CHAPTER
TWO babies. When
the scientists gave fluoride to the baby rats following their birth, the animals had cognitive
deficits, and exhibited retarded behavior. There were sex differences, too. Males appeared more
sensitive to fluoride in the womb;
females were more affected when exposed as weanlings or young adults. The two women told Jack Hein and Harold Hodge about
the results. The men ordered them
to repeat the experiments, this time on different rats. The team performed still more tests.
Mullenix remembers that Harold Hodge
kept asking her about the results, even though he was by now very ill.
He had gone to his home in Maine
but kept in contact by telephone. He asked every day. https://www.blogger.com/null By 1990 the data were crystal clear.
The women had tested more than five
hundred rats. "I finally said we have got enough animals here for statistical significance, said
Mullenix. There is a problem," she added. The two women talked endlessly
about what they had found. Mullenix
was a newcomer to fluoride research, but Pamela Den-Besten had spent
her career studying the chemical.
She suspected that they had made an
explosive discovery and that dentists in particular would find the information important. My initial gut
reaction was that this is really big,
said DenBesten. Although the Forsyth rats had been given fluoride at
a higher concentration than people
normally drink in their water — an
equivalent of 5 parts per million as opposed to 1 part per million — DenBesten also knew that many
Americans are routinely exposed to
higher levels of fluoride every day. For example, people who drink large amounts of water, such as athletes or
laborers in the hot sun; people who
consume certain foods or juices with high fluoride levels; children who
use fluoride supplements from
their dentists; some factory workers, as the result of workplace exposure; or certain sick people, all
can end up consuming higher
cumulative levels of fluoride. Those levels of consumption begin to approach — or can even surpass, for
some groups — the same fluoride
levels seen in the Forsyth rats.
"If you have someone who has a medical condition, where they
have diabetes insipidus where you
drink lots of water, or kidney
disease — anything that would alter how you process fluoride — then you could climb up to those levels, said
DenBesten. She thought that the
Forsyth research results would quickly be followed up by FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH
13 a whole
series of additional experiments examining, for example, whether fluoride at even lower levels, 1 part
per million, produced
central-nervous-system effects. "I assumed it would take off on its
own, that a lot of people would be
very concerned, she added.
Jack Hein was excited as well, remembers Mullenix. (Harold Hodge
had died before she could get the
final results to him.)' Hein said, I want you to go to Washington, Mullenix said. Go to the National
Institute of Dental Research and
give them a seminar. Tell them what you are finding. Jack Hein knew that if more research on the toxicity
of low-dose fluoride was to be
done, the government's National Institutes of Health and the U. S. Public Health Service needed
to be involved. THE
CAMPUS-STYLE GROUNDS of the federal National Institutes of Health (NIH), just north of Washington
DC, have the leafy spaciousness of
an Ivy League college. White-coated scientists and government bureaucrats in suits and ties stroll
the tree-lined walkways that connect
laboratories with office buildings. This is the headquarters of the
U.S. governments efforts to
coordinate health research around the country, with an annual budget of $23.4 billion forked out by US
taxpayers. 2 The campus is the
home of the different NIH divisions, such as the National Cancer Institute and the National Institute of
Dental Research (NIDR), as it was
then known. (Today it is known as the National Institute of Dental
and Craniofacial Research.) On October to, 1990, Phyllis
Mullenix and Jack Hein arrived at the NIH
campus to tell senior government scientists and policy makers about
her fluoride research. As director
of the nation's leading private dental-research institute, Jack Hein was well-known and respected at NIH. He
had helped to arrange the Mullenix
lecture. Mullenix was no stranger to public-health officials either. One of the Institutes' biggest divisions,
the National Cancer Institute, had
awarded her a grant that same year totaling over $600,000. The money was for a study to
investigate the neurotoxic effects of some of the drugs and therapies used in treating childhood leukemia.
Many of those drugs and radiation
therapies can slow the leukemia but are so powerful that they often produce central-nervous-system effects and
can retard childhood intelligence.
The government
14
CHAPTER TWO
wanted Mullenix to use her new RAPID computer technology at Forsyth to measure the neurotoxicity of these
drugs. To present her
fluoride data, Mullenix and Hein had flown from Boston, arriving a little early. Hein met up
with some old friends from NIDR, while
Mullenix strolled into the main hospital building on the Bethesda
campus, killing time before her
seminar. In the hallway, the scientist started to giggle. On the wall was a colorful posterboard display,
recently mounted by NIH officials,
titled The Miracle of Fluoride.
