Robert Kehoe and the
Kettering Laboratory
FROM THE DARKNESS it can be difficult to determine the source of a
shadow. Dr. Robert Arthur Kehoe of the Kettering Laboratory cast such a
shadow over us all, one of the darkest of the modern era.
For more than sixty years Americans breathed hundreds of thousands
of tons of raw poison wafted into the atmosphere from leaded gasoline.
This toxic air contributed to a medical toll of some 5,000 annual deaths
from lead-related heart disease and an almost incalculable toll of tragedy
in the neurological injuries and learning difficulties imposed on children.
One estimate, based on government data, suggests that from 1927 to 1987,
68 million young children in the United States were exposed to toxic
amounts of lead from gasoline, until the additive was finally phased out in
the United States.'
For this in good measure we can thank Dr. Kehoe. Dark-haired and
dark-eyed, Kehoe described himself as a "black Irishman" and claimed to
be descended from Spaniards who had been shipwrecked on the Irish
coast during Elizabethan times. The scientist possessed boundless energy,
and a keen mind, and he could also tell "one hell of a dirty joke,"
colleagues remembered. Others who confronted him professionally,
however, remembered Kehoe as arrogant and aloof. 2
For almost fifty years Kehoe occupied some of the commanding
heights of the nations medical establishment. He was at various points
president of the American Academy of Occupational Medi-
102
CHAPTER EIGHT
cine and president of the American Industrial Hygiene Association; he
served as a consultant to the Public Health Service, the International Labor
Organization, and the Atomic Energy Commission.' Kehoe also exercised a
powerful influence on the publication of medical reports, since he sat on
the editorial boards of leading scientific publications.' He preached the
gospel of leaded gasolines safety from his pulpit at the Kettering
Laboratory for the duration of his entire scientific career.'
Kehoe did much the same for fluoride, with health consequences of a
potentially similar magnitude.
The Fluorine Lawyers and the " Infectious
Idea of Easy Pickings"
SPOOKED CORPORATIONS STAMPEDED Kehoe's laboratory following
World War II. 6 The great factories that had throbbed and roared for the
long years of national emergency had spewed unprecedented volumes of
poisonous gas and smoke into the skies over numerous American cities and
manufacturing areas. There were aluminum plants on the Columbia River
and at Niagara Falls; uranium plants in New Jersey, Cleveland, and
Tennessee; steel mills in Pittsburgh; gasoline refineries in Los Angeles;
and phosphate plants in Florida. These were just some of the industrial
operations that had won the war for the United States, but from which a
steady rain of fluoride and other pollutants now fell, endangering the health
of workers in factories and people living nearby.
Patriotic U.S. citizens tolerated the smoke of war. When peace arrived,
they turned to the courts. Perhaps the first to file suit were the injured peach
farmers from the Garden State, downwind from DuPonts Chamber Works.
They were quickly followed by numerous additional lawsuits alleging
fluoride damage to crops, farm animals, and citizens.'
Soon we had claims and lawsuits around aluminum smelters from
coast to coast," recalled Alcoa's leading fluoride litigator, Frank Seamans.
"Once this sleeping giant was awakened, claims and lawsuits were brought
against all types of plants involving fluoride emissions — steel plants,
fertilizer plants, oil refineries, and the like," he added.'
ROBERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY 103
To battle this awakened giant, Seamans and attorneys for other
beleaguered corporations organized themselves into a self-described
Fluorine Lawyers Committee, which met regularly through the cold war
years.' The Committee would eventually include attorneys representing
several of Americas top corporations, including Aluminum Company
of Canada, U.S. Steel, Kaiser Aluminum and Steel, Reynolds Metals
Company, Monsanto Chemical, the Tennessee River Valley Authority
( TV A), Tennessee Corporation and subsidiaries, Victor Chemical, and
Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation. Those corporations,
guided by the needs of the Fluorine Lawyers, and directed by a Medical
Advisory Committee of doctors from the corporations, funded the
fluoride research at the Kettering
Laboratory. 10
The gathering storm clouds were surveyed after the war at a confidential
conference at the Mellon Institute on April 30,1946. Among the guests
filing through the ornately decorated aluminum doorways of the bunkerlike
structure on Pittsburgh's Fifth Avenue were representatives from several of
the companies facing fluoride lawsuits and complaints, including Alcoa,
Pennsylvania Salt, and Harshaw Chemical."
