English version is at the end of the Slovak version.
Je ľahké urobit‘ správnu vec, ked‘ dav jasá. Ovel’a tažšie je to vtedy, ked‘ sa vás mocné záujmy snažia zničit‘, ked‘ je vaša kariéra ohrozená, ked‘ by bolo ovel’a jednoduchšie zobrat‘ peniaze a mlčat‘.Mohol zostat‘ ticho. Mohol si užívat‘ pohodlnú, dobre platenú kariéru a študovat‘ kamene, zatial‘ čo detské mozgy boli poškodzované. Mohol povedat‘: „To nie je môj problém.“ On sa však pozrel na dáta, pozrel sa na svet a rozhodol sa, že pravda je doležitejšia ako pohodlie.
Zachránil ľudské životy v tichosti, bez slávy, bez publicity. Nepodplatiteľný, vytrvalý, nebojácny, nepokorený, idúci v ústrety pravde na základe faktov zo svojich výskumov. VEDEC HODNÝ NOBELOVEJ CENY. Nenechajme ho v zabudnutí. Clair Patterson by si zaslúžil aspoň skromný pomník alebo pamätnú tabuľu.
Viac:https://lifenews.travel2days.com/ako-tichy-vedec-odhalil…
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This is what integrity looks like when no one is watching
Caltech geochemist Clair Patterson (1922–1995) helped galvanize the environmental movement 50 years ago when he announced that highly toxic lead could be found essentially everywhere on Earth, including in our own bodies—and that very little of it was due to natural causes.
Patterson’s public war on lead — specifically, leaded gasoline — put him at odds with a fuel conglomerate formed by General Motors, Standard Oil, and Du Pont called Ethyl. They and their front man, Dr. Robert Kehoe, would work to destroy Patterson’s career. In the end, Patterson won. Mostly.
„The atmosphere of the northern hemisphere contains about 1,000 times more than natural amounts of lead,“ Patterson wrote, and he called for the „elimination of some of the most serious sources of lead pollution such as lead alkyls [i.e., tetraethyl lead], insecticides, food can solder, water service pipes, kitchenware glazes, and paints; and a reevaluation by persons in positions of responsibility in the field of public health of their role in the matter.“
Today, experts know that a blood-lead level over 5 μg/dL can damage a child’s brain, increasing the risk of attention disorders, lowering IQs, affecting academic achievement, and delaying puberty. In the mid-1980s, the Agency for Toxic Substances estimated that nearly 17 percent of preschool kids had blood lead levels over 15 μg/dL. The problem was especially bad in urban black neighborhoods: About 55 percent of African-American children in cities had damaging amounts of lead in their blood.
For decades, most experts rejected Patterson’s work because they carelessly tested corrupted samples and could not verify his data. In other words, they failed to see through the façade. When Patterson was finally accepted into the National Academy of Science in 1987, his colleague at Caltech, Barclay Kamb, summed his career up nicely: „His thinking and imagination are so far ahead of the times that he has often gone misunderstood and unappreciated for years, until his colleagues finally caught up and realized he was right.“
Here’s what we can quantify. In the 1970s, lead in the atmosphere peaked to historic highs. It has since cratered to medieval levels. In the 1960s, drivers in more than a hundred countries used leaded gasoline. Today, that number is three. In 1975, the average American had a blood lead level of 15 μg/dL. Today, it’s 0.858 μg/dL [PDF]. A 2002 study in Environmental Health Perspectives found that, by the late 1990s, the IQ of the average preschooler had risen five points. Needleman writes, “The blood lead levels of today’s children are a testimony to his brilliance and integrity.”
Pursuing that achievement revealed the troubling specter of a poisoned modern environment and prompted even more important work. The 1970 Clean Air Act and a global effort to remove lead from gasoline and other products grew out of the awareness his subsequent research and advocacy created. On the occasion of Patterson’s 1995 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, marine chemist Edward Goldberg, PhD’49, said, “It is interesting to speculate on how many additional years of life to world citizenry” could be credited to him.
That number is impossible to know, but the impact of adding lead to gasoline, and of removing it decades later, provides measurable and compelling evidence for Patterson’s crusade. As Mother Jones reported in 2013, the rise in violent crime throughout the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, and its decline beginning in the 1990s, corresponds to lead’s prevalence in the atmosphere.
Patterson was not one to bask in self-congratulation. He believed that all accomplishments were collective, and he deferred success to his predecessors and colleagues. “True scientific discovery renders the brain incapable, at such moments, of shouting victoriously to the world ‘Look at what I have done! Now I will reap rewards of recognition and wealth!’” Patterson wrote. “Instead, such discovery instinctively forces the brain to thunder, ‚WE did it!’”
Sources:
Douglas Smith, 2015, Getting the Lead Out, https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/getting-lead-out-47935
Jason Kelly, 2015,The University of Chicago Magazine, Immeasurable, https://mag.uchicago.edu/science-medicine/immeasurable
Lucas Reilly, 2017, Mental Floss – „The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of“, https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/94569/clair-patterson-scientist-who-determined-age-earth-and-then-saved-it
Andrew McRae, 2019, Cracked, How A Scientist Took On The Company That Poisoned The World
