoride can 
inhibit bacteria enzymes in the mouth, then swallowing fluoride may 
unintentionally deliver similar killer blows to necessary bodily enzymes, 
thus also inhibiting the ones we need.' 

Phyllis Mullenix, reading the NIH fluoride posters and preparing to 
give her speech on that fall day in 1990, knew almost nothing of the history 
of controversy surrounding fluoride. She was about to walk into the lion s 
den. She was stunned when she entered the lecture hall at the National 
Institutes of Health. It was packed. There were officials from the Food and 
Drug Administration. She spotted the head of the National Institute of 
Dental Research, Dr. Harald Loe, and she noticed men in uniform from 
the Public Health Service. 

The lights dimmed. Mullenix told them about the new RAPID 
computer technology at Forsyth. At first the audience seemed excited. 
Then she outlined her fluoride experiment. She explained that the 
central-nervous-system effects seen in the rats resembled the injuries seen 
when rats were given powerful antileukemia drugs and radiation therapies. 
The pattern of central-nervous-system effects on the rats from fluoride 
matched perfectly, she said. 

The room fell suddenly quiet. She attempted a joke. I said, I may be a 
little old lady, but I m not wearing tennis shoes, she remembers. Nobody 
was laughing. In fact, they were really kind of nasty. 
The big guns from the NIH opened up. Hands shot into the air. They 
started firing question after question, attacking me with respect to the 
methodology," remembered Mullenix. She answered their ques tions 
patiently, and finally, when there were no more hands in the air, she and 
Jack Hein climbed into a cab and headed for the airport. Jack Hein is 
reluctant to discuss these long-ago events. It was a messy ending to his 
career. He retired from Forsyth the following year, in 1991. He agrees that 
the Mullenix fluoride results were unpopular but adds that data showing 
fluoride damage to the central nervous system should have been 
"vigorously" followed up. " That perspective had never been looked at 
before," he remarks. "It turned out there was something there. Hein 
believes that getting the NIDR and the government to change their position 
on fluoride, however, is a difficult task. Many senior public-health officials 
have devoted their professional careers to promoting fluoride. NIDR really 
fought hard showing that fluoride was effective, Hein says. 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



17 



"It was a major discovery by the Institute. They did everything they 
could to promote it. " 

Hein made a final effort to sound a warning on fluoride. He told 
Mullenix that he was going to call a meeting of industry officials 
whose products contained fluoride. Like Mullenix, Hein had spent a 
career cultivating ties with various large-scale industries. He sent her 
a note listing the people who are coming for a private Fluoride 
Toxicity conference that would be held in his Forsyth office. He 
said, NIDR were being stupid, the industries will respond better, 
Mullenix recalls. 

Several months after the Washington seminar, Phyllis Mullenix 
sat at the table in Jack Hein s office with representatives from three of 
the worlds most powerful drug companies: Unilever, 
Colgate-Palmolive, and SmithKline Beecham. Anthony Volpe, 
Colgate-Palmolive s Worldwide Director of Clinical Dental Research, 
was there, and so was Sal Mazzanobile, Director of Oral Health 
Research for Beecham. The senior scientist Joe Kanapka was sent by 
the big transnational company Unilever. 

Mullenix outlined her fluoride findings. The men took notes. 
Suddenly Joe Kanapka of Unilever leaned back in his chair with an 
exasperated look. "He said, Do you realize what you are saying to us, 
that our fluoride products are lowering the IQ of children? 
remembers Mullenix. And I said, Well yes, that is what I am saying 
to you.'" As they left, the men "slapped me on the back," Mullenix 
said, telling her, "We will be in touch, we need to pursue this." 

The next day a note from Jack Hein's office arrived with the tele- 
phone numbers of the industry men, so that she could follow up. "I did 
call them," says Mullenix. "And I called. And the weeks went by and 
the months went by." Eventually Joe Kanapka from Unilever called 
back, she remembers. "He says, V I gave it to my superiors and they 
haven t gotten back to me. 

