Poor spelling may be the result of some chemically induced IQ loss
It starts with an anecdote.
I usually fly out of Salt Lake City, so that means Delta Airlines but recently I took a series of cross-country flights on Southwest. It was cheaper, and there were reasons. Don’t get me wrong, the flights were on on time, baggage was free, FA’s were professional and charming. But Southwest’s low cost business model does not assign seats, there’s only an honor system boarding order and so determining who sits where is crowd sourced as a general bone of contention. Just about every flight I took had some sort of ugly dispute between folks who were saving seats for those boarding later (in some cases entire rows) and those who wanted to sit in said saved seats. It seemed the airline’s policy was to instruct staff to turn a blind eye to all this unless the altercations turned physical. Which on one flight it did.
I couldn’t help but notice all the combatants in this contest of wills and sometimes fists were older folks like myself. In their 50s or 60s, certainly experienced enough in life to understand basic social contracts. Like not punching someone over bin space. And it got me thinking about all the other recent public outbursts of aggression and anger I’ve been witnessing in public lately. At first I attributed it to our hiatus from social interaction due to COVID-19 or perhaps the general coarsening of personal expression as encouraged by the example of our recent ex-President. But upon introspection, I saw that many folks like myself, who genuinely loathe Trump, have felt more belligerent lately, far less tolerant of friends and neighbors who disagree with us and it seemed that this phenomenon was over-represented by my age group.
What gives? Could there be some scientific basis for the increasing lack of emotional self-control among my fellow senior citizens? Is “OK Boomer” a reflection of something more relevant than youthful snark?
I’m part of a Leaded Generation. Growing up, we lived in homes and played with toys slathered with lead paint, used cosmetics and medicines dosed with the stuff, drank and bathed with water delivered through leaded pipes and fixtures. But by far our greatest exposure to lead came from gasoline sold with tetraethyl lead as a practically universal additive. Leaded gas profiteers poisoned our planet at massive scale and have since provided a shining model for the tobacco, asbestos, pesticide, firearms and fossil fuel industries, among other corporate bad actors, for evading obvious evidence that their products are harmful by cloaking themselves within a politicized mantle of self-righteous scientific uncertainty. All in the name of monetary gains. All at the great expense of human life and health.
During the peak era of leaded gasoline in the United States, which ran from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the average blood–lead level for the general US population was three to five times higher than the current reference value for medical concern. Burning leaded gasoline puts about four grams of lead into the atmosphere per gallon. While these exposures were deemed harmless at the time thanks to industry funded ‘research’, animal studies and epidemiological evidence gathered since show us that such exposures likely disrupted healthy development across multiple organ systems (particularly the brain, bone, and cardiovascular systems), resulting in significant deficits in cognitive ability, fine motor skills, and emotional regulation. These harms actually worsen with age (more on that later).
So why did mankind seek out and consume this stuff? Quite simply, lead is an eminently useful metal, more so than gold actually. Abundant, easy to mine and manufacture, even easier to work with, lead has been instrumental in the development of plumbing (which comes from the Latin word for it), glazed pottery, durable paints and glassware, as well as more modern technologies such as ammunition, electronic circuits and batteries.
There’s always a but. But lead is also a potent neurotoxin whose sickening and deadly effects have been known for nearly 3,000 years. Its deleterious nature was documented throughout history The Greek physician Dioscorides first mentioned its harmful effects; subsequent historians and physicians (including the Roman architect Vitruvius and scientist-philosophers Lucretius as well as Benjamin Franklin) described the tremors, convulsions, and madness that were common afflictions among workers in lead-based industries.
Unlike most carcinogens and toxins such as pesticides, waste oils and even radioactive materials, lead does not break down over time. It does not vaporize. It never simply disappears from the environment.
For this reason, the estimated 7 million tons of lead burned in gasoline in the United States in the twentieth century is still with us–in the soil, air and water and in the bodies of living organisms. Worldwide, it is estimated that modern man’s lead exposure is 300 to 500 times greater than background or natural levels. In a recent report by the government’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry it was estimated that the burning of gasoline has accounted for 90 percent of lead placed in the atmosphere since the 1920s.
Leaded gasoline was the brainchild of an ambitious young chemical engineer for General Motors named Thomas Midgeley Jr. As it turned out, tetraethyl lead is not the only environmentally disastrous compound he discovered; Midgeley also invented the first CFC or chlorofluorocarbon known as freon and used for refrigeration and air conditioning and later in everything from hair spray to styrofoam. Not only did he contribute to the near destruction of the earth’s ozone layer, his TEL gasoline additive is considered to have cost Americans an aggregate total of 824,097,690 million IQ points which averages out to 2.6 IQ points per citizen. If you narrow the parameters to start looking at those of us alive from 1961-1974, that IQ loss approaches 6 points.
