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
No comments:
Post a Comment