Contacted recently, Joe Kanapka said that he had visited Forsyth 
many times" but had no memory of the fluoride conference. When 
asked if he had once worried that his products might be hurting 
children's intelligence, he replied, "Oh God, I don't remember any- 
thing like that, Im sorry. He explained that open-heart surgery had 
temporarily impaired his memory. I dont remember who Mullenix 
is," he added. 



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Beechams Sal Mazzanobile remembers the meeting. The fluoride data 
presented that day were preliminary, he recalled. Mullenix never called 
him again, he claims, and he therefore presumed her data were inaccurate. 
I cant see why, if somebody had data like that, they would not follow up 
with another study in a larger animal model, maybe then go into humans, 
he said. It could be a major health problem. 

Did the director of consumer brands at Beecham — makers of several 
fluoride products — call Mullenix himself or find out if her data were ever 
published? "I wasn't the person responsible to follow up, if there was a 
follow-up," Mazzanobile answered. He did not remember who at Beecham, 
if anybody, might have had responsibility for keeping apprised of the 
Mullenix research. 

Procter and Gamble followed up on Mullenix's warning. They flew her 
out to their Miami Valley laboratories in Cincinnati. Mullenix flew home 
with a contract and some seed money to begin a study to look at the effects 
of fluoride on children s intelligence. Shortly afterward, however, "they 
pulled out and I never heard from them again, recalls Mullenix. 

In 1995 Mullenix and her team published their data in the scientific 
journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology. Their paper explained that, while 
a great deal of research had already been done on fluoride, almost none had 
looked at fluorides effects on the brain. And while earlier research had 
suggested that fluoride did not cross the crucial blood brain barrier, thus 
protecting the central nervous system, Mullenix's findings now revealed 
that "such impermeability does not apply to chronic exposure situations." 9 

When the baby rats drank water with added fluoride, the scientists had 
measured increased fluoride levels in the brain. And more fluoride in the 
brain was associated with "significant behavioral changes" in the young 
rats, which resembled "cognitive deficits," the scientists reported. The 
paper also suggested that when the fluoride was given to pregnant rats, it 
reached the brain of the fetus, thus producing an effect resembling 
hyperactivity in the male newborns. 

The Mullenix research eventually caught the attention of another team 
of Boston scientists studying central-nervous-system problems. They 
produced a report in 2000 reviewing whether toxic chemicals had a role in 
producing what they described as an epidemic 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



19 



of developmental, learning and behavioral disabilities in children. 
Their report considered the role of fluoride, and focused on the 
Mullenix research in particular. In Harms Way — Toxic Threats to 
Child Development by the Greater Boston chapter of Physicians for 
Social Responsibility described how 12 million children (17 percent) 
in the United States suffer from one or more learning, developmental, 
or behavioral disabilities." Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder 
(ADHD) affects 3 to 6 percent of all school-children, although recent 
evidence suggests the prevalence may be much higher, the scientists 
noted. Not enough is known about fluoride to link it directly to ADHD 
or other health effects, the report pointed out. Nevertheless, the 
existing research on fluoride and its central-nervous-system effects 
were " provocative and of significant public health concern," the team 
concluded. 

The Mullenix research surprised one of the authors of the report, Dr. 
Ted Schettler. He had previously known almost nothing about fluoride. 
It hadnt been on my radar screen, he said. Most startling was how few 
studies had been done on fluorides central-ner vous-system effects. 
Schettler turned up just two other reports, both from China, suggesting 
that fluoride in water supplies had reduced IQ in some villages. That 
just strikes me as unbelievable quite frankly," he said. "How this has 
come to pass is extraordinary. That for forty years we have been 
putting fluoride into the nations water supplies — and how little we 
know about [what] its neurological developmental impacts are.... We 
damn well ought to know more about it than we do." 

