Credit: Hitchster via Flickr. (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Lead is a study in contradictions. It’s dense enough to stop an X-ray, but soft enough to scratch with your fingernail. It’s heavier than steel and iron, but also more flexible.

And, despite evidence of its toxicity, humans have been using it for all sorts of things for thousands of years.

In this edition of our series “The Element of Surprise,” we hone in on this notorious heavy metal. What chemical properties make lead so harmful? How did something so dangerous become so ubiquitous? And if medical authorities acknowledge no amount of lead exposure is safe – especially for children – why do so many of us have lead in our water and our homes?

Featuring Justin Richardson, Bruce Lanphear, and Chakena Perry.

ADDITIONAL MATERIALS

Radiolab dedicated an episode to the scientist that was trying to estimate the earth’s age, and unintentionally helped get rid of leaded gasoline in the process. It’s wild and worth a listen.

A comprehensive history of leaded gasoline and an in-depth investigation of how the lead industry lobbied cities to use lead pipes.

Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner have published numerous books covering the American lead industry and lead’s lasting public health impacts.

The EPA has robust resources about how to deal with lead exposure and how to minimize your risk.

SUPPORT

To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.

Outside/In is made possible with listener support. Click here to become a sustaining member of Outside/In.

Follow Outside/In on Instagram or join our private discussion group on Facebook.

CREDITS

Host: Nate Hegyi

Reported, produced, and mixed by Kate Dario

Editing by Taylor Quimby

Our staff includes Marina Henke, Felix Poon, and Justine Paradis

Executive producer: Taylor Quimby

Rebecca Lavoie is NHPR’s Director of On-Demand Audio

Music by Blue Dot Sessions and Dylan Sitts

Our theme music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio

Submit a question to the “Outside/Inbox.” We answer queries about the natural world, climate change, sustainability, and human evolution. You can send a voice memo to outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a message on our hotline, 1-844-GO-OTTER (844-466-8837).

Download a transcript

Audio Transcript

Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.

OPEN:

Kate Dario: Hey, Nate.

Nate Hegyi: Hey, Kate.

Kate Dario: I have a question for you. Have you been watching The Pit?

Nate Hegyi: Oh, I watched one episode, and it was really intense, and I just haven't watched it since. I don't need more intensity in my life, Kate.

Kate Dario: Okay. I don't mean to stress you out, but I have a medical mystery for you.

Nate Hegyi: Okay.

Kate Dario: I have a patient. She's a beautiful young woman named Maria, and she's living in 18th century London. She's a countess. She's a member of high society. And that means she is up to date with all the latest beauty trends. Uh, she really looks like. Kind of like an IT girl of this period.

Nate Hegyi: Okay, wait. What does an IT girl of that period look like?

Kate Dario: Alabaster, white skin, bright red cheeks and blood red lips.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, she totally seems like she's out of, like, a Tim Burton movie.

Kate Dario: Okay, well, you're picking up on the vibe because things are gonna get a little spooky, because underneath this chic facade, she's sick. She has skin pustules. Her hair is falling out and she has premature wrinkles.

Nate Hegyi: Oh.

Kate Dario: So she's feeling worse and worse about her looks, so she keeps on applying more and more makeup to cover things up. But her muscles ache. Her stomach hurts. And at age 27, she dies.

Nate Hegyi: What does she have? Okay, so this is a medical mystery.

Kate Dario: Yeah. I'm paging Doctor Hedgy. What do you think might be happening?

Nate Hegyi: Um. Premature wrinkles. Uh, I think she has the, um. She has the worst hangover of all time.

Kate Dario: I think that's a good guess. Using context clues. But most people think that Maria likely died of lead poisoning from her makeup.

Nate Hegyi: Mhm. So they're just, like, spreading lead paint on their face.

Kate Dario: So she was likely using Venetian Cirrus, a lead based skin whitening makeup popular among the European elite between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Nate Hegyi: Wait, when did we find out that lead was bad for you?

Kate Dario: So I know it's easy to look back and be like. These were the olden days. This was the 18th century, right? Like people didn't know anything. But to answer your question, I'm going to have you read a quote for me. And then I want you to tell me when you think this is from.

Nate Hegyi: Okay. Quote. Water is much more wholesome from earthenware pipes than from lead pipes, for it seems to be made injurious. Injurious.

Kate Dario: That sounds right.

