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 Sides of the Atlantic
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