Congressman Jim Moran's News Commentary

With today's celebration of Earth Day marked by public anxiety over lead contamination in our area drinking water, I thought it fitting to commemorate the life of Clair Patterson, a scientist who worked singlehandedly to reduce our exposure to lead and, in the process, save millions of lives.

As a scientist specializing in the environment, Clair Patterson's pioneering work stretched across an unusual number of sub-disciplines, including archeology, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry and geology. Despite these many areas of expertise, he is best known for determining the age of the Earth.

The son of a postal worker, Clair Patterson began a lifelong attraction to chemistry that began at an early age and ultimately led to a thesis in molecular spectroscopy. Besides working on the Manhattan Project, he continued his dissertation project in 1951 and analyzed lead samples that gave lead isotopic compositions for minerals separated from a billion-year-old Precambrian granite.

Prompted by a visit to the U.S. Geological Survey in Washington D.C., Clair Patterson began research that opened up a new field of dating for geologists. This led to hundreds of age determinations based on his methods and techniques and affirmed his predictions on the most accurate age of the planet.

In 1962, he and other scientists observed that the lead concentration in the deeper parts of the Pacific Ocean were 3 to 10 times less than surface water. This provided new evidence for disturbance in the balance of the natural geochemical cycle for lead. Ultimately, he estimated the lead concentration in blood for many Americans to be over 100 times that of the natural level, and dangerously close to the accepted limit for symptoms of lead poisoning to occur.

Despite being accused of being more of a zealot than a scientist, Patterson continued his research into lead; he wrote to California Governor Pat Brown emphasizing the dangerously high levels of lead in aerosols, particularly in the Los Angeles area. In it he claimed that the California Department of Public Health was not doing all it should to protect the population from the dangers of lead poisoning. By 1966, Governor Brown signed a bill directing the State Department of Public Health to hold hearings and to establish air quality standards for California by February 1, 1967. Although that deadline was not met, Patterson clearly played a role in advancing concern over California air control standards.

He simultaneously started parallel actions at the national level as well, testifying before the Senate Subcommittee on Air and Water Pollution in 1966. Patterson believed it was wrong for public health agencies to work so closely with lead industries, whom he considered often biased in matters concerning public health.

By 1970, Patterson and his colleagues had completed studies of snow strata from Greenland and Antarctica that showed clearly the increase in atmospheric lead beginning with the industrial revolution. Modern Greenland snow contained over 100 times the amount of lead in pre-industrial snow, with most of the increase occurring over the last 100 years.

Patterson's efforts proved to have growing significance in the area of airborne lead exposure. In 1971, he criticized a National Research Council report on the Environmental Protection Agency's policies on lead pollution as not being forceful enough in interpreting its data and being too heavily weighted toward industrial scientists. Although Patterson's work was initially ignored, by December 1973 the EPA announced a program to reduce lead in gasoline by 60-65% in phased steps. Thus was the beginning of the removal of lead from gasoline.

In the late 1970s Patterson turned his attention to lead in food. In 1979 he wrote to the commissioner of food and drugs at the Environmental Protection Agency asserting that his headquarters laboratory could not correctly analyze for lead in tuna fish and called for more accurate analysis. Patterson made several recommendations for improvements that were taken seriously and prompted EPA to conduct better lead analyses.

In 1980, Patterson and a fellow researcher Dorothy M. Settle published a warning on the amount of lead entering the food chain due to lead solder used in sealing cans. By 1993 lead solder was removed from all food containers in the United States. Patterson's influence is again clearly evident.

Patterson was appointed in 1978 to a twelve-member National Research Council panel to evaluate the state of knowledge about environmental issues related to lead poisoning. The panel report cited the need to reduce lead hazards for urban children (a finding that demands renewed attention following the Washington area's lead scare) and called for further research on the relationship between lead ingestion and intellectual ability.

In short, Patterson argued that the dangers of lead were already clear enough and that efforts should start immediately to drastically reduce or completely remove industrial lead from the everyday environment. That included gasoline, food containers, foils, paint, and glazes. He also cited water distribution systems and urged investigations into biochemical perturbations within cells caused by lead exposures.

As we reflect on Patterson's lifelong commitment to environmental health, we must listen to today's unsung heroes who are calling for more vigilant protection of public health and an end to the assault on our nation's environmental laws that jeopardize the health of our children and grandchildren.

In a world increasingly marked by technological and scientific innovation, Clair Patterson's lifelong efforts demand renewed attention. On this Earth Day, as we see so many of our country's environmental laws being rolled back, let us honor Clair Patterson's lifelong commitment to finding that balance between modern technology and preserving the environment and human health. We have a collective responsibility to preserve our natural surroundings for generations to come. Mother Earth cannot afford to wait.