Does Mullenix s work have any relevance to children? Schettler 
does not know. Comparing animal studies to humans is an uncertain 
science, he explained. Nor was Schettler familiar with Mullenix's 
computer testing system. But the toxic characteristics and behavior 
of other chemicals and metals, such as lead and mercury, concern 
him. For those pollutants, at least, human sensitivity is much greater 
than in animal experiments; among humans, it is greater in children 
than in adults. The impact of other toxic chemicals on the developing 
brain is often serious and irreversible. 

So is the Mullenix work worth anything? I don t know the answer to 
that," Schettler said. "But what I do draw from it is that it is quite 
plausible from her work and others that fluoride inter- 



20 



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feres with normal brain development, and that we better go out to get the 
answers to this in human populations. 

The burden of testing for neurological effects falls on the Public Health 
Service, which has promoted water fluoridations role in dental health for 
half a century. Whenever anybody or any organization attempts a public 
health intervention, there is an obligation to monitor emerging science on 
the issue — and also continue to monitor impacts in the communities where 
the intervention is instituted. So that when new data comes along that says, 
Whoa, this is interesting, here is a health effect that we hadnt thought 
about,' we better have a look at this to make sure our decision is still a 
good one, Schettler said. 

Phyllis Mullenix says that she carried the ball just about as far as she 
could. Following the seminar at NIH, Harald Loe, the director of the 
National Institute of Dental Research, had written to Forsyth's director 
Jack Hein on October 23, 1990, thanking him and Mullenix for their visit 
and confirming "the potential significance of work in this area." He asked 
Mullenix to submit additional requests for funding. "NIDR would be 
pleased to support development of such an innovative methodology which 
could have broad significance for protecting health," Loe wrote. 10 

"I was very excited about that," said Mullenix. "I took their suggestions 
in the letter. [However] every one of them ended up in a dead end.' 
Mullenix now believes that the 1990 letter was a cruel ruse — to cover up 
the fact that the NIH had no interest in learning about fluoride's potential 
central-nervous-system effects. "What they put in writing they had no 
intentions [of funding]. It took years to figure that out," she says. 

Dr. Antonio Noronha, an NIH scientific -review adviser familiar with Dr. 
Mullenix's grant request, says a scientific peer-review group rejected her 
proposal. He terms her claim of institutional bias against fluoride 
central-nervous-system research "farfetched." He adds, We strive very 
hard at NIH to make sure politics does not enter the picture.'" 

But fourteen years after Mullenix s Washington seminar the NIH still 
has not funded any examination of fluoride's central-nervous-system 
effects and, according to one senior official, does not currently regard 
fluoride and central-nervous-system effects as a 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 21 

research priority. No, it certainly isnt, said Annette Kirshner, a 
neurotoxicology specialist with the National Institute of Environmental 
Health Studies (NIEHS). Dr. Kirshner confirmed that although our 
mission is to look into the effects of toxins [and] adverse environmental 
exposures on human health, she could recall no grants being given to study 
the central-nervous-system effects of fluoride. "We'd had one or two grants 
in the past on sodium fluoride, but in my time they've not been neuro 
grants, and I've been at this institute about thirteen and a half years." Does 
NIEHS have plans to conduct such research? "We do not and I doubt if the 
other Institutes intend to," said Dr. Kirshner by e-mail. 

Nor do the governments dental experts plan on studying fluorides 
central-nervous-system effects any time soon. In an e-mail sent to me on 
July 19, 2002, Dr. Robert H. Selwitz of the same agency wrote that he was 
"not aware of any follow-up studies" nor were the potential CNS effects of 
fluoride "a topic of primary focus" for government grant givers. Dr. 
Selwitz is the Senior Dental Epidemiologist and Director of the Residency 
Program in Dental Public Health, National Institute of Dental and 
Craniofacial Research, NIH. At first he appeared to suggest that the 
Mullenix study had little relevance for human beings, telling me that her 
rats were "fed fluoride at levels as high as 175 times the concentration 
found in fluoridated drinking water. 