"I thought how odd," remembered Mullenix. "It's 1990 and
they are talking about the miracle
of fluoride, and now I'm going to tell them that their fluoride is causing a neurotoxicity that is worse than
that induced by some cases of
amphetamines or radiation. I'm here to tell them that fluoride is neurotoxic." She read on. Ironically, her trip
to Washington fell on the historic
fortieth anniversary of the Public Health Service's endorsement of community water fluoridation. Mullenix
knew little about fluoride's history.
The chemical had long been the great white hope of the NIDR, once promising to vanquish blackened teeth
in much the same way that
antibiotics had been a magic bullet for doctors in the second half of
the twentieth century, beating
back disease and infection.
Terrible teeth had stalked the developed world since the industrial revolution, when the whole -grain and
fiber diet of an earlier agrarian era
was often replaced by a poorer urban fare, including increased
quantities of refined
carbohydrates and sugars.' Cavities are produced when bacteria in the mouth ferment such sugars and
carbohydrates, attacking tooth enamel,
with the resulting acid penetrating into the tooth's core. Hope of a
simple fix for bad teeth arrived
in the 1930s, when a Public Health Service dental researcher named Dr. H. Trendley Dean reported finding fewer
dental cavities in some parts of
the United States, where there is natural fluoride in the water supply. Dean's studies became the scientific
underpinning for artificial water
fluoridation, which was begun in the 1940s and 1950s. Dean also became the first head of the NIDR. By the 1960s
and 1970s, with rates of tooth
decay in free fall across the United States, dental officials pointed a proud finger at the fluoride
added to water and toothpaste. NIDR
officials revered H. Trendley Dean as the father of fluoridation." FIREWORKS AT
FORSYTH 15 "It was a major
discovery by the Institute, said Jack Hein. But opposition to fluoridation had been intense from
the start. The postwar decline in
rates of dental decay in developed nations had also occurred in communities where fluoride was not added to
drinking water and had begun in
some cases before the arrival of fluoride
toothpaste.' Widespread use of antibiotics, better nutrition,
improved oral hygiene, and
increased access to dental care were also cited as reasons. And while medical and scientific resistance to
fluoridation had been fierce and
well-argued — the grassroots popular opposition was in many ways a precursor of todays environmental movement — Mullenix found the NIH's
posterboard account of
antifluoridation history to be oddly scornful. "They made a joke
about antifluoridationists all
being little old ladies in tennis shoes," she said. "That stuck in my mind." Since Deans day laboratory
studies have forced a revolution in
official thinking about how fluoride works.' While early
researchers speculated that
swallowed fluoride was incorporated "systemi-cally" into tooth enamel even before the tooth
erupted in a child's mouth —
making it more resistant to decay — scientists now believe that fluoride acts almost exclusively
from outside the tooth, or "topi-
cally" (such a "topical" effect has always been the
explanation for how fluoride
toothpaste functions, too). This new research says that fluoride defends teeth by slowing the
harmful "demineralization" of
calcium and phosphate from tooth enamel, which can leave teeth vulnerable to cavities. Fluoride also
helps to remineralize enamel by
laying down fresh crystal layers of calcium and a durable fluoride compound known as fluorapatite. And
there is a third "killer" effect, in which the acid produced from fermenting food combines with
fluoride, forming hydrogen
fluoride (HF). This powerful chemical can then penetrate cell membranes, interfering with enzyme activity,
and rendering bad bacteria
impotent.' I still believe
that fluoride works, says the Canadian dental researcher turned critic of water fluoridation, Dr. Hardy
Limeback. It works topically. But these new ideas have not
quenched the old debate. Dental
officials now argue that water fluoridation produces a lifelong
benefit not just for children; by
bathing all teeth in water, officials argue, fluoride is continually repairing and protecting tooth
enamel in
16
CHAPTER TWO
teeth of all ages. Critics worry, however, that if hydrogen fluoride
can inhibit bacteria enzymes in
the mouth, then swallowing fluoride may
unintentionally deliver similar killer blows to necessary bodily
enzymes, thus also inhibiting the
ones we need.' Phyllis
Mullenix, reading the NIH fluoride posters and preparing to give her speech on that fall day in
1990, knew almost nothing of the history
of controversy surrounding fluoride. She was about to walk into the lion
s den. She was stunned when she
entered the lecture hall at the National
Institutes of Health. It was packed. There were officials from the Food
and Drug Administration. She
spotted the head of the National Institute of Dental Research, Dr. Harald Loe, and she noticed men in
uniform from the Public Health
Service. The lights dimmed.