Robert Kehoe dispatched a loyal young Kettering lieutenant to the
conference. Although Edward Largents only degree was a BA obtained in
1935 from Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, his willingness to
sacrifice his own body and the bodies of others on behalf of the Kettering
Laboratory's corporate clients, had already propelled him to the front line
of industry's defense against fluoride litigation.' Starting in 1939, the giant
Pennsylvania Salt Company and the Mead Johnson food company paid for
a special experimental diet for the Kettering researcher. Pennsylvania Salt
manufactured numerous fluoride products, including a cryolite pesticide
spray, while Mead Johnson made a children's food, called Pablum,
containing animal bone meal. (Bone meal can contain high amounts of
fluoride.) Largent converted to a human guinea pig for the Kettering
sponsors, eating, drinking, and breathing large quantities of fluoride for
several years." Under the direction of a Kettering toxicologist, Francis
Heyroth, the eager young researcher consumed fluoride in various forms:
as cryolite, calcium fluoride, hydrogen fluoride, sodium fluoride, and
sodium fluoroborate. As
,04
CHAPTER EIGHT
with similar experiments, in which human volunteers breathed lead fumes
in a Kettering Laboratory gas chamber, the data were subsequently used to
promote industry s position that moderate levels of fluoride — or lead — in
the body were in "equilibrium with the environment and, if kept below
certain thresholds, were both natural and safe. Such a hypothesis was
immensely practical, of course. Following Largents wartime experiments
eating cryolite, for example, the Department of Agriculture raised the
amount of cryolite pesticide residue permitted on agricultural produce, an
obvious windfall for the Pennsylvania Salt Company.'
Now, in April 1946, Largent was one of those sitting in the audience at
the Mellon Institute as the grand old man of prewar fluoride science,
Alcoa's director of research, Francis Frary, took the stage. Frary explained
to the Mellon audience some of industry's worries: how fluoride
accumulated in the human skeleton and how coal had recently been
identified as an "important" new source of airborne fluoride.' Largent was
well aware of the legal risks that fluoride posed to corporations. He had
been battling farmers who had launched court cases against several big
chemical companies in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, alleging damage to
crops and herds in a postwar barrage of litigation in the Philadelphia and
Delaware Valley area. Largent described these as almost epidemic." 6
Industry confronted a potentially devastating cold war domino
effect — that Americas industrial workers would follow the farmers into
court. Largent had been monitoring the fluoride exposure inside the
Pennsylvania Salt Company s two big plants in Natrona and Easton,
Pennsylvania. The X-rays showed "bone changes" in workers skeletons
and pointed to a clear and present danger, he stated. "These X-ray data
could easily be misused by dishonest people to conduct a probably
successful attempt to obtain compensation, Largent told a colleague from
the Harshaw Chemical Company in an April 1946 letter that discussed the
importance of the pending Mellon conference. The infectious idea of easy
pickings may spread to include damage claims regarding occupational
injuries," he added.'
The Mellon Institute audience was captivated by the bold new medical
theory of a second speaker. According to the roentgen-ologist (X-ray
expert) Paul G. Bovard, much of the bone damage
ROBERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY
105
seen on workers X-rays was probably not caused by fluoride, and the
Danish scientist Kaj Roholm had been a needless worrywart.' x Dr. Bovards
fresh perspective was terrific news, Largent reminded the Pennsylvania
Salt Company. Several of [your] employees show bone changes which
might be successfully, even if it were dishonestly, made to appear like
fluorine intoxication. The possibility of a roentgenologist being led by a
dishonest lawyer to make such an error is not too far-fetched; it shows with
great emphasis how fortunate we are to have the help and interest of a man
with Dr. Bovard's capabilities." 19 Bovard's fresh thinking would prove
"invaluable assets to the defense against dishonest claims for
compensation,"
Largent concluded. 20
Largent passed on more good news. Following the Mellon conference,
other U.S. companies had also expressed "intense interest" in the fluoride
problem. Alcoa's Francis Frary had told Largent that the aluminum
company might support an expanded research program at Kettering. Other
companies soon contacted Robert Kehoe directly. The DuPont medical
director, Dr. G. H. Gehrmann, told Kehoe that DuPont, too, might be
interested in joining the fluoride research at Kettering!' Such collaboration
became a reality that summer and fall. On July 26, 1946, industry
representatives met again, this time in the Philadelphia headquarters of the
Pennsylvania Salt Company. And by the end of the year DuPont, Universal
Oil Products, Reynolds Metals, and Alcoa had all agreed to pay for
expanded fluoride studies at Kettering. Of special interest to sponsors: the
willingness of the Kettering team to procure additional humans for
experimentation. "This program should allow for new human subjects and
should materially contribute to this subject," noted Pennsylvania Salts S. C.
