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