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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