Ogburn Jr., in a November 1946 letter to Edward Largent.
More Human Experiments,
and a Suspicious Scientific Study
THE EXPANDED RESEARCH program quickly bore fruit, both in fresh
human experiments and in an influential scientific paper attacking Kaj
Roholm. In January 1947, as industry checks for the fluoride research
started to arrive in the Kettering Laboratory
106
CHAPTER EIGHT
mailroom, Edward Largent looked around for more human subjects. He did
not have to look far. Largent sometimes ate in the Ketter-ing lunchroom
with members of a local African American family, the Blackstones, several
of whom worked for the University of Cincinnati as laboratory assistants
and animal handlers. A group of black boys — a wonderful family, Elmo
and Peanut and Gentry," remembered Edward Largent years later. 22
The Blackstone brothers had helped Dr. Robert Kehoe in his lead
experiments. In 1947 a new item appeared on the Blackstones
menu — extra-dietary fluoride. In May of that year, forty-one-year-old
Elmo Blackstone began eating fluoride and carefully collecting his urine
and excreta. The industrial experiments would continue for three and a half
years, during which time he would consume a startling 12,047 mg of
fluoride in the form of sodium fluoride and sodium fluoroborate,
considerably more fluoride than even Lar-gent had ingested. In one
experiment, begun in June 1948, Elmo was given 84 mg of sodium fluoride
each week in his food for 130 weeks.' There is no surviving record of
whether Elmo Blackstone experienced injury as a result of these
experiments, but the historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner
describe similar Kettering human experiments with lead as particularly
pernicious because their objective was not the discovery of a therapy for
those with lead poisoning but was to gather evidence that could be used by
industry to prove that lead in the blood was normal and not indicative of
poisoning by industry. 25
In 1951 Edward Largent mounted a major assault on the research of Kaj
Roholm, describing health effects of fluoride exposure in American
workers that were much less severe than those reported by the Danish
scientist. 26 His paper laid a medical keystone for Americas cold war
industrial enterprise. 27 The war had hugely increased U.S. industrial
dependence on fluoride, a hunger that grew voraciously as the American
economy began its spectacular cold war expansion, with entire new
enterprises, such as fluorocarbon plastics, aerosols, refrigerants, uranium
enrichment, rocket fuels, and agricultural chemicals, all requiring
that employees breathe and absorb fluoride. 28 By 1975 the government
estimated that 350,000 men and women in 92 different occupations were
exposed to fluoride in the workplace. 29 Yet the consequences of that
chemical exposure
BERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY
107
would be largely overlooked, in part because of Largents 1951 paper,
published in the influential American Journal of Roentgenology.
Roholm had reported that fluoride produced a host of medical symptoms
in factory workers. Most distinctly, fluoride could visibly disfigure a
worker's bones, disabling them with a painful thickening and fusing of
spinal vertebrae, a condition Roholm called crippling skeletal fluorosis.
Largent now contradicted the Dane, reporting that no disabilities had been
caused by fluoride in the U.S. workers he had studied. Instead, he argued
that fluoride "deposition only highlighted a preexisting condition, making
it more "apparent" to X-rays. "One wonders if Roholm may not have
overemphasized the part that fluorides may play in causing limitation of
mobility of the spine," Largent wrote. Perhaps the crippled spinal columns
of the Danish workers were mostly the result of "hard labor," he
suggested. 30
Largents 1951 paper was influential among those for whom it was
meant to be influential, so that in 1965, for example, the nations leading
fluoride expert, Harold Hodge, could state that crippling fluorosis has
never been seen in the United States. 31 But Largents paper also appears to
have been a grim scientific hoax. At the end of his paper the Kettering
researcher had ostentatiously posed a question: why did fluoride appear to
affect American and European workers differently? "Just why disability
has not been recorded in American workers remains unanswered, Largent
wrote.
