Includes bibliographical references (p. 215-227) and index.

The story of the bitter thirty-year fight to protect children from lead. Clair Patterson, a geochemist, traveled worldwide to measure the composition of rock, ice, and rain. Herbert Needleman, a psychiatrist, measured children's performance in poor urban schools. By the 1960s and 1970s their work revealed that mankind was filling the world with lead, a toxic substance that was doing irreparable harm to children. Patterson and Needleman's discoveries and their willingness to take on the lead industry helped bring about the banning of lead from paint, gasoline, and food packaging, beginning in the late 1970s. Journalist Lydia Denworth also documents the lead industry's well-funded efforts to discredit and silence them. By the 1990s the average American's lead level had dropped 90 percent, an achievement that ranks as one of the great public health success stories of the twentieth century, and redefined how we conceive of disease, contaminants, and public safety.--From publisher description.