LOS ANGELES (AP) — Steven Spielberg has extended his domination at the Directors Guild of America Awards, earning a nomination Tuesday for his Civil War epic “Lincoln” to pad the record he already held to 11 film nominations from the guild.
Also nominated were past winners Kathryn Bigelow for her Osama bin Laden thriller “Zero Dark Thirty”; Tom Hooper for his musical “Les Miserables”; and Ang Lee for his lost-at-sea story “Life of Pi.”
Rounding out the Directors Guild lineup is first-time nominee Ben Affleck for his Iran hostage-crisis tale “Argo.”
The Directors Guild field is one of Hollywood’s most-accurate forecasts for who will be in the running at the Academy Awards, whose nominations come out Thursday. The winner at the Directors Guild almost always goes on to win the directing prize at the Oscars, too. Only six times in the 64-year history of the guild awards has the winner there failed to follow up with an Oscar.
Besides the record number of feature-film nominations, Spielberg also has won the Directors Guild prize a record three times, for “The Color Purple,” ”Schindler’s List” and “Saving Private Ryan,” along with directing Oscars for the latter two. He received the guild’s lifetime-achievement award in 2000.
Bigelow became the first woman ever to win the guild honor and the directing Oscar three years ago for “The Hurt Locker.” Hooper won the same prizes a year later for “The King’s Speech,” while Lee is a two-time guild winner for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “Brokeback Mountain,” the latter also earning him the directing Oscar.
Affleck, who also stars in “Argo,” follows such actors-turned-filmmakers as Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson to earn a Directors Guild nomination.
Overlooked by the guild were past nominees Quentin Tarantino for his slave-revenge tale “Django Unchained” and David O. Russell for his oddball romance “Silver Linings Playbook.”
The film that receives the Directing Guild prize typically also goes on to win the best-picture Oscar, a prize Spielberg has earned only once, for “Schindler’s List.” No clear front-runner has emerged yet for the Feb. 24 Oscars, with “Lincoln,” ”Zero Dark Thirty” and “Les Miserables” all considered strong prospects to take home Hollywood’s highest honor.
Sunday’s Golden Globes will help sort out the Oscar picture, as will the various guild prizes that will be handed out in late January and February on the run-up to the Academy Awards.
Winners for the 65th annual Directors Guild awards will be announced at a Hollywood dinner Feb. 2, with Kelsey Grammer as host for the second year in a row.
Milos Forman, director of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus,” will receive the guild’s lifetime-achievement award.
___
Online:
http://www.dga.org
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In a move that underlines how many Chinese citizens now work in Africa, China’s quarantine officials recently urged greater efforts to make sure that a yellow fever epidemic now raging in Sudan does not come back to China.
Local health authorities were asked to scan all travelers arriving from Sudan for fevers. Chinese citizens planning travel to Sudan were advised to get yellow fever shots. Customs officers were told that containers arriving from Sudan might have stray infected mosquitoes inside.
Sudan’s epidemic is considered the world’s worst in 20 years. Sweden, Britain and other donors have paid for vaccinations. The United States Navy’s laboratory in Egypt has helped with diagnoses.
Estimates of the number of Chinese working in Africa, many in the oil and mining industries or on major construction projects, range from 500,000 to 1 million. Experts on AIDS have previously warned that the workers could become a new means of bringing that disease to China, which has a low H.I.V.-infection rate.
ProMED-mail, a Web site that follows emerging diseases, has tracked reports about the Sudan outbreak, with its moderators adding valuable context. China’s mosquito-killing winters make a large yellow fever outbreak there unlikely, moderators said. But Sudan’s containment efforts are troubled. For example, vaccinated people cannot get cards proving they have had shots, but the cards are reported to be for sale at police checkpoints.
Australia’s now-endemic dengue fever, according to ProMED moderators, may have come from mosquitoes arriving in containers from East Timor.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A fuel leak forced a Boeing Co 787 Dreamliner operated by Japan Airlines to cancel its takeoff and return to the gate at Boston's Logan International Airport Tuesday, a fire official said, the second incident in two days with the new jet.
The leak occurred on a different plane than the 787 that experienced an electrical fire Monday at Logan, said Richard Walsh, a Massport spokesman. That plane also was operated by Japan Airlines.