The answer is simple. The facts were hidden by a Kettering cover-up
that misled a generation of medical researchers about the consequences of
industrial fluoride exposure and sentenced many thousands of U.S.
workers to undiagnosed fluoride injury. Just three years earlier Kettering's
Robert Kehoe had privately told Alcoa that 120 workers at its Massena
aluminum smelting plant had "bone fluorosis" and that 33 were "severe"
cases that showed evidences of disability ranging in estimated degree up to
loo per-cent. 32 Similarly, while Largent publicly reported no fluoride dis-
ability, privately three doctors had told him that workers' X-rays showed
evidence of fluoride-linked medical injury, according to his personal
correspondence and long-concealed records.
Largents 1951 paper was based on X-rays of workers at the
Pennsylvania Salt Company. Fluoride was burrowing inside the
1 o 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
employees bodies, deforming and crippling their bones, according to a
radiologist, Dr. Thomas Smyth. Ira Templeton, one worker from the
company s plant in Easton, Pennsylvania, showed marked increase in the
density of the pelvis, upper portion of the femur, vertebrae, ribs, clavicle,
scapula and forearm. Dr. Smyth considered these [effects] to be indicative
of marked fluorine intox ication," Largent told management. At another
Pennsylvania Salt plant at Natrona, Pennsylvania, X-ray images of a
worker, Elmer Lammay, revealed that "bone growths on some of the
vertebrae were extensive enough to indicate that some of the bones of the
spine were becoming solidly fused together," Largent reported to
management. 33 A second Natrona worker, Ross Mills, also revealed
a "clear-cut increase in the density of the lower ribs and the lower
thoracic and lumbar spine, typical of fluorine absorption,"
according to radiologist Paul Bovard, who classified Mills a "probable
case of fluorosis." 34
Although the Kettering researchers hid the incriminating X-ray pictures
from the workers, on January 31, 1947, a mix-up occurred and Ira
Templeton's results were sent directly to the Easton plant. " All of the films
show osteosclerosis previously described and considered to be as a result of
fluoride poisoning. . . . Very truly yours, Russell Davey, M.D.," read the
mailed analysis." Pennsylvania Salt's management was furious at the
misdirected letter. Its workforce might learn of the danger from fluoride
exposure, the company worried. "You can appreciate the seriousness of
this situation to us," wrote a senior official, S. C. Ogburn Jr., to Dr. Robert
Kehoe, Largent's boss at the Kettering Laboratory. "Doubtless, this letter
has been widely discussed at our Plant and is evidence of extremely poor
tact, to say the least, on the part of Drs. Pillmore and Davey,"
Ogburn added. 36
Kehoe asked the offending radiologist, Dr. Davey, to send future X-rays
directly to the Kettering Laboratory and thereby "absolve the management
of the Easton plant of any responsibility." He added, "We wish to avoid any
situations that would result in undue suspicions or anxiety on the part of
any of these men." And Kehoe swiftly reassured Pennsylvania Salts
management that any apprehension or concern by workers about their
health was the result of a semantic misunderstanding. In Europe the terms
"fluorine
gOBERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY
109
poisoning and fluorine intoxication might suggest disability and even
worker compensation. In the United States, however, Edward Largent and
the radiologist Dr. Paul Bovard were using these terms differently, infusing
medical language with new meaning, Kehoe insisted. Poisoning was
merely an unfortunate choice of verbal expression," he added. 37
Dr. Kehoe and Edward Largent now delivered their sponsors some good
news. Dr. Bovard had reversed the earlier diagnoses of fluoride poisoning
by Drs. Smyth and Davey. He now claimed that, "with the exception of
spinous ligament changes seen in films of Ira Templeton, the bone
changes were so commonly seen in laborers as to have no necessary or
likely relation to fluorine deposition. Pennsylvania Salt should therefore
"differentiate between the terms, fluorine intoxication, which carries with
it the implication of illness and disability, or impending disability, and
"fluorine deposition, which signifies demonstrable change but without
implying, necessarily, that illness or disease has occurred or is
imminent, suggested Largent. 38
The Kettering researchers published verdict of no disability was
manifestly suspicious. All three radiologists had diagnosed some degree of
fluoride-induced spinal thickening, ligament changes, or fluorosis in the
Pennsylvania Salt workers. A careful reader of Largent's published paper
might also note an important distinction between the way Largent had
arrived at his medical conclusions and how Kaj Roholm had investigated
the same problem. The Dane had listened closely to the health complaints
of the Copenhagen employees. He had concluded that fluoride poisoning
was insidious and hydra-headed and that several groups of
symptoms — including stomach, bone, lung, skin, and nervous
problems — often presented themselves at different times in different
people, making fluoride injury both serious and sometimes difficult to
diagnose. 39 Largent's 1951 published finding of "no disability" in the
Pennsylvania Salt workers, however, was made without ever talking to the
employees themselves. Nor had the Kettering team performed any medical
examinations beyond studying bone X-rays in a distant office. Detailed
clinical examination of the workmen in these plants could not be carried
out and therefore no other data are available for consideration, Largent
wrote."
