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The extraordinary story of one man’s discovery of the global contamination of the environment by man-made lead compounds -- a story of brilliant applied science, painstaking research and a refusal to bow to vested interests.
When the prestigious journal ‘Nature’ published Clair ‘Pat’ Patterson’s first paper linking lead pollution to leaded petrol in 1963, it set him against much of the industrial, political and even scientific establishment. This was no principled battle on the rights and wrongs of his scientific work, but an underhanded one that saw his funding cut by two thirds, his job threatened, and of course attempts to discredit him by scientists in the pay of the lead industry.
Yet he had come to the subject by accident. Early in the 1950s he set out to measure the concentration of lead isotopes in ancient rocks and meteorites, purely to calculate the age of the earth. But a six month project stretched out to five years as he found everything he touched was contaminated with lead, even the laboratories, containers, instruments and the people in them. He developed ultra-clean techniques to solve that problem and went on to measure deposits of lead in the environment and to work out where it was all coming from. He devised ways of calculating the amount of lead in prehistoric human bones – and showed that by the mid-20th century the average American had 500 times that level in his or her body.
It was largely thanks to his efforts that lead was removed from petrol, food cans, electrical solder and a host of other applications where it was entering the air we breathe and the food we eat.
Patterson died in 1995. This programme tells the story in his own words from an oral history tape, along with new interviews with his widow, children and former colleagues, and visiting some of the places where he did his ground-breaking work.
The presenter is the environmental scientist Dr Hermione Cockburn, and the producer Mike Hally is also a published author of science history.
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