Major Figures On The Fluoride Story

from Cristpher Bryson's The Fluoride Deception" [2004]

EDWARD L. BERNAYS

A propagandist and the self-styled father of public relations, Bernays was Sigmund Freud's nephew. Among his clients were the U.S. military, Alcoa, Procter and Gamble, and Allied Signal. On behalf of big tobacco companies he persuaded American women to smoke cigarettes. He also promoted water fluoridation, consulting on strategy for the National Institute of Dental Research.

GERALD JUDY C

A researcher at the Mellon Institute in the 1930s, where he held a fellowship from the Aluminum Company of America. Following Frary's (see below) suggestion, Cox reported that fluoride gave rats cavity-resistant teeth and in 1939 made the first public proposal to add fluoride to public water supplies.

HENRY TRENDLEY DEAN

The U.S. Public Health Service researcher who studied dental fluorosis in areas of the United States where fluoride occurred naturally in the water supply. His "fluorine-caries" hypothesis suggested that fluoride made teeth cavity-resistant but also caused unsightly dental mottling. Worried about toxicity, Dean opposed adding fluoride to water in Newburgh, New York, the site of the nation's first-planned water fluoridation experiment. In 1948 Dean became the first director of the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) and, in 1953,a top official of the American Dental Association.

OSCAR R. EWING

A top Wall Street lawyer for the Aluminum Company of America. As Federal Security Agency administrator for the Truman administration with jurisdiction over the Public Health Service, it was Ewing who, in 1950, endorsed public water fluoridation for the United States.

FRANCIS COWLES FRARY

As Directorof Research at the Aluminum Company of America from 1918, Frary was one of the most powerful science bureaucrats in the United States and grappled with the issue of fluoride emissions from aluminum smelters. It was Frary who made early suggestions to Gerald Cox, a researcher at the Mellon Institute, that fluoride might make strong teeth.

GENERAL LESLIE R. GROVES

Head of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Manhattan Project to build the world's first atomic bomb.

HAROLD CARPENTER HODGE

A biochemist and toxicologist at the University of Rochester who investigated fluoride for the U.S. Army's Manhattan Project, where he also supervised experiments in which unsuspecting hospital patients were injected with uranium and plutonium.

After the war Hodge chaired the National Research Council's Committee on Toxicology and became the leading scientific promoter of water fluoridation in the United States during the cold war.

DUDLEY A. IRWIN

Alcoa's medical director who helped oversee Robert Kehoe's fluoride research at the Kettering Laboratory, and who met personally with top fluoride researchers at the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) following the verdict in the Martin air-pollution trial.

ROBERT A. KEHOE

As the Director of the Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology at the University of Cincinnati, Kehoe was the leading defender in the United States of the safety of leaded gasoline.

Guided by a group of corporate attorneys known as the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, Kehoe similarly defended fluoride on behalf of a group of corporations that included DuPont, Alcoa, and U.S. Steel, all of which faced lawsuits for industrial fluoride pollution.

EDWARD J. L ARGENT

A researcher at the Kettering Laboratory who defended corporations accused of fluoride pollution and spent a career negating the fluoride warnings of the Danish scientist Kaj Roholm. Largent exposed his wife and son to hydrogen fluoride in a laboratory gas chamber.

NICHOLAS C. LEONE

The head of medical investigations at the federal government's NIDR who was in close communication with industry's Fluorine Lawyers and who, following the 1955 Martin verdict, met with Alcoa's Dudley Irwin and the Kettering Laboratory's Robert Kehoe to discuss how government water fluoridation safety studies could help industry.

WILLIAM J. MARCUS

A senior toxicologist in the EPA's Office of Drinking Water. In 1992, after he protested what he described as the systematic downgrading of the results of the government's study of cancer and fluoride, he was fired. A federal judge later ruled that he had been fired because of his scientific opinions onfluoride and ordered him reinstated.

PAUL AND VERLA MARTI

Oregon farmers who were poisoned by fluoride from a Reynolds Metals aluminum plant. Their precedent-setting court victory in 1955 sparked emergency meetings between fluoride industry representatives and senior officials from the National Institute of Dental Research and launched a crash program of laboratory experiments at the Kettering Laboratory to prove industrial fluoride pollution "safe."

PHYLLIS J. MULLENIX

A leading neurotoxicologist hired by the Forsyth Dental Center in Boston to investigate the toxicity of materials used in dentistry. In 1994,after her research indicated that fluoride was neurotoxic, she was fired.

KAJ ELI ROHOLM

The Danish scientist who in 1937 published the book Fluorine Intoxication, an encyclopedic study of fluoride pollution and poisoning. He opposed giving fluoride to children.

PHILIP SADTLER

The third-generation son of a venerable Philadelphia family of chemists, Sadtler gave expert testimony during the 1940s and 1950s on behalf of farmers and citizens who claimed that they had been poisoned by industrial fluoride pollution. He blamed fluoride for the most notorious air pollution disaster in U.S. history, during which two dozen people were killed and several thousand were injured in Donora, Pennsylvania, over the Halloween weekend in 1948.

FRANK L. SEAMANS

A top lawyer for Alcoa, Seamans was also head of the group of senior attorneys known as the Fluorine Lawyers Committee, which represented big corporations in cases of alleged industrial fluoride pollution.

GEORGE L. WALDBOTT

A doctor and scientist and a leading expert on the health effects of environmental pollutants, Waldbott's research in the 19505 and 196os on his own patients indicated that many people were uniquely sensitive to very small doses of fluoride.

He founded the International Society for Fluoride Research and was a leader of the international and domestic opposition to water fluoridation.

COLONEL STAFFORD L. WARREN

Head of the Manhattan Project's Medical Section.

EDWARD RAY WEIDLEIN

Director of the Mellon Institute, where Cox carried out his studies.