Mullenix told them about the new RAPID
computer technology at Forsyth. At first the audience seemed
excited. Then she outlined her
fluoride experiment. She explained that the central-nervous-system effects seen in the rats resembled
the injuries seen when rats were
given powerful antileukemia drugs and radiation therapies. The pattern of central-nervous-system
effects on the rats from fluoride
matched perfectly, she said.
The room fell suddenly quiet. She attempted a joke. I said, I may be a little old lady, but I m not wearing
tennis shoes, she remembers. Nobody
was laughing. In fact, they were really kind of nasty. The big guns from the NIH opened up.
Hands shot into the air. They
started firing question after question, attacking me with respect to
the methodology," remembered
Mullenix. She answered their ques tions
patiently, and finally, when there were no more hands in the air, she
and Jack Hein climbed into a cab
and headed for the airport. Jack Hein is
reluctant to discuss these long-ago events. It was a messy ending to
his career. He retired from
Forsyth the following year, in 1991. He agrees that the Mullenix fluoride results were unpopular but adds that
data showing fluoride damage to
the central nervous system should have been "vigorously" followed up. " That perspective
had never been looked at
before," he remarks. "It turned out there was something there.
Hein believes that getting the
NIDR and the government to change their position on fluoride, however, is a difficult task. Many senior
public-health officials have
devoted their professional careers to promoting fluoride. NIDR really fought hard showing that fluoride was
effective, Hein says.
FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH
17
"It was a major discovery by the Institute. They did everything
they could to promote it. " Hein made a final effort to sound
a warning on fluoride. He told
Mullenix that he was going to call a meeting of industry officials whose products contained fluoride. Like
Mullenix, Hein had spent a career
cultivating ties with various large-scale industries. He sent her a note listing the people who are
coming for a private Fluoride
Toxicity conference that would be held in his Forsyth office. He said, NIDR were being stupid, the
industries will respond better,
Mullenix recalls.
Several months after the Washington seminar, Phyllis Mullenix sat at the table in Jack Hein s office
with representatives from three of
the worlds most powerful drug companies: Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, and SmithKline
Beecham. Anthony Volpe,
Colgate-Palmolive s Worldwide Director of Clinical Dental Research, was there, and so was Sal Mazzanobile,
Director of Oral Health Research
for Beecham. The senior scientist Joe Kanapka was sent by the big transnational company
Unilever. Mullenix outlined
her fluoride findings. The men took notes. Suddenly Joe Kanapka of Unilever leaned back in his chair
with an exasperated look. "He
said, Do you realize what you are saying to us, that our fluoride products are lowering the IQ of
children? remembers Mullenix. And
I said, Well yes, that is what I am saying to you.'" As they left, the men "slapped me on the
back," Mullenix said, telling
her, "We will be in touch, we need to pursue this." The next day a note from Jack
Hein's office arrived with the tele-
phone numbers of the industry men, so that she could follow up. "I
did call them," says
Mullenix. "And I called. And the weeks went by and the months went by." Eventually
Joe Kanapka from Unilever called
back, she remembers. "He says, V I gave it to my superiors and
they haven t gotten back to
me. Contacted recently, Joe
Kanapka said that he had visited Forsyth
many times" but had no memory of the fluoride conference. When asked if he had once worried that his
products might be hurting
children's intelligence, he replied, "Oh God, I don't remember any- thing like that, Im sorry. He explained
that open-heart surgery had
temporarily impaired his memory. I dont remember who Mullenix is," he added. 18 CHAPTER TWO Beechams Sal
Mazzanobile remembers the meeting. The fluoride data presented that day were preliminary, he recalled. Mullenix
never called him again, he claims,
and he therefore presumed her data were inaccurate. I cant see why, if somebody had data like that, they would
not follow up with another study
in a larger animal model, maybe then go into humans, he said. It could be a major health problem. Did the director of consumer
brands at Beecham — makers of several
fluoride products — call Mullenix himself or find out if her data were
ever published? "I wasn't the
person responsible to follow up, if there was a follow-up," Mazzanobile answered. He did not remember
who at Beecham, if anybody, might
have had responsibility for keeping apprised of the Mullenix research. Procter and Gamble followed up on Mullenix's warning.
