"In addition to canceling his grants and attempting to prevent his work from
receiving public attention, the lead industry also worked aggressively to destroy
Patterson’s credibility through the news media.[77]32 Beginning in 1963, several
newspapers discounted Patterson’s work by focusing on Dr. Robert Kehoe and other lead
industry allies in an attempt to create uncertainty about the effects of lead in the
environment.[78-84] Herbert E. Stockinger, chief of toxicology with the U.S. Public
Health Service (USPHS) in Cincinnati, Ohio, had just conducted studies and presented
data which suggested there had not been increases in environmental lead levels or in the
amount of lead in human blood or urine over the past several decades. Rather than
address scientific concerns relating to Patterson’s studies, the lead industry attacked
Patterson personally and sought to tie him to political activists of the environmental
movement. Stockinger himself claimed Patterson’s conclusions were “rabble rousing . .
.science fiction” and accused Patterson of “trying to be a second Rachel Carson.”[65]
Multiple newspaper articles discussed Patterson’s research in the context of several
contrary government and industry reports that claimed lead in the environment was not a
major problem and was not created through exhaust emissions, but rather through other
industrial wastes. Although these studies were scientifically unsound, they were given
equal weight in the media"
Mostly limited to pistol-powered aircraft that use 100LL, and not anything with a turbine / jet engine (which uses diesel-like Jet-A fuel (kerosene family)).
The FAA is working on it, but it seems it's not a simple problem:
An observation: the baby boomers is one of the largest demographic cohorts out there, and they were exposed to lead a lot. So I'm wondering if the way politics was run from the 1980s onward has anything to do with impaired "executive functions that allow people to understand the consequences of their actions".
Probably, although Boomers are getting up in years and many of the most heavily impacted by lead most likely are not involved in politics either due to death, apathy, or incarceration.
A staggering yet rather unfashionable set of studies supporting the compelling hypothesis that lead exposure in childhood contributes to an increase in violent crime later.
One gets the sense that laying blame for specific modern social issues on such external, physical (historical) forces is an uphill struggle; by not providing enough actionable insight for today, the results are too abstract and seemingly inapplicable for us to learn much from them.
Yet the evidence is overwhelming. More, it highlights the difficulty faced in acknowledging and reducing the impact of as-yet-unrecognisably dangerous substances and technologies today.
>It’s important to emphasize that the lead-crime hypothesis doesn’t claim that lead is solely responsible for crime. It primarily explains only one thing: the huge rise in crime of the 70s and 80s and the equally huge—and completely unexpected—decline in crime of the 90s and aughts.
He spent nearly twenty years fighting for lead to be removed from gasoline.