The fuel-leaking plane had left the gate in preparation for takeoff on a flight to Tokyo when the fuel spill of about 40 gallons was discovered, Walsh said. No fire or injuries occurred, he said.
The plane was towed back to the gate, where passengers disembarked and were waiting for a decision on whether the flight would leave, he said.
"The airline will make that determination," Walsh said.
A spokeswoman for Japan Airlines, Carol Anderson, said the plane had returned to the gate because of a mechanical issue, but said exact details were not yet confirmed.
Boeing said it was aware of the issue and was working with its customer.
The National Transportation Safety Board, which is investigating the fire that occurred on Monday, said this issue wouldn't warrant an investigation because there was no accident.
In December, the Federal Aviation Administration ordered inspections of 787s after fuel leaks were found on two aircraft operated by foreign airlines. The leaks stemmed from incorrectly assembled fuel line couplings, which could result in loss of power or engine fire, the FAA said.
Boeing shares were down 3.2 percent at $73.63 in afternoon trading. The stock fell 2 percent on Monday.
Walsh, the Massport spokesman, said the leak was noticed at 12:25 pm ET Tuesday, as the flight, JAL 007, was taxiing toward the runway for takeoff. Crews used an absorbent to soak up the spilled fuel, Walsh said.
Some analysts had raised concerns about Boeing's jet after the JAL 787 suffered an electrical fire on Monday. Today's fuel leak caused further alarm about the impact on public perceptions of Boeing and the plane.
"We're getting to a tipping point where they go from needing to rectify problems to doing major damage control to the image of the company and the plane," said Richard Aboulafia, a defense and aerospace analyst with Teal Group, a consulting firm based in Fairfax, Virginia.
"While they delivered a large and unexpected number of 787s last year, it's possible that they should have instead focused on identifying glitches and flaws, rather than pushing ahead with volume production," he said.
Aboulafia said there is still no indication that the plane itself is flawed.
"It's just a question of how quickly they can get all the onboard technologies right, and whether or not the 787 and Boeing brands will be badly damaged," he said.
(Reporting by Alwyn Scott; Editing by Steve Orlofsky, Cynthia Osterman and Andrew Hay)
WASHINGTON -- Ten of the nation's largest mortgage servicers have agreed to an $8.5-billion settlement with federal regulators to end a review of foreclosure abuses.
The settlement, announced Monday, involved some of the biggest names in the financial industry, including Bank of America Corp., Wells Fargo & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup Inc..
They agreed to pay a total of $3.3 billion to more than 3.8 million borrowers whose homes were in foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, according to the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. Borrowers could receive as much as $125,000, depending on the type of problems with their foreclosures.
In addition, the banks agreed to provide $5.2 billion in other assistance to those borrowers, including modifications to their mortgages or having judgments against them forgiven.
The other servicers participating in the settlement are Aurora Loan Services, MetLife Bank, PNC Financial Services, Sovereign Bank, SunTrust Banks and U.S. Bancorp. Four smaller servicers whose foreclosure practices have been under review did not sign on to Monday's settlement.
Under the original plan devised by the comptroller and the Federal Reserve in April 2011, 4.4 million Americans whose homes were in foreclosure proceedings in 2009 and 2010 could request a free review. Only about half a million have done so.
Regulators decided to stop the reviews in exchange for the cash payments and assistance.
Borrowers who requested reviews would get bigger cash payments. Those that did not would get a few hundred dollars. Those who requested reviews would get bigger payments.
"When we began the Independent Foreclosure Review, the OCC pledged to fix what was broken, identify who was harmed and compensate them for that injury," said Comptroller of the Currency Thomas J. Curry.
"While today's announcement represents a significant change in direction," he continued, "it meets those original objectives by ensuring that consumers are the ones who will benefit and that they will benefit more quickly and in a more direct manner."
Curry said that although regulators have "have learned a great deal from the reviews ... it has become clear that carrying the process through to its conclusion would divert money away from the impacted homeowners" and delay compensation to the borrowers.
Rep. Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.), criticized the decision by regulators to reach a settlement with the mortgage servicers.
