The Quandary of Environmental Research: A History of Lead, Children and Scientific Investigation 1970-2000

In recent decades the popular media, the scientific community and political leaders have acknowledged that lead poisoning has been a significant problem for U.S. children in the past half century. Headlines in the 1950s and 1960s alerted the nation to the thousands of children who were dying or suffering permanent brain damage from exposures to lead paint in slum housing; in the 1970s and 1980s, newspapers reported on the hundreds of thousands of children who were suffering from a variety of neurological and behavioral problems due to low-level lead exposure; in the 1990s, researchers discovered that even minute amounts of lead in a child's body could lead to sub-clinical, but life altering, changes in IQ, behavior, and school performance. Today, lead in toys, dust, soil and paint in the child's environment have been identified as causes of damage to nearly half a million American children. This study, funded by Science and Society, investigates part of the history of environmental health through the lens of childhood lead poisoning in America from the 1970s through the early 21st century. Using oral histories, archival records, legal documents and traditional historical methodologies, the study analyzes the recent history of popular and scientific awareness of low level lead exposure to children, uncovering aspects of the changing historical relationship between science and social policy. Specifically, the project looks at how changing scientific ideas and policies regarding the effects of low level lead exposure stimulated a wide range of studies aimed at identifying ways of reducing children's exposure; how various interest groups' resistance to abatement of lead from walls in the housing stock where children were exposed to lead paint led to different perspectives in the research community as to whether "complete" or "partial" abatement was the best way to protect children from lead poisoning; how the limitations on the amount and kind of funding available to researchers affected the intellectual questions that scientists asked, and, ultimately, the research designs that scientists developed in the 1990s and early 2000s; and what is emerging as one of the most troubling ethical and historical disputes regarding environmental research on children. A case examined in more detail involves scientists at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, the internationally renowned center for the study of children with developmental disabilities associated with Johns Hopkins University. In the early 1990s, they initiated a research project that aroused intense controversy because it allowed children to be exposed to low levels of lead in their homes in inner city neighborhoods in Baltimore. The goal of the research was to identify a method of lead abatement that would be cheap enough to encourage landlords to participate in abatement programs yet effective enough to result in little or no damage to the children. But when some children were identified with elevated, rather than diminished, blood-lead levels in some of the study apartments, two sets of parents filed suit against Kennedy Krieger to stop the research. Although the suit was thrown out at the trial court level, the Court of Appeals of Maryland decided that the research raised troubling issues regarding human experimentation on vulnerable populations. The Kennedy Krieger study has attracted the attention of scientists and those interested in human subject experimentation. This project adds a new and critical historical dimension to our understanding of this troubling and complex episode in environmental history and the history of science.