MentalFloos – Michael Rogalski: “For 60 years, American drivers unknowingly poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their tanks. Here is the lifelong saga of Clair Patterson—a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth—and how he took on a billion-dollar industry to save humanity from itself…Over the previous nine years, the oil industry had awarded Patterson about $200,000. But the minute he published a paper in Nature blaming the industry for abnormal lead concentrations in snow and sea water, the American Petroleum Institute rescinded its funding. Then his contract with the Public Health Service dissolved. At Caltech, a member of the board of trustees—an oil executive whose company peddled tetraethyl lead—called the university president and demanded they shut Patterson up.

One day, the petroleum industry knocked on Patterson’s door. The four oil executives (or, as Patterson termed them, “white shirts and ties”) acted friendly. They showed him a résumé of ongoing projects and wondered if he’d like money to study something new. “[They tried to] buy me out through research support that would yield results favorable to their cause,” Patterson remembered. Instead of shooing the suits away, Patterson asked them to sit before a lectern as he explained, bluntly, “how some future scientists would obtain explicit data showing how their operations were poisoning the environment and people with lead. I explained how this information would be used in the future to shut down their operations.”,,”