"I am deeply disappointed that the OCC and the Federal Reserve finalized this settlement and effectively terminated the Independent Foreclosure Review process before providing Congress answers to serious questions about how this settlement amount was determined, who these funds will go to, and what will happen to other families who were abused by these mortgage servicing companies, but have not yet had their cases reviewed," Cummings said.
He said he didn't know "know what the rush was to make this settlement without answering these key questions" and that he had "serious concerns that this settlement may allow banks to skirt what they owe and sweep past abuses under the rug without determining the full harm borrowers have suffered."
ALSO:
Investors bet BofA can begin to focus on expansion
$10-billion settlement of foreclosure abuse cases said to be near
Bank of America to pay Fannie Mae $10 billion in loan settlement
If sticking drawings to a fridge won’t do, parents of pint-sized Picassos can put their child’s art on a pedestal by having it 3-D printed through a new service called CrayonCreatures.
The service is the invention of Bernat Cuni, a Spanish designer working in Barcelona with a focus on emerging 3-D printing applications. “The idea came one morning when my daughter asked me to make one of her drawings as a toy with my DIY 3-D printer, and I did it,” says Cuni. “She was totally satisfied with a monochrome plastic version of her drawing, but I wasn’t. I felt that something was lost in the translation from drawing to thing. That was the color, the scratches of crayon that make a child’s drawing so unique and expressiveness were lost.”
Cuni revised the process to add full-color printouts, and in turn, launched CrayonCreatures to help others do the same. The system is simple: The drawings of a diminutive Degas are scanned, interpreted by an artist at CrayonCreatures, and a full-color print is produced on a ZCorp 3-D printer, then shipped to the designer. It’s similar to Child’s Own, the drawing-to-plushie service, but uses the actual drawn details from the original artwork in the prints.
CrayonCreatures’ process for transforming 2-D sketches into 3-D prints starts with outlining the drawings, then using CAD tools they “inflate it like a balloon,” apply pressure physics to round out the shapes, and export the file for 3-D printing. ”I feel CrayonCreatures is a 3-D printing application where the value is not on the fabrication process itself but in the service that it provides,” says Cuni. “Often some 3-D printed objects and projects rely on the technological ‘wow’ factor of 3-D printing, and I try to avoid that.”
There are some limitations to what kinds of drawings can be printed, but Cuni promises that workarounds can be found, even if a parent is raising a budding abstract expressionist. “Some things like thin walls and spiky shapes are not welcome because the object might collapse once it comes out from the printer,” he says. “I make the 3-D models as accurate to the original drawing as possible, and in some cases, if the character has super thin legs or hair, I have to make a blob around it in order to make it printable.”
The printouts aren’t as expensive as most commissioned statues, but still cost more than most figurines; each four-inch figurine is $150 — $130 for printing and $20 more for shipping to the US.
Beyond CrayonCreatures, Cuni is also exploring the intersection of toys and cutting edge fab technology through his “Jana” series, applying various images onto a plastic 3-D printout of a small teddy bear, based on scans of a five year old girl’s doll. “The idea behind the Jana series is the ‘editing’ capability of the digital environment,” Says Cuni. “We have became very familiar editing our digital things — from formatting a text in a word processing software to applying filters to our photos. So, when thinking that stuff will become digital as well, I thought about how plugins/effects/filters for the real objects might look.”
Cuni has used a simple teddy bear form as way to experiment with digital patterns, textures, and data from the real world. He’s superimposed a Google Map of Hong Kong on one, made another look like a sea urchin, and explored a variety of other sculptural techniques which are available at Shapeways.
While many still dismiss 3-D printers as toys, Cuni is using his Jana series to explore a bigger vision. His goal is to capture an object in the real world through digital means, apply filters to the CAD model, and return it to the world in a process he dubs “The Instagram of Things.”
PASADENA, Calif. (AP) — David Letterman says he sees a psychiatrist once a week, part of his attempt to be the person he once believed he was.
The late-night talk show host gave an extraordinary interview to Oprah Winfrey in which he talked about his feuds with her and Jay Leno, and his own effort to make amends for the affairs that became public three years ago when a man tried to extort him.
The interview aired Sunday night on Winfrey’s OWN network after it was done in November.
The CBS host says his wife has forgiven him for his transgressions and his life is more joyful than ever, but he hasn’t necessarily forgiven himself.