But his statement was subtly misleading. Rats and humans have very 
different metabolisms, and in laboratory experiments these differences 
must be compensated for. The critical measurement in studying effects on 
the central nervous system is not how much fluoride is given to the 
laboratory animals but how much of the chemical, after they drink it, 
subsequently appears in the animals blood. The amount of fluoride in the 
blood of the Mullenix rats — a measurement known as the blood serum 
level — had been the equivalent of what would appear in the blood of a 
human drinking about 5 parts per million of fluoride in water. This, of 
course, is just five times the level the government suggests is optimal for 
fluoridated water- 1 ppm. I asked Dr. Selwitz, therefore, if it was fair to 
portray the Mullenix rats as having drunk 175 times the amount of 
fluoride that citizens normally consume from fluoridated water. 



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Wasn't the "blood serum" measurement and comparison more relevant? 
Wasn't his statement, inadvertently at least, misleading? 

Dr. Selwitz, who had just been ready to dispense medical arguments 
and implied reassurances as to why Mullenix's research was not relevant 
to human beings, now explained that he could not answer my question. 
"The questions you are asking in your recent e-mail message involve the 
field of fluoride physiology," wrote the senior dental epidemiologist at 
NIDCR. "This subject is not my area of expertise." 

FAR FROM USHERING in new opportunities for scientific research, 
Mullenixs fluoride studies appear to have spelled the death knell for her 
once-promising academic career. When Jack Hein retired from Forsyth on 
June 30, 1991, the date marked the beginning of a very different work 
environment for Phyllis Mullenix. She gave a seminar at Forsyth on 
February 20, 1992, outlining what she had discovered and explaining that 
she hoped to publish a major paper about fluoride toxicity with Pamela 
DenBesten. "That's when my troubles started," said Mullenix. Pam 
DenBesten had been worried about the Boston seminar. Senior 
researchers at Forsyth, such as Paul DePaola, had published favorable 
research on fluoride since the 196os. The seminar was " ugly," says 
Mullenix. DenBesten describes the scientists' response as "angry" and 
"sarcastic." "She was risking their reputation with NIH," DenBesten 
explains. 

Karen Snapp remembers "hostile" questioning of Mullenix by the audience. 
"They looked upon Phylliss research as a threat. The dental business in this 
country is focused on fluoride. They felt that funding would dry up. We are 
supposed to be saying that fluoride is good for you, whereas somebody is 
saying maybe it is not good for you. ... In their own little minds, they were 
worried about that." The following day Forsyth's associate director, Don 
Hay, approached Mullenix. "He said, 'You are going against what the 
dentists and everybody have been publishing for fifty years, that this is safe 
and effective. You must be wrong,'" Mullenix recalled. "He told me, You 
are jeopardizing the financial support of this entire institution. If you 
publish these studies, NIDR is not going to fund any more research at 
Forsyth. 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



23 



Karen Snapp also remembers Don Hay as opposing publication of 
the paper. "He didn't believe the science. He didn't believe the 
results — and he did not think the paper should go out." Both Snapp 
and Mullenix were concerned that somehow Don Hay would prevent 
the paper from being published. "I think we were even laughing about 
it, saying I think in America we have something called freedom of the 
press, freedom of speech?" Snapp recalls. 

Don Hay calls allegations that he considered suppressing the 
Mullenix research "false." He told Salon.com: "My concern was that 
Dr. Mullenix, who had no published record in fluoride research, was 
reaching conclusions that seemed to differ from a large body of 
research reported over the last fifty years. We had no knowledge of 
the acceptance of her paper prior to the time she left [Forsyth] ." 

Editor Donald E. Hutchings of Neurotoxicology and Teratology, 
where the Mullenix paper was published, says that there was no effort 
to censor or pressure him in any way. Her study was first "peer 
-reviewed" by other scientists, revised, and then accepted. "Was I 
called and told that 'If you publish this we are going to review your 
income taxes, [or] send you a picture of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress?' 
No," he said. Hutchings was a little bemused, however, to get such a 
critical paper on fluoride from a Forsyth researcher. He knew that 
Forsyth had long been a leading supporter of a role for fluoride in 
dentistry. "It almost strikes me like you are working in a distillery and 
you are doing work studying fetal alcohol syndrome. That is not work 
that they are going to be eager to be sponsoring. I didn't care — it 
wasn't my career. I thought it was really courageous of her to be doing 
that." 

