The Most Important People in the World

Your life is being shaped by people you don’t know, making discoveries and decisions of which you’re mostly unaware, and those decisions have implications far more wide-ranging than any of the most controversial issues discussed in the halls of congress.  Sound frightening?  In a sense, it should.  These men and women don’t work for the NSA.  They’re not laboring in the depths of the Pentagon.  They might be super heroes, or super villains, but they don’t generally favor spandex and capes. However, some of them have been known to adopt an archetypical costume: a white lab coat.

The people in question are scientists, and more than any elected official, they will shape the world you live in for good… and for bad.

The Place of Science

In some countries, scientists are regarded as important public figures and given a level of attention that we Americans reserve for the truly significant (you know, movie stars and country singers).  It’s hard to even express the level of disappointment that swept across Korea when much of the cloning advances claimed by Hwang Woo-Suk turned out to be false.  In Japan, Shuji Nakamura, inventor of the blue LED, whose work holds promise to greatly reduce the world’s energy demands for lighting, is a national hero.    At the far end of the ideological spectrum, Abdul Kahn is revered in Pakistan for giving that country its first nuclear bomb.

It’s not surprising that those countries that esteem scientists also turn out a large number of scientists and engineers from their universities.  Where American parents often look at business as the best way to extract junior from the couch, families across Asia and Eastern Europe are just as likely to push their kids toward careers in the sciences.

It wasn’t always this way.  The place of scientists in modern American society is a measure of what we feel is important.  Most people can name not only dozens of entertainment celebrities and sports stars, but can also rattle off a good number of politicians and several corporate CEOs.  But scientists?  Chances are, you know more names of scientists from the past than you do of those working today.  If you’re old enough, you surely recall Linus Pauling and his polymath genius in everything from chemistry to political activism (drink your vitamin C, kids!).  Anyone who owns a television has surely run into Carl Sagan, who had the ability to be both challenging and charming — a rare trait in or out of science.

At the start, America was a nation that played host to a number of gentlemen scientists.  Men like Ben Franklin (who retired as early as he could so he could spend more time on his experiments) and Thomas Jefferson were more than just hobbyists.  They were important scientists of their day, well respected in Europe as well as at home.  At other times in our history — particularly in times of war — scientists have again taken up more space on the public stage.  If you’re moderately conversant with the history of the 20th century, names from the Manhattan Project era will roll out, names like Edward Teller and Robert Oppenheimer, or immigrants like Enrico Fermi and, of course, Albert Einstein.  Even earlier, as America was transformed from a rural and agricultural state into one that was more technical and urban, men like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison weren’t just inventing the new world, but also making the news.

I’m lucky enough to have met one of my personal heroes, Stephen Jay Gould, on a couple of occasions before his all too early death.  I’ve also been in the audience for a speech by E. O. Wilson.   I’ve talked with that most colorful of paleontologists, Robert Baker and his less outwardly quirky, but even more scientifically adventurous mentor, John Ostrom.  I had the good fortune to spend a decade working for M. E. Hopkins (there is no name to go with the initials), one of the preeminent stratigraphers and sedimentary geologists.

Still, I don’t know even a tiny faction of what I should about the scientists working in this country and around the world.  And I should.  You should, too.  Let me tell you, the intellectual ground under your feet is shaky stuff.  You don’t know what you know half as well as you think, half of that is wrong, and for the other half, you don’t know the why.  Everything you think you know about the physical world, including those facts of which you’re most certain (especially those), has likely already been proven to be a quaint bit of folklore in some lab.  

But this — all of this — is just the build up.  The under card.

I want to hurry on to the main event, a battle royale that illustrates exactly how men you’ve never heard of can rattle the world.

The Main Event: Patterson vs. Midgley

In the blue corner, the man from Iowa.  His parents named him “Clair” so you know he grew up tough, it’s geochemist Clair “I think your name is funny, too” Patterson!

In the red corner, hailing from Beaver Falls, PA, fictional home of Mr. Belvedere, it’s that rompin’ stompin’ engineer who may have had more effect on the planet than any single person in history, it’s Thomas “Mad Tom” Midgley, Jr!

Midgley came out of his corner first (but hey, he had a thirty year head start), taking a degree in mechanical engineering from Cornell and landing a job at General Motors.  At the time GM was frustrated by the problem of engine knock.  Knocking, caused by premature combustion, limits compression ratios and reduces an engine’s power and efficiency.  Pushed to find a solution to the problem, Midgley tinkered with mechanical answers, but soon segued into looking into chemistry.  That’s where he got interested in a little compound called Tetra Ethyl Lead.   Add this stuff to gasoline, and it drives up the octane rating.  Presto, no knock.  General Motors had the solution they were looking for.