Letterman also called his late-night rival Leno the funniest guy he’s ever known.
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KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A wall in one of the conference rooms at the National Center for Drug Free Sport displays magazine covers, each capturing a moment in the inglorious history of doping scandals in sports.
Steve Hebert for The New York Times
The National Center for Drug Free Sport, in Kansas City, Mo., tries to deter doping with programs for high school, college and professional leagues.
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Don Catlin, formerly of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, has raised questions about drug testing at colleges.
The images show Ben Johnson, the sprinter who lost his 1988 Olympic gold medal after testing positive; and Barry Bonds, the tarnished home run king; and Lyle Alzado, one of the first pro football players to admit to steroid use.
“People always assume that it’s the athletes at the top of their sport or the top of their game that are using,” said Frank Uryasz, Drug Free Sport’s founder and president. “But I can assure you that’s not the case. There’s always that desire to be the best, to win. That permeates all level of sport — abuse where you just wouldn’t expect it.”
Over the past quarter-century, athletes like Johnson, Bonds and Alzado stirred widespread concern about doping in sports.
Professional leagues without drug-testing programs have put them in; leagues with drug-testing programs have strengthened them. Congress and medical experts have called on sports officials at all levels to treat doping like a scourge.
It was in this budding American culture of doping awareness that Uryasz found a niche business model. He has spent the past decade selling his company’s services to the country’s sports officials.
The company advises leagues and teams on what their testing protocols should look like — everything from what drugs to test for to how often athletes will be tested to what happens to the specimens after testing. It also handles the collection and testing of urine samples, often with the help of subcontractors.
Drug Free Sport provides drug-testing programs for high school, college and professional leagues.
A privately held company with fewer than 30 full-time employees, it counts among its clients Major League Baseball, the N.F.L., the N.B.A., the N.C.A.A. and about 300 individual college programs.
Many, if not all, of the players on the field Monday night for the Bowl Championship Series title game between Alabama and Notre Dame have participated in a drug-testing program engineered by Drug Free Sport.
Uryasz says his company’s programs provide substantial deterrents for athletes who might consider doping.
Critics, however, question how rigorous the company’s programs are. They say Drug Free Sport often fails to adhere to tenets of serious drug testing, like random, unannounced tests; collection of samples by trained, independent officials; and testing for a comprehensive list of recreational and performance-enhancing drugs.
The critics, pointing to a low rate of positive tests, question Drug Free Sport’s effectiveness at catching athletes who cheat. Since the company began running the N.C.A.A.’s drug-testing program in 1999, for example, the rate of positive tests has been no higher than 1 percent in any year — despite an N.C.A.A. survey of student-athletes that indicated at least 1 in 5 used marijuana, a banned substance. (The N.C.A.A. tests for marijuana at championship competitions but not in its year-round program.)
Uryasz said the rate of positive tests was not meaningful. “I don’t spend a lot of time on the percent positive as being an indicator of very much,” he said.
Independent doping experts contend that having a contract with Drug Free Sport allows sports officials to say they take testing seriously without enacting a truly stringent program.
Don Catlin, the former head of U.C.L.A.’s Olympic Analytical Lab, best known for breaking the Bay Area Laboratory Co-operative doping ring, oversaw the testing of many of Drug Free Sport’s urine samples when he was at U.C.L.A. He said the work by Drug Free Sport and similar companies could be used to mislead fans.
“The problem with these schools is they all want to say they’re doing drug testing, but they’re not really doing anything I would call drug testing,” he said.
A Company’s Origins
Uryasz said he became interested in working with student-athletes while tutoring them as an undergraduate at Nebraska. After he graduated, he earned an M.B.A. from Nebraska and worked in health care administration in Omaha. He said he heard about an opening at the N.C.A.A. through a friend.
Driven in part by scandals in professional sports, the N.C.A.A. voted at its 1986 annual convention to start a drug-testing program.
The Securities and Exchange Commission announced on Monday that it had named Geoffrey F. Aronow to be general counsel, the agency’s top legal post.
The appointment fills an important gap in the S.E.C.’s roster. There have been a number of prominent departures in recent weeks, following the resignation of Mary L. Schapiro as chairwoman in November.