They flew her out to their Miami
Valley laboratories in Cincinnati. Mullenix flew home with a contract and some seed money to begin a study to look
at the effects of fluoride on
children s intelligence. Shortly afterward, however, "they pulled out and I never heard from them
again, recalls Mullenix. In
1995 Mullenix and her team published their data in the scientific journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.
Their paper explained that, while
a great deal of research had already been done on fluoride, almost none
had looked at fluorides effects on
the brain. And while earlier research had
suggested that fluoride did not cross the crucial blood brain barrier,
thus protecting the central
nervous system, Mullenix's findings now revealed that "such impermeability does not apply to chronic
exposure situations." 9
When the baby rats drank water with added fluoride, the scientists
had measured increased fluoride
levels in the brain. And more fluoride in the brain was associated with "significant behavioral
changes" in the young rats,
which resembled "cognitive deficits," the scientists reported.
The paper also suggested that when
the fluoride was given to pregnant rats, it reached the brain of the fetus, thus producing an effect
resembling hyperactivity in the
male newborns. The Mullenix
research eventually caught the attention of another team of Boston scientists studying
central-nervous-system problems. They
produced a report in 2000 reviewing whether toxic chemicals had a role
in producing what they described
as an epidemic
FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 19 of developmental, learning and behavioral
disabilities in children. Their
report considered the role of fluoride, and focused on the Mullenix research in particular. In
Harms Way — Toxic Threats to Child
Development by the Greater Boston chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility described how 12
million children (17 percent) in
the United States suffer from one or more learning, developmental, or behavioral disabilities."
Attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) affects 3 to 6 percent of all school-children,
although recent evidence suggests
the prevalence may be much higher, the scientists noted. Not enough is known about fluoride to link it
directly to ADHD or other health
effects, the report pointed out. Nevertheless, the existing research on fluoride and its central-nervous-system
effects were " provocative
and of significant public health concern," the team concluded. The Mullenix research surprised one of the authors of
the report, Dr. Ted Schettler. He
had previously known almost nothing about fluoride. It hadnt been on my radar screen, he said. Most startling
was how few studies had been done
on fluorides central-ner vous-system effects. Schettler turned up just two other reports, both from China,
suggesting that fluoride in water
supplies had reduced IQ in some villages. That just strikes me as unbelievable quite frankly," he
said. "How this has come to
pass is extraordinary. That for forty years we have been putting fluoride into the nations water
supplies — and how little we know
about [what] its neurological developmental impacts are.... We damn well ought to know more about it
than we do." Does
Mullenix s work have any relevance to children? Schettler does not know. Comparing animal studies
to humans is an uncertain science,
he explained. Nor was Schettler familiar with Mullenix's computer testing system. But the toxic
characteristics and behavior of
other chemicals and metals, such as lead and mercury, concern him. For those pollutants, at least,
human sensitivity is much greater
than in animal experiments; among humans, it is greater in children than in adults. The impact of other
toxic chemicals on the developing
brain is often serious and irreversible. So is the Mullenix work worth anything? I don t know
the answer to that,"
Schettler said. "But what I do draw from it is that it is quite plausible from her work and others that
fluoride inter-
20
CHAPTER TWO
feres with normal brain development, and that we better go out to get
the answers to this in human
populations. The burden of
testing for neurological effects falls on the Public Health Service, which has promoted water
fluoridations role in dental health for
half a century. Whenever anybody or any organization attempts a
public health intervention, there
is an obligation to monitor emerging science on the issue — and also continue to monitor impacts in the
communities where the intervention
is instituted. So that when new data comes along that says, Whoa, this is interesting, here is a
health effect that we hadnt thought
about,' we better have a look at this to make sure our decision is still
a good one, Schettler said. Phyllis Mullenix says that she
carried the ball just about as far as she
could. Following the seminar at NIH, Harald Loe, the director of
the National Institute of Dental
Research, had written to Forsyth's director Jack Hein on October 23, 1990, thanking him and Mullenix for
their visit and confirming
"the potential significance of work in this area." He asked Mullenix to submit additional requests
for funding. "NIDR would be
pleased to support development of such an innovative methodology
which could have broad
significance for protecting health," Loe wrote. 10 "I was very excited about
that," said Mullenix. "I took their suggestions in the letter. [However] every one of
them ended up in a dead end.'