On May 18,1994 — Just days after the paper had been accepted — 
Forsyth fired Mullenix. The termination letter merely stated that her 
contract would not be renewed. There was no mention of fluoride. A 
new regime was now installed at the Center. The toxicology 
department was closed, and a new Board of Overseers had been 
established, with the mission "to advise the Director in matters 
dealing with industrial relationships." 14 

Mullenix describes the final couple of months at Forsyth as the 
lowest ebb in her career. The big grant from the National Cancer 
Institute had dried up and her laboratory conditions were horrible, she 
said. "The roof leaked, they destroyed the equipment, they 



24 



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destroyed the animals. That was the lowest point, right before I physi cally 
moved out in July 1994. Nobody would even talk to me. 

Her mother remembers Phyllis calling frequently that summer. She was 
very upset about it, said Olive Mullenix. At first she wondered if her 
daughter had done something wrong. Phyllis explained that her fluoride 
research had been unpopular. There was no use to get angry, said Olive 
Mullenix. She was honest about what she found and they didn't like it." 

Stata Norton got calls too from her former student. Norton was not 
surprised at the hostile response from Forsyth. She knew that clean data 
can attract dirty politics. There are situations in which people don't want 
data challenged, they don't want arguments," said Norton. 

The implications of Mullenix s work have been buried, according to her 
former colleague, the scientist Karen Snapp. Is it fair to say that we don't 
know the answer to the central-nervous-system effects of the fluoride we 
currently ingest? I think that Phyllis got just the tip of the iceberg. There 
needs to be more work in that area, Snapp said. 

Jack Hein wishes that he had approached things differently. He knew 
that the scientific landscape of the last fifty years was littered with the 
bodies of a lot of people who, like Phyllis Mullenix, got tangled up in the 
fluoride controversy. His team should have tested other dental materials 
before tackling fluoride, said Hein. It would have been better if we had 
done mercury and then fluoride," 
he said. Less controversial. 

It would have made no difference, believes Mullenix. Nor does she 
believe another scientist would have been treated differently. She had 
stellar academic credentials, powerful industry contacts, and hard scientific 
data about a common chemical. "That is the sad part of it," she said. "I 
thought I had the people back then. I thought you could reason one scientist 
to another. I don't know that there is anything I could have done differently, 
without just burying the information." 

Mullenix no longer works as a research scientist. Since her fluoride 
discovery at Forsyth a decade ago, she has received no funding or research 
grants. "I liked studying rats," she said. "I probably would have continued 
working with the animals my entire life. Now, she added, I dont think I 
will ever get to work in a laboratory again. 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



Jack Hein and Pamela DenBesten knew about fluorides bizarre 
undertow, one that could pull and snatch at even the most established 
scientist, and they were able to swim free from the Forsyth shipwreck But 
Mullenix was dragged down by a tide that no one warned her about. "I 
didnt understand the depth, she said. And to me, in my training, you pay 
no attention to that. The data are the data and you report them and you 
publish and you go from there. 

Mullenix is disappointed at the response of her fellow scientists. Jack 
Hein walked off into the sunset of retirement. Most of her former 
colleagues were reluctant to support her call for more research on fluoride, 
she said. Instead of saying maybe scientifically we should take another 
look, everybody took cover, they all dove into the bushes and wouldn't 
have anything to do with me." 

Olive Mullenix did not raise her daughter that way. You cant just walk 
away from something like this, Phyllis Mullenix said. I mean, they had to 
find out that thalidomide was wrong and change. Why should fluoride be 
any different? 