Nate Hegyi: Injurious by lead, because white lead paint is produced from it, and this is said to be harmful to the human body. Ah, I'm going to guess that this is from the coroner's report after she died.

Kate Dario: It is from the first century BC, and it is a quote from the writings of the ancient Roman architect Vitruvius.

Nate Hegyi: Oh, so they've known about this for a really, really long time.

Kate Dario: Yeah. If only Maria had been reading her Latin textbooks instead of the latest beauty magazines from the day.

Nate Hegyi: I'm Nate Hegy and this is Outside/In. And today producer Kate Dario has another edition of our periodic segment, The Element of Surprise. Do you get it, Kate?

Kate Dario: Periodic segment I do, I do. Very nice.

Nate Hegyi: And this time we are going to be talking about lead.

Kate Dario: Yes. Lead. Atomic symbol PB, sometimes called the black sheep of the carbon family. Look, pretty much everybody knows that lead is not good when it gets inside our bodies. So why on earth did humans use it for so many things?

And from paint to pipes to leaded gasoline, why are we still stuck cleaning up these messes from the past?

[BREAK]

Part 1:

Kate Dario: To understand lead. I think we need to start with the basics. Nate, do you know the phrase form follows function?

Nate Hegyi: I probably should know that phrase. Like I went to college, but I don't.

Kate Dario: Well, being a lifelong learner is a good thing, so. Okay.

Nate Hegyi: All right. Teach me, teach me. Kate.

Kate Dario: Point is, people didn't just reach for lead just because its physical properties make it super useful. First, it has a high atomic number. 82, to be precise. This means it has a tightly packed nucleus. It is classified as a heavy metal. And that's why when you get an x-ray at the dentist, they give you a lead apron. The metal is so dense it can stop or absorb radiation.

Nate Hegyi: Huh. Okay, so that's why I'm always wearing lead whenever I get an x ray.

Kate Dario: Exactly. And that's also why we use it to surround nuclear reactors. Why old TVs use lead to stop radiation. And it's why lead is the only metal that Superman cannot see through.

[Superman clip]

Nate Hegyi: He can fly. He can do all these amazing things, but he can't see through lead. Come on, Superman.

[Superman clip]

Kate Dario: But at the same time, lead is also soft and malleable. You can bang it into all sorts of shapes and sizes really easily. And that's because structurally, the bonds between lead atoms are relatively weak. So the atoms have a lot of flexibility, meaning they can move and shift without breaking.

Nate Hegyi: Okay. So it's strong, but it also bend and is squishy and flexible.

Kate Dario: Yeah. Lead has been hitting the yoga classes hard. It's also very resistant to corrosion. Okay. So chemistry. Lee speaking. When pure lead meets oxygen and carbon dioxide in the air, it forms this protective shield of lead carbonate. So unlike iron, lead doesn't rust, and that's one of the reasons it's still used today widely in car batteries, because it can handle battery acid without totally falling apart.

Nate Hegyi: That's fascinating. I didn't realize that lead can't rust. I mean, that makes sense for pipes, too.

Kate Dario: And finally, lead has a low boiling point which goes back to the weak atomic bonds also. And among other things, that means it's relatively easy to take lead ore and turn it into pure lead.

Nate Hegyi: Okay, so I can just do that on my stovetop then.

Kate Dario: New hobby for the weekends. Exactly. How much do you know about lead mining?

Nate Hegyi: Uh, I know nothing about lead mining.

Kate Dario: Have you heard the word Galena before?

Nate Hegyi: Uh, no, but it does sound like a really good name for some, like Gen Alpha it girl.

Kate Dario: I will add that to my baby name list. So Galena is the primary lead ore, and it's so important for lead mining that it actually is the state mineral in a few places like Missouri, Kansas and Wisconsin.

Nate Hegyi: How did I not know it was the state mineral of Wisconsin. I grew up there.

Kate Dario: Galena is a form of lead sulfide, and this is connected to early mining history. Because experts think lead was first mined kind of unintentionally, as a byproduct from pursuing other, more precious metals.

Justin Richardson: So it hangs out with sulfur and sulfides, and sulfur and sulfides are known since antiquity to host very useful things like, say, copper for the Bronze Age.

Kate Dario: That is Justin Richardson. He is a biogeochemist at UVA.

Justin Richardson: So of course they're melting down all this copper, and they have all this other leftover material, and those leftover material seems hard, but it's easy to use, and you don't need a very high temperature to melt it. So with that in mind, it was just basically human ingenuity to take a waste product and make something useful of it.