For Mr. Aronow, a partner in the Washington office of Bingham McCutchen, the move represents a return to the regulatory world. He was the head of enforcement for the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the late 1990s.
At Bingham McCutchen, Mr. Aronow represented people and firms facing investigations from the S.E.C. and other regulators. The federal investigation into MF Global, the brokerage firm that went bankrupt in 2011 after raiding customer accounts, was one of his most prominent cases in recent memory. Mr. Aronow represented Christine Serwinski, MF Global’s North American chief financial officer.
“I’m truly honored to re-enter public service as the general counsel at an agency with such a storied history and critical mission of investor protection and effective market oversight,” Mr. Aronow said in a statement on Monday.
Mr. Aronow, 57, will join the S.E.C. later this month. He replaces Mark Cahn, who departed as part of a broader exodus from the agency. Robert W. Cook, the director of trading and markets, and Meredith Cross, the head of corporation finance, also announced their departures in the wake of Ms. Schapiro’s resignation.
Mr. Aronow is the first recent replacement official that the S.E.C plucked from outside the agency. And unlike other new directors, he won the job outright, saving him the burden and uncertainty of an interim status.
“Geoff brings the ideal combination of practical knowledge, expertise, and common sense that is so critical to addressing the often nuanced and difficult issues that come before the commission,” Elisse Walter, who replaced Ms. Schapiro as chairwoman, said in a statement.
Mr. Aronow joined Bingham McCutchen in 2008. He previously did two stints as a partner at Arnold & Porter.
In addition to his legal practice, Mr. Aronow is adjunct professor at George Washington University Law School. He also served on the board of the National Capital Area Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
LA JOLLA — There's a political stink rising in this seaside community, blown ashore from the rocks of La Jolla Cove, where myriad seabirds and marine mammals roost, rest and leave behind what animals leave behind.
The offal accumulation is offending noses at trendy restaurants, tourist haunts, and expensive condos perched on some of the most pricey real estate in the country. But finding a solution to the olfactory assault has proved elusive.
Environmental regulations have thwarted proposals to cleanse the rocks with a non-toxic, biodegradable solution. Even a low-tech idea to scrub the rocks with brooms may need official approval.
The state-protected cove area falls under the permitting jurisdiction of the California Coastal Commission and San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. Since wildlife is involved, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also have authority.
The normally low-key Sherri Lightner, who represents La Jolla on the San Diego City Council, has challenged — some say dared — Gov. Jerry Brown to tour the cove area in high stink season.
"Everybody is pointing fingers, and nobody is doing anything," said a La Jolla resident who strolled the sidewalk along the community's famed corniche on New Year's Day, tissue to her nose to battle the smell.
A San Diego park ranger assigned to the La Jolla beaches takes a more philosophic approach toward the excretory matter. "It's a natural process," said ranger Richard Belesky. "But would I want to buy a multimillion-dollar condo with the stink nearby? I don't think so."
The difficulty of reconciling the habits of sea creatures and the needs of humankind is not new to La Jolla. South of the La Jolla Cove is the Children's Pool where harbor seals lounge on the beach.
For two decades a legal and political dispute has raged between people who say the seals should be removed because they are blocking access to the water and those who say the seals should be allowed to stay, particularly during pupping season. Signs warn bathers that seal excrement has resulted in a high bacteria count that can cause disease.
At the La Jolla Cove, the droppings began to pile up after restrictions were put in place to keep people from climbing down the delicate bluffs to the rocks below. The birds and mammals suddenly had no reason to scatter.
The La Jolla Village Merchants Assn. gathered more than 1,000 signatures demanding an immediate solution. But immediate is not in the governmental lexicon when it comes to issues involving the ocean and wildlife.
To wash down the rocks would require a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit from the San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board. The city, probably the full City Council, would need to endorse a specific wash-down proposal — but that, according to Lightner's staff, would mean submitting the issue to an application process that could take at least two years, given the backlog at the water board.
And even if the water board approved the application, the issue would then proceed to the Coastal Commission, an agency not known for its speed.
In hopes of finding a faster, if more limited, solution, city officials are considering arming Park and Recreation Department employees with brooms to scrub down the rocks. They assure that steps will be taken to ensure that no runoff reaches the ocean and no birds or mammals are hurt.
