Lucas Reilly's Mental Floss article on Clair Patterson https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter... is a much better piece. I'll also recycle https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=heymijo 's old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28502232 on this article from its 2021 HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28500508 (again, what follows is his or her work not mine!):

> Two beliefs became entrenched:

1. that lead is natural to the human body, and

2. that a poisoning threshold for lead existed

Robert Kehoe, working for GM, was the chief advocate for leaded gasoline, and really the only person/lab doing research on lead until Clair Patterson stumbled into it while measuring the age of the earth. [0,1]

A modern equivalent might be if Facebook was the only organization researching social media's impact on society, while being able to set the paradigm/assumptions about said safety for half a century.

So even when Patterson's research was published in 1965, it took time to change the paradigm, and more time to phase out lead's use.

Should anyone want to read a narrative about the intertwined lives of Midgley, Patterson, Kehoe and lead, then this Mental Floss article is a good read. [2]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Kehoe

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_Patterson#Campaign_again...

[2] https://www.mentalfloss.com/science/environment/clair-patter...