Mullenix now believes that the 1990 letter was a cruel ruse — to cover
up the fact that the NIH had no
interest in learning about fluoride's potential central-nervous-system effects. "What they put in
writing they had no intentions [of
funding]. It took years to figure that out," she says. Dr. Antonio Noronha, an NIH
scientific -review adviser familiar with Dr. Mullenix's grant request, says a scientific peer-review
group rejected her proposal. He
terms her claim of institutional bias against fluoride central-nervous-system research
"farfetched." He adds, We strive very hard at NIH to make sure politics does not enter the
picture.'" But fourteen
years after Mullenix s Washington seminar the NIH still has not funded any examination of
fluoride's central-nervous-system
effects and, according to one senior official, does not currently
regard fluoride and
central-nervous-system effects as a FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 21 research priority. No, it
certainly isnt, said Annette Kirshner, a
neurotoxicology specialist with the National Institute of
Environmental Health Studies (NIEHS).
Dr. Kirshner confirmed that although our
mission is to look into the effects of toxins [and] adverse
environmental exposures on human
health, she could recall no grants being given to study the central-nervous-system effects of
fluoride. "We'd had one or two grants in the past on sodium fluoride, but in my time they've not
been neuro grants, and I've been
at this institute about thirteen and a half years." Does NIEHS have plans to conduct such
research? "We do not and I doubt if the other Institutes intend to," said Dr. Kirshner by
e-mail. Nor do the
governments dental experts plan on studying fluorides central-nervous-system effects any time soon. In an e-mail
sent to me on July 19, 2002, Dr.
Robert H. Selwitz of the same agency wrote that he was "not aware of any follow-up
studies" nor were the potential CNS effects of fluoride "a topic of primary focus" for government
grant givers. Dr. Selwitz is the
Senior Dental Epidemiologist and Director of the Residency Program in Dental Public Health,
National Institute of Dental and
Craniofacial Research, NIH. At first he appeared to suggest that
the Mullenix study had little
relevance for human beings, telling me that her rats were "fed fluoride at levels as high as 175 times
the concentration found in
fluoridated drinking water.
But his statement was subtly misleading. Rats and humans have very different metabolisms, and in
laboratory experiments these differences
must be compensated for. The critical measurement in studying effects
on the central nervous system is
not how much fluoride is given to the
laboratory animals but how much of the chemical, after they drink
it, subsequently appears in the
animals blood. The amount of fluoride in the blood of the Mullenix rats — a measurement known as the
blood serum level — had been the
equivalent of what would appear in the blood of a human drinking about 5 parts per million of fluoride in
water. This, of course, is just
five times the level the government suggests is optimal for fluoridated water- 1 ppm. I asked Dr.
Selwitz, therefore, if it was fair to
portray the Mullenix rats as having drunk 175 times the amount of fluoride that citizens normally consume
from fluoridated water.
22
CHAPTER TWO
Wasn't the "blood serum" measurement and comparison more
relevant? Wasn't his statement,
inadvertently at least, misleading?
Dr. Selwitz, who had just been ready to dispense medical arguments and implied reassurances as to why
Mullenix's research was not relevant
to human beings, now explained that he could not answer my
question. "The questions you
are asking in your recent e-mail message involve the field of fluoride physiology," wrote the senior dental
epidemiologist at NIDCR.
"This subject is not my area of expertise." FAR FROM USHERING in new opportunities for scientific
research, Mullenixs fluoride
studies appear to have spelled the death knell for her once-promising academic career. When
Jack Hein retired from Forsyth on
June 30, 1991, the date marked the beginning of a very different
work environment for Phyllis
Mullenix. She gave a seminar at Forsyth on February 20, 1992, outlining what she had discovered and
explaining that she hoped to
publish a major paper about fluoride toxicity with Pamela DenBesten. "That's when my
troubles started," said Mullenix. Pam DenBesten had been worried about the Boston seminar.
Senior researchers at Forsyth,
such as Paul DePaola, had published favorable research on fluoride since the 196os. The seminar was "
ugly," says Mullenix.
DenBesten describes the scientists' response as "angry" and "sarcastic." "She was
risking their reputation with NIH," DenBesten explains.