Talks are planned with regional, state and federal agency staff members to see if such a limited approach could be taken without a full-tilt application process. A radio talk-show host has shown the way, taking his own broom to the cove.
Meanwhile, restaurateurs say the smell continues to discourage patrons. Some tourists complain that it mars their vacations. Shirley Towlson, a bookkeeper who arrived in La Jolla from Phoenix, was shocked at the smell along the promenade and outside her hotel.
"I thought La Jolla meant 'The Jewel,' '' she said. "This smells more like 'The Toilet.' "
Other tourists find the smell but a small downer amid the other joys of La Jolla as a seaside place of visual beauty, fine dining and chic shopping.
"It smells like fish," said Mark Bain, a general contractor from Sacramento, enjoying a New Year's week idyll. "It happens."
He said the smell is not nearly as noxious as when dead fish line the banks of the Sacramento River. "Now, that's really bad," he said.
Author’s note: Most people don’t realize that we knew in the 1920s that leaded gasoline was extremely dangerous. And in light of a Mother Jones story this week that looks at the connection between leaded gasoline and crime rates in the United States, I thought it might be worth reviewing that history. The following is an updated version of an earlier post based on information from my book about early 10th century toxicology, The Poisoner’s Handbook.
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect those out-of-state corpses to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt blowing in Manhattan streets. But they did.
To understand why you need to know the story of those five dead men, or at least the story of their exposure to a then mysterious industrial poison.
The five men worked at the Standard Oil Refinery in Bayway, New Jersey. All of them spent their days in what plant employees nicknamed “the loony gas building”, a tidy brick structure where workers seemed to sicken as they handled a new gasoline additive. The additive’s technical name was tetraethyl lead or, in industrial shorthand, TEL. It was developed by researchers at General Motors as an anti-knock formula, with the assurance that it was entirely safe to handle.
But, as I wrote in a previous post, men working at the plant quickly gave it the “loony gas” tag because anyone who spent much time handling the additive showed stunning signs of mental deterioration, from memory loss to a stumbling loss of coordination to sudden twitchy bursts of rage. And then in October of 1924, workers in the TEL building began collapsing, going into convulsions, babbling deliriously. By the end of September, 32 of the 49 TEL workers were in the hospital; five of them were dead.
The problem, at that point, was that no one knew exactly why. Oh, they knew – or should have known – that tetraethyl lead was dangerous. As Charles Norris, chief medical examiner for New York City pointed out, the compound had been banned in Europe for years due to its toxic nature. But while U.S. corporations hurried TEL into production in the 1920s, they did not hurry to understand its medical or environmental effects.
In 1922, the U.S. Public Health Service had asked Thomas Midgley, Jr. – the developer of the leaded gasoline process – for copies of all his research into the health consequences of tetraethyl lead (TEL).
Midgley, a scientist at General Motors, replied that no such research existed. And two years later, even with bodies starting to pile up, he had still not looked into the question. Although GM and Standard Oil had formed a joint company to manufacture leaded gasoline – the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation - its research had focused solely on improving the TEL formulas. The companies disliked and frankly avoided the lead issue. They’d deliberately left the word out of their new company name to avoid its negative image.
In response to the worker health crisis at the Bayway plant, Standard Oil suggested that the problem might simply be overwork. Unimpressed, the state of New Jersey ordered a halt to TEL production. And because the compound was so poorly understood, state health officials asked the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office to find out what had happened.
In 1924, New York had the best forensic toxicology department in the country; in fact,, it had one of the few such programs period. The chief chemist was a dark, cigar-smoking, perfectionist named Alexander Gettler, a famously dogged researcher who would sit up late at night designing both experiments and apparatus as needed.
It took Gettler three obsessively focused weeks to figure out how much tetraethyl lead the Standard Oil workers had absorbed before they became ill, went crazy, or died. “This is one of the most difficult of many difficult investigations of the kind which have been carried on at this laboratory,” Norris said, when releasing the results. “This was the first work of its kind, as far as I know. Dr. Gettler had not only to do the work but to invent a considerable part of the method of doing it.”