"A Spooky Feeling" 

ONE HOT JULY evening in 1995 the phone rang. Dr. Phyllis Mulle-nix 
was in her office, upstairs in her Andover, Massachusetts, home. Scientific 
papers were strewn on the floor. She had been depressed. Her firing from 
Forsyth the previous summer had hit the family hard. Her daughters were 
applying to college ; she and her husband, Rick, were quarreling about 
money. 

She lifted the receiver. A big bass voice boomed an apology from New 
York City for calling so late. Mullenix did not recognize the speaker. She 
settled back into her favorite white leather armchair. Joel Griffiths 
explained that he was a medical writer in Manhattan. He had a request. 
Would Mullenix look at some old documents he had discovered in a U.S. 
government archive? The papers were from the files of the Medical Section 
of the Manhattan Project, the once supersecret scientific organization that 
had built the worlds first atomic bomb. 

Mullenix rolled her eyes. It was late. Rick, now an air traffic controller, 
was trying to sleep in the next room. The atom bomb, Mul-lenix thought! 
What on earth did that have to do with fluoride? 



26 



CHAPTER TWO 



Mullenixs own patience was growing thin. Since her research had 
become public, she had been bombarded with phone calls and letters from 
antifluoride activists. Some of the callers had been battling water 
fluoridation since the 1950s. Late-night radio talk shows were especially 
hungry to speak with the Harvard scientist who thought that fluoride was 
dangerous. They called her at three or four in the morning from across the 
country and overseas. Usually "there was no thank you note, and you never 
heard from them again," Mullenix said. 

The New York reporter dropped a bombshell. Dr. Harold Hodge, 
Mullenixs old laboratory colleague, was described in the documents as the 
Manhattan Projects chief medical expert on fluoride, Griffiths told her. 
Workers and families living near atomic-bomb factories during the war 
had been poisoned by fluoride, according to the documents, and Harold 
Hodge had investigated. 

Mullenix felt a sudden "spooky" feeling. She shifted in her chair. 
Harold Hodge was now dead, but as the journalist continued, Mullenix 
cast her mind back to the days in her Forsyth laboratory with the kind old 
gentleman, the grandfatherly figure who had some-times played with her 
children. 

"All he did was ask questions," she told Griffiths. "He would sit there 
and he would nod his head, and he would say, You don't say, you don't say. 
Once, Mullenix recalled, as Hodge watched her experiments, he had briefly 
mentioned working for the Manhattan Project. But he had never said that 
fluoride had anything to do with nuclear weapons — or that he had once 
measured the toxic effects of fluoride on atomic-bomb workers. Yes, 
Mullenix told the journalist, she wanted to see the documents. 

Some days later a colleague of Griffiths s arrived at the Mullenix home. 
Clifford Honicker handed her a thick folder of documents. Honicker was 
part of a small group of researchers and reporters who had unearthed many 
of the ghoulish medical secrets of the Manhat tan Project and the Atomic 
Energy Commission. Those secrets had included details about scores of 
shocking cold-war human radiation experiments on hospital patients, 
prisoners, pregnant women, and retarded children. 

For years the media had ignored the information about human 
experimentation that Honicker and others were discovering. Finally, 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



27 



in 1995, an investigative journalist named Eileen Welsome had won a 
Pulitzer Prize for revealing how atomic-bomb-program doctors had 
injected plutonium into hospital patients in Tennessee and New York. 
She uncovered the names of the long-ago victims. Harold Hodge had 
planned and supervised many of those experiments, the documents 
showed. President Bill Clinton ordered an investigation. His energy 
secretary, Hazel O'Leary, began a new policy of openness. And 
Honicker and others had gained access to newly declassified cold- war 
documents — including much of the new information on fluoride. 

That night, after Honicker left, Mullenix settled in her chair and 
began to read. Her face drained as she read one memo in particular. 
The fifty-year-old document mentioned Harold Hodge — and dis- 
cussed fluorides effects on the brain and central nervous system. It 
was the same work she had done at the Forsyth Dental Center. 