Karen Snapp remembers "hostile" questioning of Mullenix by the
audience. "They looked upon
Phylliss research as a threat. The dental business in this country is focused on fluoride. They
felt that funding would dry up. We are
supposed to be saying that fluoride is good for you, whereas somebody
is saying maybe it is not good for
you. ... In their own little minds, they were worried about that." The following day Forsyth's
associate director, Don Hay,
approached Mullenix. "He said, 'You are going against what the dentists and everybody have been
publishing for fifty years, that this is safe and effective. You must be wrong,'" Mullenix recalled.
"He told me, You are
jeopardizing the financial support of this entire institution. If you publish these studies, NIDR is not
going to fund any more research at
Forsyth.
FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH 23 Karen Snapp also remembers Don Hay as
opposing publication of the paper.
"He didn't believe the science. He didn't believe the results — and he did not think the
paper should go out." Both Snapp
and Mullenix were concerned that somehow Don Hay would prevent the paper from being published. "I
think we were even laughing about
it, saying I think in America we have something called freedom of
the press, freedom of speech?"
Snapp recalls. Don Hay calls
allegations that he considered suppressing the Mullenix research "false." He told Salon.com:
"My concern was that Dr.
Mullenix, who had no published record in fluoride research, was reaching conclusions that seemed to
differ from a large body of
research reported over the last fifty years. We had no knowledge of the acceptance of her paper prior to
the time she left [Forsyth] ."
Editor Donald E. Hutchings of Neurotoxicology and Teratology, where the Mullenix paper was published,
says that there was no effort to
censor or pressure him in any way. Her study was first "peer -reviewed" by other scientists,
revised, and then accepted. "Was I
called and told that 'If you publish this we are going to review your income taxes, [or] send you a picture
of J. Edgar Hoover in a dress?'
No," he said. Hutchings was a little bemused, however, to get such
a critical paper on fluoride from
a Forsyth researcher. He knew that
Forsyth had long been a leading supporter of a role for fluoride in dentistry. "It almost strikes me
like you are working in a distillery and
you are doing work studying fetal alcohol syndrome. That is not
work that they are going to be
eager to be sponsoring. I didn't care — it wasn't my career. I thought it was really courageous of her
to be doing that." On May 18,1994 — Just days after
the paper had been accepted —
Forsyth fired Mullenix. The termination letter merely stated that
her contract would not be renewed.
There was no mention of fluoride. A
new regime was now installed at the Center. The toxicology department was closed, and a new Board
of Overseers had been established,
with the mission "to advise the Director in matters dealing with industrial
relationships." 14
Mullenix describes the final couple of months at Forsyth as the lowest ebb in her career. The big grant
from the National Cancer Institute
had dried up and her laboratory conditions were horrible, she said. "The roof leaked, they
destroyed the equipment, they 24 CHAPTER TWO destroyed the animals. That was the lowest
point, right before I physi cally
moved out in July 1994. Nobody would even talk to me. Her mother remembers Phyllis
calling frequently that summer. She was
very upset about it, said Olive Mullenix. At first she wondered if
her daughter had done something
wrong. Phyllis explained that her fluoride research had been unpopular. There was no use to get angry,
said Olive Mullenix. She was
honest about what she found and they didn't like it." Stata Norton got calls too from
her former student. Norton was not
surprised at the hostile response from Forsyth. She knew that clean
data can attract dirty politics.
There are situations in which people don't want data challenged, they don't want arguments," said
Norton. The implications of
Mullenix s work have been buried, according to her former colleague, the scientist Karen Snapp. Is it fair to
say that we don't know the answer
to the central-nervous-system effects of the fluoride we currently ingest? I think that Phyllis
got just the tip of the iceberg. There
needs to be more work in that area, Snapp said. Jack Hein wishes that he had
approached things differently. He knew
that the scientific landscape of the last fifty years was littered with
the bodies of a lot of people who,
like Phyllis Mullenix, got tangled up in the fluoride controversy. His team should have tested other
dental materials before tackling
fluoride, said Hein. It would have been better if we had done mercury and then fluoride," he said. Less controversial. It would have made no difference,
believes Mullenix. Nor does she
believe another scientist would have been treated differently. She
had stellar academic credentials,
powerful industry contacts, and hard scientific data about a common chemical. "That is the sad part of
it," she said. "I
thought I had the people back then. I thought you could reason one
scientist to another. I don't know
that there is anything I could have done differently, without just burying the information." Mullenix no longer works as a
research scientist. Since her fluoride
discovery at Forsyth a decade ago, she has received no funding or
research grants. "I liked
studying rats," she said. "I probably would have continued working with the animals my entire
life. Now, she added, I dont think I
will ever get to work in a laboratory again. FIREWORKS AT FORSYTH Jack Hein and Pamela
DenBesten knew about fluorides bizarre
undertow, one that could pull and snatch at even the most
established scientist, and they
were able to swim free from the Forsyth shipwreck But Mullenix was dragged down by a tide that no one warned her
about. "I didnt understand
the depth, she said. And to me, in my training, you pay no attention to that. The data are the
data and you report them and you
publish and you go from there. Mullenix is disappointed at the response of her fellow
scientists. Jack Hein walked off
into the sunset of retirement. Most of her former colleagues were reluctant to support her call for more
research on fluoride, she said.