Kate Dario: And boy, what a waste product it was. Nate, off the top of your head, what's one of the big well-known ways ancient civilizations used lead. I'm guessing you probably think about this often.

Nate Hegyi: I really appreciate that. Hint. The Roman empire.

Kate Dario: Exactly. So PB, the chemical symbol for lead, comes from its Latin name Plumbum plumbum. So what English word did Plumbum give us? It gave us plumbing. And as you know, the Romans were way ahead of the curve when it came to water and waste systems. They had aqueducts, sewers and. Yeah, lead pipes for drinking water. And again, think about all the properties we've talked about. Lead is abundant. It's easy to bend in pipes and they won't rust like they would if they were made of iron. But Romans didn't just have lead in their water system. Roman winemakers preferred lead pots or lead lined kettles.

Justin Richardson: Lead tastes sweet, so that's why kids put it in their mouths and why Romans had used lead for sweetening wine.

Kate Dario: There are even surviving cooking recipes that call for using lead acetate as a sweetener.

Nate Hegyi: It seems like the perfect metal. If only it didn't have a really bad downside.

Kate Dario: Yeah, exactly. Now, ancient Romans began to realize that there were potential health effects from all this lead. And Vitruvius, who we talked about earlier, likely observed people getting acute lead poisoning. But for thousands of years, across different civilizations, people decided the pros outweigh the cons. So I want to play a game. You're going to name an ancient civilization. Okay. And then we're going to talk about how they use lead. Give me a name.

Nate Hegyi: The Egyptians?

Kate Dario: used it in cosmetics and in fishing.

Nate Hegyi: Uh, China.

Kate Dario: China used it in coins.

Nate Hegyi: The Fertile Crescent.

Kate Dario: They used it as a writing material.

So I could keep going and going. I mean, this continued throughout the centuries. Printing press, stained glass windows, bullets. Lead has become a super important resource that was a bedrock for human civilization for centuries.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, and we're still using it today.

Kate Dario: But today, we know that our long love affair with lead has come at a huge cost, because many of the same physical and chemical properties that make lead so useful are also what make it so dangerous for the human body.

Justin Richardson: One of the modus operandi. So the modes of toxicity for lead is that it gets ingested by organisms, and essentially lead is treated by the organism as calcium.

Nate Hegyi: So our body thinks that the lead is actually calcium.

Kate Dario: Yeah. So when lead gets ingested in water or in dust or in paint or whatever, our bodies treat it like calcium and it accumulates where calcium accumulates in our bones and in our teeth. And when a bone breaks or during pregnancy, lead that is stored in the bones can be rereleased into the body's bloodstream.

Justin Richardson: And also it gets into your brain and essentially in your brain, your neurons are trying to send signals, and the calcium that should be carrying the signal is not there.

Kate Dario: And here's what's most frightening about all of this. It stays with us. Your body doesn't process lead like it can other contaminants. Once it's there, it's basically there forever.

Nate Hegyi: Huh.

Kate Dario: And lead exposure is particularly dangerous for children because they absorb lead easier than for adults. And lead poisoning can lead to impaired cognitive development, learning disabilities, hearing problems, behavioral issues, and even death.

Nate Hegyi: You know, I knew that lead was bad. I just didn't know it was this bad. This makes me a little bit afraid of lead.

Kate Dario: I will say I have been having a harder and harder time drinking from my tap water. So that's starting to do all this research.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, and I'm really happy I didn't close on a house a couple years ago that had lead paint on the inside and outside.

Kate Dario: Exactly. Because in adults, lead exposure can also create issues. It can affect memory, mental health, heart disease and fertility. And all these risks really became a big problem around the Industrial revolution when our lead production kicked into overdrive.

[Leaded Gasoline Ad]

Kate Dario: More after the break.

Part 2:

Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside In. I am here with Kate Dario and we are talking about all things lead okay.

Kate Dario: I want to talk about lead in 20th century America. Since around the turn of the century, there have been three main ways that lead has gotten into people. Lead. Pipes, lead paint, and leaded gasoline. Let's start with leaded gasoline. All right. Nate. Does the name Thomas Midgley Jr ring any bells?

Nate Hegyi: No. He sounds like some sort of like an accountant in the 1930s.

