Robert Kehoe

Robert Kehoe

Robert Kehoe (1893-1992) was a key part of the Lead Industries Associations (LIA) efforts to obscure the facts about the health effects of overexposure to lead. He was an outspoken physician who worked for decades within the lead industry. With a career that began in the 1920s, Kehoe helped establish the extensive theoretical framework the lead industry relied upon to build a paradigm of belief that lead was not a toxic substance. This paradigm that was based off inaccurate and biased research funded by the LIA (Niragu, 71). Kehoe was almost entirely financed and supported by the lead industry who build him a laboratory and almost paid his entire salary (Niragu, 72). When he began his research, virtually all public health science on lead was supported by lead industries (Markowitz, Rosner ) Kehoe would become one of the most prominent researchers who pushed the idea “that introducing more lead, even much more lead, into the environment presented no danger to people”, he supported the idea that since lead was a naturally occurring thing we had the natural ability to remove it from our bodies (Markowitz, Rosner 37).
As information about leads toxic effects became available in the in sixties, Kehoe adapted his paradigm to match emerging data. He continued to promote, however, the message that lead was non-toxic up to 80ug in the bloodstream (Markowitz, Rosner 39). Our modern understanding of leads effects has made the acceptable lead threshold 5ug showing the disparity between the message of the lead industry and objective fact. This commitment to an 80ug safety threshold prevented discussion over what the safety threshold might be for children who face a much larger risk lead due to its distortion of neurological development. The goal of placing the safety threshold at 80ug might have been to try to keep lead as a health issue exclusively for those in manufacturing and the lead industry, and to send the message to the public that lead was not something for them to worry about. This became a part of Kehoe’s message because “It was imperative for Kehoe and his industrial clients to insulate the occupational lead hazard from environmental lead hazard” (Nigaru, 72) any research about lead’s environmental effects could show the impact of lead manufacturing and leaded gasoline which would put the lead industry in dire straits.
In addition to publishing misguiding research which claimed that “introducing lead, even much more lead, into the environment presented no danger to people” and pushing the idea that lead was safe to the American public, Kehoe attacked researchers who published opposing views (Markowitz, Rosner 37). For instance, in the sixties, he took on Clair C. Patterson, who used the lead industries own data to take down their pro-lead paradigm exposing the fact that the blood lead level of Americans was at least a hundred times the background lead values (Nigaru, 76). Patterson attacked the notion that lead exposure was a naturally occurring event, using data in a way that the lead industry could not portray in uncertain terms (Niragu, 77). Patterson also attacked the lead industries use of data explaining that “‘you can use the data to justify your purposes. If your purpose is to sell lead alkyls, then you look at these data one way. If your purpose is to guard public health, you will look at this data in another way, and you will reach different conclusions’” (Niragu, 77). Patterson’s approach was remarkably successful at highlighting an industrial conspiracy that prevented and stalled environmental regulations for almost four decades (Niragu, 72).

Lucas Reilly

https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it

Mentalfloss

May 17, 2017

David McGuire
Meghan Thornton