Instead of saying maybe scientifically we should take another look, everybody took cover, they all
dove into the bushes and wouldn't
have anything to do with me."
Olive Mullenix did not raise her daughter that way. You cant just
walk away from something like
this, Phyllis Mullenix said. I mean, they had to find out that thalidomide was wrong and change. Why should
fluoride be any different? "A Spooky Feeling" ONE HOT JULY evening in 1995 the
phone rang. Dr. Phyllis Mulle-nix
was in her office, upstairs in her Andover, Massachusetts, home.
Scientific papers were strewn on
the floor. She had been depressed. Her firing from Forsyth the previous summer had hit the family hard. Her
daughters were applying to college
; she and her husband, Rick, were quarreling about money.
She lifted the receiver. A big bass voice boomed an apology from
New York City for calling so late.
Mullenix did not recognize the speaker. She settled back into her favorite white leather armchair. Joel
Griffiths explained that he was a
medical writer in Manhattan. He had a request. Would Mullenix look at some old documents he had discovered
in a U.S. government archive? The
papers were from the files of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project, the once supersecret scientific
organization that had built the worlds
first atomic bomb. Mullenix
rolled her eyes. It was late. Rick, now an air traffic controller, was trying to sleep in the next room.
The atom bomb, Mul-lenix thought!
What on earth did that have to do with fluoride? 26 CHAPTER TWO Mullenixs own
patience was growing thin. Since her research had become public, she had been bombarded with phone calls and
letters from antifluoride
activists. Some of the callers had been battling water fluoridation since the 1950s.
Late-night radio talk shows were especially hungry to speak with the Harvard scientist who thought that
fluoride was dangerous. They
called her at three or four in the morning from across the country and overseas. Usually
"there was no thank you note, and you never heard from them again," Mullenix said. The New York reporter dropped a
bombshell. Dr. Harold Hodge,
Mullenixs old laboratory colleague, was described in the documents as
the Manhattan Projects chief
medical expert on fluoride, Griffiths told her. Workers and families living near atomic-bomb factories
during the war had been poisoned
by fluoride, according to the documents, and Harold Hodge had investigated. Mullenix felt a sudden "spooky" feeling. She
shifted in her chair. Harold Hodge
was now dead, but as the journalist continued, Mullenix cast her mind back to the days in her
Forsyth laboratory with the kind old
gentleman, the grandfatherly figure who had some-times played with
her children. "All he did was ask
questions," she told Griffiths. "He would sit there and he would nod his head, and he would
say, You don't say, you don't say.
Once, Mullenix recalled, as Hodge watched her experiments, he had
briefly mentioned working for the
Manhattan Project. But he had never said that fluoride had anything to do with nuclear weapons — or that
he had once measured the toxic
effects of fluoride on atomic-bomb workers. Yes, Mullenix told the journalist, she wanted to see the
documents. Some days later a
colleague of Griffiths s arrived at the Mullenix home. Clifford Honicker handed her a thick
folder of documents. Honicker was
part of a small group of researchers and reporters who had unearthed
many of the ghoulish medical
secrets of the Manhat tan Project and the Atomic Energy Commission. Those secrets had included details about
scores of shocking cold-war human
radiation experiments on hospital patients, prisoners, pregnant women, and retarded children. For years the media had ignored
the information about human
experimentation that Honicker and others were discovering. Finally, FIREWORKS AT
FORSYTH 27 in 1995, an
investigative journalist named Eileen Welsome had won a Pulitzer Prize for revealing how
atomic-bomb-program doctors had
injected plutonium into hospital patients in Tennessee and New
York. She uncovered the names of
the long-ago victims. Harold Hodge had
planned and supervised many of those experiments, the documents showed. President Bill Clinton ordered
an investigation. His energy
secretary, Hazel O'Leary, began a new policy of openness. And Honicker and others had gained access
to newly declassified cold- war
documents — including much of the new information on fluoride. That night, after Honicker left,
Mullenix settled in her chair and
began to read. Her face drained as she read one memo in particular. The fifty-year-old document mentioned
Harold Hodge — and dis- cussed
fluorides effects on the brain and central nervous system. It was the same work she had done at the
Forsyth Dental Center.