110
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sins of the Father
EDWARD LA RGENTS WILLINGNESS tO perform human experiments was
remarkable. In the haste of World War II, he had helped the Manhattan
Project fix fluoride inhalation safety standards at 6 parts per million for
U.S. war workers who breathed in fluoride in factories." Following the war
Largent even turned to his own family to obtain additional scientific data. 42
He couldnt get experimental subjects, explained his son Edward
Largent Jr., who today is a classical composer and professor emeritus at
the Dana School of Music at Youngstown State University in Ohio. A lot
of people were just antifluoride for whatever reasons, he added.
His son, then a high school student, was selected by his father because
he "was available and he was willing," his father told the medical writer
Joel Griffiths. "Willing human subjects are not that easy to find," he
explained. Largent told his son that he needed more data for whatever
research he was doing, Largent, Jr. remembered. "It was really sort of a
cursory knowledge. I wouldn't have understood a lot of what he was talking
about because I was only a sophomore in high school.
The Manhattan Project's Rochester division had already reported
earlier experiments with hydrogen fluoride gas on dogs. At
concentrations of approximately 8.8 parts per million of hydrogen fluoride,
the lungs of one out of five dogs hemorrhaged. 43 Largent, Sr., had read the
study but appeared skeptical about the results. " When I read it I wasn't
impressed with what it meant in terms of potential human exposure, he
told Griffiths. There was no review commit-tee for the Kettering inhalation
experiment and no formal consent forms. "I was the review committee," he
said. He did not anticipate health problems in the experimental subjects.
"As far as we were concerned, there were no such risks," he added.
In order to perform these new experiments, Largent had to have a gas
chamber built. The process was a challenge. HF gas is corrosive, and the
acid attacked the metal cylinders and valves. " It was found to be very
difficult to maintain a specific concentration of HF in air inside the
inhalation chamber, he reported.
Once the gas chamber was built, Largent reserved the greatest amount
of fluoride for one of the Kettering laboratory s African
ROBERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY 111
American laboratory assistants, forty-six-year-old male Gentry Blackstone.
For fifty days in the early spring of 1953 Blackstone sat in the Kettering gas
chamber six hours a day, breathing an average dose of 4.2 parts per million
of hydrogen fluoride acid. But Largent did not experiment on Gentry
Blackstone alone. Largent also exposed his own wife, Kathleen, to a lower
dose of 2.7 parts per million. And although Gentry Blackstone received the
largest amount of fluoride over the longest period of time, the single
highest exposure values were given to Largent's son. On June 22, 1953,
Edward Largent Jr., aged seventeen, entered a Kettering gas chamber for
the first time. Cold cosmetic cream was applied to his face. The experiment
would continue for twenty-eight days, six hours at a time, with weekends
off.
"I had to sit in this cage," the son remembered. A small fan was placed
in front of the boy to improve the gas circulation. Outside, his father
operated the controls and watched. The walls of the chamber were made
from transparent plastic sheeting. The gas whispered in. At first, it caught
the teenagers lungs and burned his nostrils, he said. His skin reddened and
flaked. He read fiction to relieve the tedium, eyes stinging and smarting.
The average dose for the six weeks that Edward Largent Jr. sat in the
chamber was 6.7 parts per million — almost two and a half times what his
mother received. For one remarkable week in early July 1953, however,
with a break for Independence Day, the scientist gassed his son with doses
of hydrogen fluoride that averaged 9.1 parts per million and climbed as
high as 1 1 .9, almost four times the maximum allowable concentration then
set by federal authorities and twice what the father had tolerated himself.
The son's urine levels spiked at 40 parts of fluoride per million. The highest
doses given to his son were accidental, the father said in retrospect; "It was
our inability to keep it from going higher than we wanted it to."
