“I’m gonna have to science the shit out of this,” says the main character of Andy Weir’s _The Martian_, and proceeded.to use every bit of his resourcefulness to harness the power of knowledge to save himself. That movie is fictional, but actual scientists have done this (Hello, COVID-19 vaccination developers, I’m talkin’ to you there). For instance, this guy — smiling in the picture is one Clair Cameron Patterson, the genius who not only figured out the age of the earth but also saved humanity and other species from lead poisoning.
Patterson’s attitude towards research reminded me of Andy Weir’s character. After developing special techniques that allowed him to measure the decay rate of lead, he determined that our planet is 4.5 billion years old. It was a pretty big deal, but reflecting on his discovery Patterson wrote:
“True scientific discovery renders the brain incapable at such moments of shouting vigorously to the world ‘Look what I’ve done! . . . Instead such discovery instinctively forces the brain to thunder ‘*We* did it’ in a voice no one else can hear, within its sacred, but lonely, chapel of scientific thought”.
And it was also on the shoulders of earlier researchers that Patterson determined that humans were poisoning the earth with rapid amounts of lead — Americans had 100 times the natural amount of lead in their bloodstream at the time of his exposé paper “Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man” in 1965. He then took on the gasoline industry, because this was the culprit: gasoline had such a high concentration of lead that the short amount of time it had been on the market was enough to have skyrocketed lead levels even on the ocean floors and in snowfall around the entire planet.
By 1973 Patterson had enough allies and had convinced enough people in power of the truth. The United States’ EPA began to take steps to remove lead from gasoline, and of course by now all gas is unleaded. By 1991 the lead content in snow in Greenland had decreased by a factor of 7.5 since 1971.
We can all be grateful that Patterson decided to science the shit out of our lead problem.
Source(s): _Biographical Memoirs: Volume 74 (1998), Chapter: Clair Cameron Patterson, by George R. Tilton, The National Academies of Science Engineering, and Medicine Press.
