OK, this is absolutely horrifying:
The ill effects of ingested lead and other heavy metals had been known since the 1920s, when employees at TEL [tetraethyl lead]-refining plants began hallucinating butterflies and going into convulsions of violent insanity (at least ten died). ‘Smelter nose’, a finger-sized hole in the septum, was an occupational hazard at plants. Horses near the Bunker Hill stack dropped dead; children were hospitalised with kidney damage, forced to undergo excruciating chelation therapy. By the 1970s scientists were beginning to link lead emissions with surging delinquency and crime rates.
The industry’s response was to deny everything or, at best, occasionally raise the height of its smokestacks. Company quacks put out statements asserting that high levels of lead in human bodies were not only harmless but ‘natural’. Thomas Midgley Jr, a General Motors engineer with the diabolic distinction of having invented both leaded gasoline and chlorofluorocarbons, washed his hands in a can of TEL at a press conference, claiming he was ‘not taking any chance whatever’. He knew this to be a lie, having already succumbed to a bout of lead poisoning. (Years later, paralysed with what was said to be polio, he strangled himself in the ropes of a contraption designed to hoist him out of bed.)
In the 1970s, my dad worked for the EPA in their mobile source enforcement division: their job was to stop people from illegally selling leaded gasoline and to adjudicate petitions from mom-and-pop refineries that, for various reasons, wanted exemptions from the new rules on unleaded gasoline.
But that story about Thomas Midgley, Jr.: Wow. What an evil guy. The linked article (a review by James Lasdun of a book by Caroline Fraser) is just full of horrible stories.
I guess that the world is full of evil people and always will be. The challenge is to avoid putting them in positions where they can do a lot of harm.
Do you think that the way our political system works (start with campaign financing and then move on) increases the likelihood that evil people will be put in positions where they can do a lot of harm? It seems to me that rather than building in protections against that, our current system facilitates it.
Quote from the blog post: “I guess that the world is full of evil people and always will be. The challenge is to avoid putting them in positions where they can do a lot of harm.”
I must say I think it’s refreshing to hear a bit more of this on this blog in recent months instead of “it’s the incentives” or “the system is wrong” or “everyone is good or bad in some situations” or such sentences and reasoning that I am tired of hearing.
Anyway, it’s possibly quite a challenge avoiding putting bad people, or people with bad personality charecteristics to perhaps phrase things a bit more differently, in positions where they can do a lot of harm because those might be the exact positions that certain people might want to be in. For instance, see Palmen et al. 2021 “The need for domination in psychopathic leadership: A clarification for the estimated high prevalence of psychopathic leaders.”
I have been wondering about this more and more in the last years, and I think it might be very useful and important to educate people more about psychopathy. And make people more aware of the ways in which one can be manipulated, or fooled, or taken advantage of, by people with psychopathic characteristics. I wrote something about psychopathy in academia and psychological science which might be in line with this all, and I have wondered whether I should attempt to write some more about that. Or at first, go and look for relevant papers, and read things, and think about things. For instance, I wondered where I could read about, and write about, the characterstics of academia and psychological science and try and see how and why people with psychopathy might especially be present and prosperous. That would be a sort of a part II of what I already wrote, but a little more detailed and focused. I started with an outline, but stopped. Then I wrote another manuscript about another topic.
I don’t see mention of the concentrations/doses involved and ingested is quite different from transdermal. As a result I’m highly skeptical this source is accurately reporting on what happened.
PS. As someone who is very skeptical of putting synthetic compounds into the body and related safety testing, I’m practically the choir for this kind of content.