Working with the first four bodies, then checking his results against the body of the last worker killed, who had died screaming in a straitjacket, Gettler discovered that TEL and its lead byproducts formed a recognizable distribution, concentrated in the lungs, the brain, and the bones. The highest levels were in the lungs suggesting that most of the poison had been inhaled; later tests showed that the types of masks used by Standard Oil did not filter out the lead in TEL vapors.
Rubber gloves did protect the hands but if TEL splattered onto unprotected skin, it absorbed alarmingly quickly. The result was intense poisoning with lead, a potent neurotoxin. The loony gas symptoms were, in fact, classic indicators of heavy lead toxicity.
After Norris released his office’s report on tetraethyl lead, New York City banned its sale, and the sale of “any preparation containing lead or other deleterious substances” as an additive to gasoline. So did New Jersey. So did the city of Philadelphia. It was a moment in which health officials in large urban areas were realizing that with increased use of automobiles, it was likely that residents would be increasingly exposed to dangerous lead residues and they moved quickly to protect them.
But fearing that such measures would spread, that they would be forced to find another anti-knock compound, as well as losing considerable money, the manufacturing companies demanded that the federal government take over the investigation and develop its own regulations. U.S. President Calvin Coolidge, a Republican and small-government conservative, moved rapidly in favor of the business interests.
The manufacturers agreed to suspend TEL production and distribution until a federal investigation was completed. In May 1925, the U.S. Surgeon General called a national tetraethyl lead conference, to be followed by the formation of an investigative task force to study the problem. That same year, Midgley published his first health analysis of TEL, which acknowledged a minor health risk at most, insisting that the use of lead compounds,”compared with other chemical industries it is neither grave nor inescapable.”
It was obvious in advance that he’d basically written the conclusion of the federal task force. That panel only included selected industry scientists like Midgely. It had no place for Alexander Gettler or Charles Norris or, in fact, anyone from any city where sales of the gas had been banned, or any agency involved in the producing that first critical analysis of tetraethyl lead.
In January 1926, the public health service released its report which concluded that there was “no danger” posed by adding TEL to gasoline…”no reason to prohibit the sale of leaded gasoline” as long as workers were well protected during the manufacturing process.
The task force did look briefly at risks associated with every day exposure by drivers, automobile attendants, gas station operators, and found that it was minimal. The researchers had indeed found lead residues in dusty corners of garages. In addition, all the drivers tested showed trace amounts of lead in their blood. But a low level of lead could be tolerated, the scientists announced. After all, none of the test subjects showed the extreme behaviors and breakdowns associated with places like the looney gas building. And the worker problem could be handled with some protective gear.
There was one cautionary note, though. The federal panel warned that exposure levels would probably rise as more people took to the roads. Perhaps, at a later point, the scientists suggested, the research should be taken up again. It was always possible that leaded gasoline might “constitute a menace to the general public after prolonged use or other conditions not foreseen at this time.”
But, of course, that would be another generation’s problem. In 1926, citing evidence from the TEL report, the federal government revoked all bans on production and sale of leaded gasoline. The reaction of industry was jubilant; one Standard Oil spokesman likened the compound to a “gift of God,” so great was its potential to improve automobile performance.
In New York City, at least, Charles Norris decided to prepare for the health and environmental problems to come. He suggested that the department scientists do a base-line measurement of lead levels in the dirt and debris blowing across city streets. People died, he pointed out to his staff; and everyone knew that heavy metals like lead tended to accumulate. The resulting comparison of street dirt in 1924 and 1934 found a 50 percent increase in lead levels – a warning, an indicator of damage to come, if anyone had been paying attention.
It was some fifty years later – in 1986 – that the United States formally banned lead as a gasoline additive. By that time, according to some estimates, so much lead had been deposited into soils, streets, building surfaces, that an estimated 68 million children would register toxic levels of lead absorption and some 5,000 American adults would die annually of lead-induced heart disease. As lead affects cognitive function, some neuroscientists also suggested that chronic lead exposure resulted in a measurable drop in IQ scores during the leaded gas era. And more recently, of course, researchers had suggested that TEL exposure and resulting nervous system damage may have contributed to violent crime rates in the 20th century.
Which is just another way of say that we never got out of the loony gas building after all.
Images: 1) Manhattan, 34th Street, 1931/NYC Municipal Archives 2) 1940s gas station, US Route 66, Illinois/Deborah Blum
