In June of this year I read about a miraculous drug trial done at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, that has allegedly cured all 14 members of the trial group — people with advanced colorectal cancer who normally would have no chance to survive. The drug is called Dostarlimab, a monoclonal antibody therapy. I asked my wife, a physician, if this is a cure for cancer. She gave me a vague answer, but mentioned that she worked as a medical transcriptionist at Memorial Sloan Kettering before medical school, many years ago.
I meant to read more about the Dostarlimab trials — I have a family history — but distractions intervened, and I simply forgot. Since the beginning of the pandemic, an obsessive level of my focus has been directed toward my COVID diary — essentially a haphazard and often random stream of observations about the pandemic. Recently, however, I stumbled upon a possible epiphany: COVID (particularly Long COVID) mimics many of the features associated with lead toxicity — both injure almost all the organs in the human body, and, critically, both have a particularly destructive role in diminishing focus, cognition and impulse control. If COVID-19 is lead’s reprise, there is already a roadmap of bungling and malice to warn us.
I have impulsively read almost everything I could find about lead exposure in the past months, and this topic inevitably leads to the darkest corridor in American history. Lead exposure has been killing and disabling people by the tens of millions for an entire century. The sort of political collusion, flaccid media and Madison Avenue bluster, that we have all come to regard as existential features in America, took shape on behalf of industrial lead. A popular YouTube video about Thomas Midgely, the inventor of the tetraethyl leaded gasoline cocktail, is entitled, “The Man Who Accidently Killed The Most People In History.” But this is a misnomer. Midgely was an underling at General Motors a century ago, a man who followed orders at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. The decision to blanket the planet with 250,000 tons of poisonous residue yearly came from the captains of industry. No one died by accident.
According to Jamie Kitman in his essay “The Secret History of Lead,” (published in The Nation in 2000), the oil industry had a safer gasoline additive — ethanol. Both tetraethyl and ethanol prevented “engine knocking,” but ethanol was simply grain alcohol, a mundane liquid within the public domain. However, GM controlled tetraethyl with a patent and thus made a profit on every gallon of leaded gas sold around the world.
Many scientists in the 1920s penned letters to GM executives warning of the dangers of lead. The war between science and corporate profit inspired GM propagandists to design a now familiar strategy — deniers spent four decades arguing that lead was a normal part of the environment. They claimed that elevated blood lead levels merely reflected natural processes. This same practice of pseudo-scientific manipulation can now be observed in the rhetoric of climate change denial — natural cycles, not CO2 emissions, cause warming.
In 1965, Clair Patterson published research proving that natural (background) levels of lead were almost nil. After examining preindustrial ice samples and ancient human remains, Patterson concluded that all invasive lead originated from pollution and none from the original composition of the earth’s surface. The narrative deception of corporate predators collapsed like a popped balloon. Leaded gasoline was banned in the U.S. pursuant to Richard Nixon signing the federal Clean Air Act in 1970. After the banning of leaded gasoline, a serendipitous result followed two decades after: violent crime rates plunged. Lead exposure had created an assembly line of broken victims who resonated with American gun culture. Yvette Cabrera coined the phrase, “lead to prison pipeline.” A study at Florida State University recently estimated that even today the average IQ in America is 2.6 points lower than it would be in a hypothetical lead free environment. Lead remains ubiquitous in our soil and infrastructure..
Who perpetrated the most terrible of all blood baths? Alfred Sloan, president of GM and Charles Kettering, the head of GM research, gave the orders. Both amassed vast wealth. Tetraethyl lead shaped the modern world and created fortunes. Imagine a point where an industrial apocalypse and philanthropy touch with no separating membrane — that is The Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. What sort of society names one of their most famous hospitals for those who mustered the highest body count ever?
Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center is irony on steroids — a blow to our feeble imaginations. At first, when I learned who Sloan and Kettering were, I was aghast. I sent a complaint into the void of a “contact us” Sloan Kettering email address to protest. But I now realize that the proper response is not outrage, but awe. Maybe we should view irony as a fifth dimension along with three dimensional space and time. We are limited creatures, tiny, crawling, ephemeral things incapable of comprehending the infinity of cosmic scope. Irony can be like a Mobius strip, an unsolvable, ambiguous puzzle. How do we draw a single loop that encompasses both extinction and a cure for cancer?
Phil Wilson is a retired mental health worker living in Northampton.