"I went white. I was outraged," said Mullenix. "I was
hollering and pacing the floor. He
wrote this memo saying that he knew
fluoride would affect the central nervous system!" The central-nervous-system memo —
stamped "secret" — is
addressed to the head of the Manhattan Projects Medical Section, Colonel Stafford Warren, and dated
April 29, 1944 It is a request to
conduct animal experiments to measure the central-nervous-system effects of fluoride. Dr. Harold Hodge
wrote the research proposal.
"Clinical evidence suggests that uranium hexafluoride may have
a rather marked central nervous
system effect. ... It seems most likely
that the F [code for fluoride] component rather than the T [code
for uranium] is the causative
factor," states the memo. 15
A light flashed on for Mullenix. At the time, in 1996, she was
still sending grant requests to
the National Institutes of Health in
Washington, DC, asking to continue her studies on fluoride's central-nervous-system effects. A panel
of NIH scientists had turned down
the application, flatly telling her, "Fluoride does not have central nervous system effects."
Mullenix realized the absurdity of
what she had been doing. Harold Hodge and the government had sus- pected fluorides toxic effects on the
human central nervous system for
half a century. She read on.
The 1944 memo explained why research on fluorid e's central-nervous-system effects was vital to the United
States' 28 CHAPTER Two war effort. Since
work with these compounds is essential, it will be necessary to know in advance what mental effects may occur
after exposure. . . . This is
important not only to protect a given individual, but also to prevent a confused workman from injuring others by
improperly performing his
duties. All of a sudden it
dawned on me, said Mullenix. Harold Hodge, back in the 1940s, had asked the military to do a study that I
had done at Forsyth.... Hodge knew
this fifty years ago. Why didnt he tell me what he was interested in? Why didnt he say to me, This stuff, I
know, is a neurotoxin?'" All
he did was ask questions, and he would sit there and he would nod his head and he would say,
You dont say, you dont say. He
never once said, I know it is a neuro-toxin, I know it causes
confusion, lassitude, and drowsiness. Today Mullenix calls Harold Hodge
a monster for his human-radiation
experiments. In retrospect she compares sharing a laboratory with him
with being in a movie theater,
sharing popcorn with the Boston Strangler. Had the two Rochester alumni — Jack Hein and Harold
Hodge — manipulated the
toxicologist to perform the fluoride studies that Hodge had proposed fifty years earlier, she
wondered. Did they let Mullenix take the
fall when her experiments proved what Hodge had already suspected?
At first, Mullenix had shown no
interest in studying fluoride, she remembered. It seems strange that a neuro-toxicology person was brought
into a dental institution to look
at fluoride, Mullenix said. I felt that I had really been lied to, or led along," she added,
"used like a little puppet." Mullenix called up Jack Hein. He denied knowing
anything about Harold Hodges
long-ago Manhattan Project fears that fluoride was a neurotoxin, she said. And instead, he offered to pass the
explosive information on to the
government, telling Mullenix, Shouldnt you tell the NIDR — do you want me to help you take it to the NIDR? (Hein
may have known far more than he
told Mullenix, however. In a 1997 interview with the United Kingdoms Channel Four television, he disclosed
that one of the primary concerns
of Manhattan Project toxicologists had been fluorides effects on the central nervous system.)" The next day Dr. Mullenix called
the head of the National Institute of
Dental Research, Dr. Harold Slavkin. She hoped the nations top FIREWORKS AT
FORSYTH 29 dental officer would
be concerned about the wartime memo. Instead, she remembers, He got very nasty about it. He basically
pushed me off, like I was some
kind of a crackpot. She thought that NIDR would be interested in the memos, that the institute would want to
read them. But he treated her as
if she were some kind of a whacko, she recalls. She put the telephone down and a terrible truth dawned on
her. The public guardians at the
National Institutes of Health, like Harold Hodge, also had a double identity. It seemed they, too, were
keepers of cold war
national-security secrets — bureaucratic sentries at the portcullis of the nuclear-industrial
state. Opposite
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