Kate Dario: So he was not an accountant. But this is a really interesting story, because some people say that no human has had a larger impact on the environment than this one guy, Thomas Midgley Jr. So Midgley Jr was a chemical engineer who worked for General Motors in the 1920s, and he is the inventor of Freon today.

[Freon ad]

Kate Dario: And Nate, tell me, what did that do?

Nate Hegyi: It was in refrigerants and it led to a hole in the ozone.

[Vintage news clip]

Kate Dario: But one, you know, planet altering invention was not enough for Midgley Jr. He is also the inventor of Tetraethyl lead. And that is the additive that gave us leaded gasoline.

Nate Hegyi: Why were we putting lead in gasoline? I've never understood this.

Kate Dario: Basically, early automobile engines experienced this thing called knocking. It's kind of like incomplete combustion. And it was really loud and even dangerous. And car companies like GM wanted to fix it. And a few different things worked. And one of those things was TEL.

[Vintage TEL ad]

Kate Dario: But

Bruce Lanphear: There were alternatives to lead.

Kate Dario: That's Bruce Lanphear. He's a doctor and a public health researcher who's been at the vanguard of lead science for decades. And he says one of those alternatives was ethanol.

Bruce Lanphear: Ethanol could have been used. The problem is nobody could get a monopoly on ethanol. And so the industry that was pushing this: General Motors, DuPont, among the big ones, were pushing this because they could get a monopoly.

Nate Hegyi: Wait so they could get a monopoly on this lead stuff that Midgley created. But they couldn't get it on ethanol. How?

Kate Dario: Because people have been making ethanol for thousands of years. You can make it via fermentation from things like sugars found in corn and sugar cane. So any old farmer could make it. But you could patent TEL because this was a novel invention. So places like GM, DuPont, Standard Oil, they all came together to form something called the Ethyl Corporation to manufacture TEL.

Nate Hegyi: Wait, why do they call it the Ethyl Corporation if they're not making ethanol?

Kate Dario: It's sort of confusing, which people think was part of the plan to sort of obscure the lead, leave out the L of T.l emphasize the E, so people would be none the wiser. Because even at this time, in the 1920s, a lot of people knew that lead was dangerous before it even went to mass market, there was significant pushback from scientists and the emerging field of public health.

Bruce Lanphear: The US surgeon general convened a panel of scientists and industry representatives, and the scientists consistently said, don't do it. Don't add lead to gasoline. It's a poison. The nation's leading expert on chemical warfare said you'll cause a scourge worse than tuberculosis, with people dying from slow lead poisoning and hardening of the arteries.

Kate Dario: But those warnings went unheeded, and the government let TEL be used broadly, and it became the dominant form of gasoline sold in the US. And pollution from leaded gasoline isn't like what you'd get from, like, a smokestack. Here's Justin, the soil biogeochemist we heard from earlier.

Justin Richardson: What makes leaded gasoline so prevalent is that it's a mobile source. It's one of these non-point sources where people are driving vehicles, burning gallons of leaded gasoline all throughout the United States and all throughout the world, globally.

Kate Dario: He said even remote locales were impacted by all this lead we were just sending into the atmosphere.

Justin Richardson: So even though Vermont and New Hampshire is, you know, hundreds of miles away from some of the big urban areas like New York City, they were receiving some of the highest deposition rates because they're high in elevation and spending a lot of time in the clouds that are carrying the lead from urban areas and industrial areas of, say, Pennsylvania, new Jersey and New York City.

Kate Dario: So it was everywhere. It was floating everywhere. And this is really interesting. So during the summer, because of lead floating in the air and lead in the paint, lead poisoning actually was a bigger issue on summer vacation.

Bruce Lanphear: If you look at older homes, people would open the windows.

Kate Dario: This is Bruce Lanphear again.

Bruce Lanphear: And all that dust that might have been trapped in the window trough or the window wells would then blow in the exterior, paint was often more heavily contaminated with lead, or more lead had been added than interior paint, and so that would blow in from the outdoors. But there were also some human factors. Children are going to be exposed to more sunlight during the summers. Sunlight activates vitamin D, vitamin D increases calcium absorption from the gut, but lead mimics calcium absorption. And so you'd be absorbing more lead during the summer months because of the sun's rays.

Nate Hegyi: I have very specific, like childhood memories of opening windows during that first starts to get warm, and there's just all that dust. And that used to be like, you know, kind of a nice little memory. And now it's now it's tainted. It's tainted with lead. Kate.