There was only one problem — lead is poisonous.  It’s a neurotoxin, and over exposure can cause permanent loss of brain function, as well as any number of debilitating symptoms.  Though lead was still used in many consumer products at the time Midgley made his discovery, it was already controversial.  

In 1924, Midgley took a prolonged vacation to cure himself of lead poisoning — a fact he deliberately kept secret, holding a press conference to demonstrate the “safety” of contact with the substance. In this demonstration, he poured tetra-ethyl lead over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical over his nose and breathed it in for sixty seconds, declaring all the while that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever.

Working together, Midgley, GM, and Standard Oil began to market the new additive to the nation, shortening the name to “Ethyl.”  If you’re old enough to remember Linus Pauling, you’re probably also old enough to have heard someone at a gas station ask “do you want regular, or Ethyl?”  Within a decade, Midgley’s discovery was pouring neurotoxin into the air at a rate of billions of pounds a year.

The American Chemical Society responded by giving Midgley the Priestley Award, the highest honor it can bestow.

But now Clair Patterson was coming off his stool and getting into the fight.  At first, it seems difficult to find any potential for overlap in Patterson’s interests and those of Midgley.  As a grad student in geochemistry at the University of Chicago, Patterson became fixated in determining the age of the Earth.  He conceived of an experiment, using newly discovered techniques, which would give a good number for the first time.  Patterson’s experiments involved looking at the amount of uranium in source rocks and comparing it to the products that result when uranium naturally decays over millions of years.

There was only one problem.  The end of the decay chain was lead, and no matter what sample he checked, Patterson was finding far, far, too much lead.

Patterson eventually got his date (the date still considered authoritative today) after fifteen years of long hours spent using meteoritic material, the newly invented mass spectrometer, and what was likely the world’s first “clean room” to eliminate the lead contamination.  No sooner did he solve this problem than he turned to another: finding the source of all that lead.  To do so, he came up with a technique still in use by those investigating the atmosphere today — he went to Greenland and took an ice core.  With that, it didn’t take long to discover the date at which lead had begun to enter the atmosphere and track down its source.

Clair Patterson began a tireless campaign to undue the work of Thomas Midgley and “get the lead out” of gasoline.

By this time, Midgley himself was no longer so enamored of his first big idea.  Though he still defended his pal Ethyl in public, it seems that he had regrets in private.  He’d taken time out to invent the first cruise missile, but now he wanted to do something to show that he could use chemicals in a way that would really help people.  He turned to the problem of compressible gases used for refrigeration and propellants.  At the time, ammonia was the most common, and problems with ammonia leaks were an all-too-frequent cause of worker death or injury.  On the propellant side, even asthma inhalers involved chemicals that were noxious enough to make their use almost as dangerous as the condition they addressed.  Midgley set out to come up with a gas that could solve both problems, something that had the admirable properties of ammonia in refrigeration, but which was chemically inert enough that leaks wouldn’t be dangerous.  Something so innocuous that it could be used in inhalers — and in aerosol cans.  After four years of work, he had his answer.  Midgley had invented CFCs.

Clair Patterson, despite his authoritative work on the age of the Earth — a question scientists had been trying to answer for centuries — did not receive great acclaim.  In fact, by taking on the Ethyl Corporation and its friends in congress, he found himself ostracized from many scientific panels and conferences.  Patterson soldiered on, giving speeches, writing books, and gradually gathering others to his cause.  Eventually, his efforts resulted in the Clean Air Act, which set the stage for not only the removal of lead from gasoline, but put in place the tools to deal with CFCs, acid rain, and other threats.

So there you have it.  An engineer turned chemist who, while trying to do good, introduced both leaded gas and CFCs, quite probably doing more damage to the environment than any other individual in history.  And a geochemist turned public crusader, who spent much of his career trying to clean up the mess.

If you’ve never heard of either man, don’t be embarrassed.  I was aware of Patterson only because of his work on dating the Earth (and because a man named “Clair” is hard to forget).  I wasn’t aware of his relation to the Clean Air Act, and wouldn’t have know Midgley at all if not for Bill Bryson’s marvelously dense and entangled work of science history, A Short History of Nearly Everything.

Some takeaways from today’s little snippet of history:

1. The women and men laboring in the depths of corporate and university labs are much more likely to have a lasting impact on your life than the CEOs and university presidents that get TV time.

2. No one ever thinks they are the villain of the story (even Dick Cheney thinks he is the good guy, believe it or not).

3. All those questions about “would the super villians be there if it wasn’t for the super-heroes” are stupid, because the villians think they are the heroes.

4. When corporations, politicians, and other “experts” start to explain about how some modern problem can’t be addressed, or would cause huge job losses, do not believe them.  Doing the right thing always turns out to be the best thing, not just for the environment, but for business.