Largent's experiments rang alarm bells for industry. At a 1953
Symposium on Fluorides at the Kettering Laboratory, he described his
inhalation studies and spelled out the potential dangers they had revealed.."
The gathered officials — including the head of the Fluorine Lawyers
Committee, Alcoa s Frank Seamans — knew that American workers were
regularly exposed to 3 parts per million of fluoride in their factories and
workplaces. They also knew that when fluoride urine levels rose above 8
milligrams per liter, there was real danger
1 12
CHAPTER EIGHT
that fluoride was building up in the skeleton and might soon become visible
to X-rays. Largent delivered the bad news. Fluoride levels in his
experimental subjects had spiked sharply immediately after their gas
chamber exposures, even at lower acceptable exposure levels. Urinary
concentrations averaged about io mg. per liter, he told the industry men,
"although the atmospheric concentrations of HF were near to 3 ppm, which
is generally accepted as satisfactory for prolonged occupational exposure.
95 In public Largent continued to maintain that fluoride was safe in low
doses. 96 Privately he told the industry representatives at the 1953
Symposium, One wonders (whether) . . . prolonged exposure to HF at such
a level may not give rise to medico-legal controversies.""
Despite his private warnings to industry, Largent s experiments on his
family and on the Blackstones are now considered a scientific foundation
for today's official safety standard for the tens of thousands of workers who
each day breathe the gas in their factories. The other source for safety
assurances? Experiments done in
1909 on rats. 98
Even though the family experiments seem shocking, Edward Largent Jr.
refuses to judge his father for placing him in a hydrogen fluoride gas
chamber. Although the music professor has experienced knee problems in
recent years, he blames a youthful passion for soccer; he doubts that it had
anything to do with his summer spent breathing fluoride in the basement of
the Kettering Laboratory, where he remembers only moderate discomfort.
Mostly, he told me, "It stank and it was very boring. Be careful about
criticizing," he warned, referring to the 19505 experiments. "Those were
different times. The criteria and the sensitivities to such things were very
different." He added, "It is like trying to judge a Beethoven symphony
today. You have to look at the circumstances, the instruments he was
writing for, the audience situations."
After the experiments Edward Largent Jr., abruptly changed his career
plans. He had passed his entrance exams for medical school at Ohio State,
but suddenly plumped for music. Science no longer seemed so appealing.
"I just decided I didn't want to do that, he said.
His father would be haunted in later life by his own service as a human
laboratory animal. Painful osteofluorosis led to a knee
ROBERT KEHOE AND THE KETTERING LABORATORY 113
replacement and a reliance on medication for relief, the former Kettering
researcher told medical writer Joel Griffiths in a taped interview in the
mid-1990s. Both knees were hurting, Largent explained, because of the
deposition of fluoride. Ironically, he seemed to have wound up suffering
from the very type of skeletal disability his industry-funded scientific
studies said did not exist. (In a second interview, however, Largent
reversed himself and denied to Griffiths that he had ever suffered
osteofluorosis.) 49
Edward Largent Sr. died in December 1998, five days after an operation
for a broken hip, suffered after a nighttime fall: gripped by Alzheimer's
dementia, Largent had forgotten to use his walker to get to the bathroom.
At the end of his life, his son recalled, Edward Largent "was angry and
frustrated and very frightened because he knew there was something that
wasn't right and that he couldn't fig ure out how to deal with it. The son
wondered whether his father's bone pain in later life was because of his
fluoride experiments. Edward Largent Jr.'s mother also suffered from ill
health in her final years. Kathleen Largent had a leaking heart valve and a
nerve disorder known as myasthenia gravis. (Arthritis, increased risk of hip
fracture, Alzheimer's, and other central-nervous-system disorders have all
been linked by scientists to fluoride exposure.) 50
In recent years Edward Largent Jr. has spent hours reading about the
Manhattan Project, wondering if his father was involved. An elder brother
said their father had worked at Oak Ridge. And as a boy, Edward Largent
Jr. remembers his father arriving from Tennessee at their Cincinnati home
on a Friday night during the 1940s, driving a black car with government
plates. "The car would go in the garage and I would say "Let's go for a
ride,' and Dad would say No, no we can't use that car.' And then he would
leave Sunday after-noon in the government car."
9
Donora: A Rich Man's Hocus Pocus
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