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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