Tetraethyl lead prevented “knocking” in internal combustion engine, a common problem resulting from pre-ignition in the cylinders of higher compression engines developed during the late 1920s. While the simple addition of ethanol, which was quite cheap and plentiful would solve this issue with some minimal loss of horsepower, Midgeley’s bosses at GM, Arthur Sloan and Charles Kettering preferred having a proprietary product that could be controlled and marketed for more profit. (Both men endowed the esteemed Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute in a seeming act of penance and legacy-washing that the Sacklers could only dream of) So GM, DuPont and Standard Oil joined forces to create a company called the “Ethyl Gasoline Corporation” which held the patent on the fuel additive and whose business plan was to introduce tetraethyl lead wherever gasoline was sold.
It didn’t take long for alarmed physicians and scientists such as Harvard’s Dr. Alice Hamilton to protest this newfangled injection of lead into the environment. To insure that their cash cow would survive what might become an onslaught of protest, Sloan and Kettering came up with a strategy that became the roadmap for future collaboration between harmful industries with the very public health agencies that were tasked to protect the populace- Corporate Junk Science.
For that they turned to Robert Kehoe, a toxicologist at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, who would go on to become the pre-eminent academic proponent of the use of tetraethyl lead.
Spurred by the outcry over the 1924 deaths of five workers at Standard Oil’s refinery in New Jersey, Charles Kettering hired physiology instructor Kehoe to ‘examine’ health issues related to tetraethyl lead’s production. In 1925, Kehoe was anointed the chief medical advisor of the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation.
In 1930, a new laboratory funded by the General Motors, EGC, and DuPont corporations, the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology, opened at the University of Cincinnati with Kehoe as director. It was the very first university laboratory devoted to the toxicological problems peculiar to industry. And it didn’t exactly help humanity.
Kehoe’s theories and the famous “Kehoe Paradigm” helped to define the limits to industrial responsibility for lead pollution and poisoning for decades. He promoted the notion that manufacturers and distributors of industry could self-regulate rather than be ‘unduly restrained’ by legislation as it related to environmental hazards. His biased research convinced a US Surgeon General committee to issue a report in 1926 that concluded there was no real evidence that the sale of tetraethyl lead was hazardous to human health.
It wasn’t until 1973 when the EPA began regulating the amount of lead in gasoline under a 1970 amendment to the Clean Air Act. The phasing out of lead additives began slowly, but was accelerated by the introduction of catalytic converters as an industry accepted smog control measure. Leaded gas fouls CAT converters, as well as other mandated pollution control devices like oxygen sensors, so leaded gas went by the wayside just as the old clunkers that burnt it went to the junkyard.
The US phaseout of lead was largely complete by 1986. Based on data collected in more than sixty US cities by the CDC, the Department of Health and Human Services reported that blood-lead levels in the American population had declined 78 percent between 1978 and 1991.
Unethical profit seeking business leaders colluding with ill-informed government officials is sadly to be expected in our imperfect capitalist society. But what about the academics and members of the scientific community who collaborated to silence whistle-blowers such as Caltech’s Clair Patterson and Harvard’s Alice Hamilton? Dr. Patterson himself observed that the only things that protected his livelihood after testifying to the dangers of leaded gasoline was his university tenure and stature as contributor to the Manhattan Project.
So just how does this all relate to those angry older folks wilding in airports,fast food counters and political events as celebrated in r/BoomersBeingFools? We got the lead out after all, right? Unfortunately lead is a gift that keeps giving. In adults, 80–95 % of retained lead is stored in bone with a half-life of approximately 20–30 years. Due to the slow release of lead from bone resorption, lead levels significantly increase with age, as does the resultant derangement in neuro-cognitive function. As a result, lead poisoning increasingly damages the emotional control center of the brain. It makes people irrational, hostile and incapable of controlling themselves.
A man in dire need of some chelation therapy
The current public controversy regarding our leaded lives now revolves around another perennial subject- Our sacred American fetish for second amendment rights, or as this site calls it RKBA. Lead ammunition is widely used for hunting and shooting, making it the greatest and mostly unregulated source of lead being discharged into this country’s environment, far eclipsing our continued use of leaded fuels in aviation and auto racing.
Imagine having a disorder commonly associated with poor self control and mental decline combined with guns?
What could go possibly go wrong?
“It is not just a mistake for public health agencies to cooperate and collaborate with industries in investigating and deciding whether public health is endangered–it is a direct abrogation and violation of the duties and responsibilities of those public health organizations.”
-Professor Clair Patterson, who BTW accurately dated the earth
If you want to know more about the shameful story of leaded gasoline, I highly recommend Beth Gardiner's book "Choked"