"I went white. I was outraged," said Mullenix. "I was hollering 
and pacing the floor. He wrote this memo saying that he knew 
fluoride would affect the central nervous system!" 

The central-nervous-system memo — stamped "secret" — is 
addressed to the head of the Manhattan Projects Medical Section, 
Colonel Stafford Warren, and dated April 29, 1944 It is a request to 
conduct animal experiments to measure the central-nervous-system 
effects of fluoride. Dr. Harold Hodge wrote the research proposal. 

"Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have a 
rather marked central nervous system effect. ... It seems most likely 
that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code for 
uranium] is the causative factor," states the memo. 15 

A light flashed on for Mullenix. At the time, in 1996, she was still 
sending grant requests to the National Institutes of Health in 
Washington, DC, asking to continue her studies on fluoride's 
central-nervous-system effects. A panel of NIH scientists had turned 
down the application, flatly telling her, "Fluoride does not have 
central nervous system effects." Mullenix realized the absurdity of 
what she had been doing. Harold Hodge and the government had sus- 
pected fluorides toxic effects on the human central nervous system 
for half a century. 

She read on. The 1944 memo explained why research on fluorid 
e's central-nervous-system effects was vital to the United States' 



28 



CHAPTER Two 



war effort. Since work with these compounds is essential, it will be 
necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur after 
exposure. . . . This is important not only to protect a given individual, but 
also to prevent a confused workman from injuring others by improperly 
performing his duties. 

All of a sudden it dawned on me, said Mullenix. Harold Hodge, back 
in the 1940s, had asked the military to do a study that I had done at 
Forsyth.... Hodge knew this fifty years ago. Why didnt he tell me what he 
was interested in? Why didnt he say to me, This stuff, I know, is a 
neurotoxin?'" All he did was ask questions, and he would sit there and he 
would nod his head and he would say, You dont say, you dont say. He 
never once said, I know it is a neuro-toxin, I know it causes confusion, 
lassitude, and drowsiness. 

Today Mullenix calls Harold Hodge a monster for his human-radiation 
experiments. In retrospect she compares sharing a laboratory with him with 
being in a movie theater, sharing popcorn with the Boston Strangler. 

Had the two Rochester alumni — Jack Hein and Harold Hodge — 
manipulated the toxicologist to perform the fluoride studies that Hodge had 
proposed fifty years earlier, she wondered. Did they let Mullenix take the 
fall when her experiments proved what Hodge had already suspected? At 
first, Mullenix had shown no interest in studying fluoride, she remembered. 
It seems strange that a neuro-toxicology person was brought into a dental 
institution to look at fluoride, Mullenix said. I felt that I had really been 
lied to, or led along," she added, "used like a little puppet." 

Mullenix called up Jack Hein. He denied knowing anything about 
Harold Hodges long-ago Manhattan Project fears that fluoride was a 
neurotoxin, she said. And instead, he offered to pass the explosive 
information on to the government, telling Mullenix, Shouldnt you tell the 
NIDR — do you want me to help you take it to the NIDR? (Hein may have 
known far more than he told Mullenix, however. In a 1997 interview with 
the United Kingdoms Channel Four television, he disclosed that one of the 
primary concerns of Manhattan Project toxicologists had been fluorides 
effects on the central nervous system.)" 

The next day Dr. Mullenix called the head of the National Institute of 
Dental Research, Dr. Harold Slavkin. She hoped the nations top 



FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 



29 



dental officer would be concerned about the wartime memo. Instead, 
she remembers, He got very nasty about it. He basically pushed me 
off, like I was some kind of a crackpot. She thought that NIDR would 
be interested in the memos, that the institute would want to read them. 
But he treated her as if she were some kind of a whacko, she recalls. 
She put the telephone down and a terrible truth dawned on her. The 
public guardians at the National Institutes of Health, like Harold 
Hodge, also had a double identity. It seemed they, too, were keepers of 
cold war national-security secrets — bureaucratic sentries at the 
portcullis of the nuclear-industrial state. 



Opposite Sides of the Atlantic