Ch. 3. Opposite Sides of the Atlantic: the fluoride deception by
Christopher Bryson from archive.org
Opposite
Sides of the Atlantic
Copenhagen: Crucible of Discovery KAJ ELI ROHOLM had a passion for life and medicine.
The son of a Danish sea captain
and an immigrant Polish Jew, Roholm shone briefly as one of Europe's brightest
stars. During the
1920S and 193os, when Copenhagen
glowed as a crucible of scientific discov ery and Nils Bohr and a cadre
of physicist disciples laid the
theoretical foundation for nuclear fission, Kaj Roholm had advanced the healing arts.' "He was a very vital and
lively person," remembered the
ninety-five-year-old Georg Brun, who met Roholm almost a lifetime
ago, when both were young doctors
training in a Danish hospital. They had
talked eagerly about politics, history, and medicine.' Although a
handful of specialists around the
world today remember Roholm for his "great and lasting" study of fluoride toxicity, he was also a pio
neer in the use of biopsy samples
to study the human liver, an expert in infectious and occupational diseases, and a tireless advocate for public
health.' He was interested in
everything, said Brun. https://www.blogger.com/null 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
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