A lesson learned from AMERICAN POISON: A DEADLY INVENTION AND THE WOMAN WHO BATTLED FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, by Daniel Stone

 

Science must be believed over the promise of progress and profits.

          I have no doubt that our current era of technological advancement is very much based on the concept of “can we?,” not “should we?”. Our world is rushing head-long into embracing the concepts that AI and digitizing our existence can be nothing but positive developments that bring great progress for humanity, and the faster we can pull these changes off the better off we’ll be. Suffice to say, I have found the world’s enthusiasm for these ideas to be bizarre and a massive risk, and I have become an old man yelling at the clouds demanding that we slow down and think about what we are doing as a species. Outdated I may be, yet I found Daniel Stone’s excellent new book American Poison to be a gripping and fascinating read, as Stone recounts the story of how the world embraced the revolutionary technology of leaded gasoline, and did so while ignoring the warnings of the scientist Alice Hamilton, who saw a growing global cataclysm that people were determined to ignore in the name of progress and profits.

            Hamilton was a likeable protagonist who was an all-too-familiar type to those who continue to watch such people be sidelined today—a brilliant, hard-working, soft-spoken woman, who was perfectly happy being alone in her research and was deeply uncomfortable with having to speak truth to power, while knowing she had too because the scientific truths she uncovered simply could not be denied. That made her an enemy of the famous scientist Thomas Midgely, who began his infamous crusade with the original noble goal of trying to figure out how to make automobile gasoline more efficient and less destructive; after much experimentation and ingenuity, he discovered that adding lead components to gasoline seemed to fix just about all of its problems just as the world was developing an insatiable thirst for it. Midgely quickly patented leaded gasoline, and energy companies began to make a fortune adding it to the world’s gas stations throughout the 1920’s.

            This seemingly miraculous new technology quickly showed dark hints of its dangerous nature, as multiple workers processing the leaded material suffered from horrific poisonings. Conducting her own experiments, Hamilton and her scientific allies began to worry that no amount of daily lead exposure was safe, and feared that millions of cars around the world spewing leaded gasoline into the atmosphere was a massive scientific experiment with potentially disastrous consequences. They urged government officials to put the brakes on the approval of leaded gasoline, pointing out that proper testing of its safety would need massive experiments that took years of painstaking research. That reality worked against them in the government’s hearings on the topic, as the corporate-friendly Coolidge Administration became convinced that Midgely and his business associates should not have to wait that long to promote their miraculous new technology and reap their fortunes from it. Ultimately, the government approved of leaded gasoline with only a cursory investigation, and Hamilton spent the rest of her long life lamenting that humans cared so little for the planet’s long-term health. Of course, Hamilton’s warnings proved stunningly correct when scientists made the grim discoveries in the 1960’s that: no amount of lead ingestion could ever be good for someone’s health; and, that lead had leached into the atmosphere, water supply, and ground of the planet, poisoning entire generations and possibly negatively affecting their physical and mental health.

            Stone’s book is a well-written and accessible work that is both a tragic true historical drama, and a tribute to the bold work of Hamilton and her colleagues in trying to stand up to the might of “progress and profits trump everything” philosophy of 1920’s corporate America (and still very much believed by many people today). The world would be much better off agreeing to take a breather before jumping toward every new supposed innovation, and doing the necessary science and taking the time to properly understand the consequences of these supposedly wondrous new technologies.

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