Kate Dario: I know, I know this deeply because I lived over the summer in an old house here in New Hampshire, and I would be flinging the window open and close, open and close. And then one day I was like, that is really old chipping paint. Maybe this is bad.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, I should probably hold off.

Kate Dario: For a long time, there was some debate about how bad all this was because the lead industry argued that, yeah, acute lead poisoning is bad. You know, eating lead paint chips, not great. But they were like a little bit of lead in the environment. That's not a big deal. Don't worry about it.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Dose makes the poison.

Kate Dario: But that's not true for lead because modern science tells us there is no safe level of lead. Even minuscule amounts in a child's bloodstream can have negative effects. The EPA uses an acronym called the MCL, and it stands for the Maximum Contaminant Level Goal, and the MCL for lead is zero.

Bruce Lanphear: Even when children were dying in the streets in cities like New York and Chicago and Providence, the lead industry would argue that it wasn't from gasoline, it was from paint. It was from mothers in slums not doing a good job cleaning their homes. Right. So they found ways to blame people for the contamination that they were causing.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah. That is just vile.

Kate Dario: No, it's really terrible. And it did irreparable damage. There was a 2022 study from Duke that estimates exposure to car exhaust from leaded gas during childhood, stole a collective 824 million IQ points for more than 170 million Americans alive today. Let me simplify that. That is more than half the population of the US losing around five IQ points apiece.

Nate Hegyi: Jeez.

Kate Dario: So we finally started phasing out leaded gasoline in the 1970s. There was the Clean Air Act, and the newly minted EPA started requiring catalytic converters, which were actually incompatible with leaded gasoline. So that's interesting. But it wasn't fully banned until 1996. That ad you heard earlier.

[Leaded gas ad]

Kate Dario: That was from the 80s. And in Algeria, the last country in the world to use leaded gasoline. They used up its last supply of the fuel in 2021.

Nate Hegyi: Wow. Coming up from our tailpipes to our water pipes. And why the quest to replace lead infrastructure is very, very slow going.

[BREAK]

Part 3:

Nate Hegyi: Welcome back to Outside In today. Kate Dario is talking about lead. And now we're going to move on to water pipes, right?

Kate Dario: Yep.

And that's because in the US today, there are still about 9 million service lines made of lead. A service line, to clarify is the pipe that connects from your house to the main line on the street. That means that 22 million people are getting their water through a lead service line.

Nate Hegyi: So it's not even just the lead pipes potentially in your home, but it's the lead pipe that the city put in decades ago.

Kate Dario: Yeah. And I want to dig in here because if we know lead is bad, why is it so hard to completely get rid of lead service lines?

So to answer this, I want to zoom in on one place Chicago, which has more lead service lines than any other American city.

At the turn of the 20th century, you see the expansion of municipal water systems in the US and many plumbing experts. They thought the potential exposure from lead pipes was too low to be dangerous. Back then, tracing low level lead Exposure to symptoms was pretty tricky because when water systems are maintained well, there's actually little risk of lead from the pipe leaching into the water.

Nate Hegyi: Okay, so it's not like chipping off when you've got like water going through it. It's it's all kind of just staying in place.

Kate Dario: Well let's get into it because it's complicated. It's not just the pipe that matters. The water itself does. If the water is too acidic or alkaline, exactly. Lead can fleck into the water and get into the drinking supply. That's what happened in Flint, Michigan, in 2014.

[BBC news clip]

Kate Dario: The city changed its water source, didn't test or treat the highly corrosive water adequately, and a ton of lead got into the city's drinking supply. But if your water is well treated and your lead infrastructure is really well maintained. You might not have problems for a long time. So let's go back to the beginning of the 20th century. Cities decided the advantages of lead outweighed the potential health risks. And that happened on a large scale in Chicago, because they didn't just use lead pipes like a lot of other cities did. Chicago required them by law.

Nate Hegyi: Why did they require them by law? That seems ridiculous.

Kate Dario: I know, but we can go through it. On the one hand, you've got the lead industry, and they're directly lobbying city governments to use lead pipes. And they're also helping train a generation of plumbers. So plumbers unions become big fans of lead pipes, and they're funding research. The lead industry was pushing back against reports about lead poisoning and instead funneling money into research that showed the benefit, not the harm, of lead pipes.

Nate Hegyi: Okay. Yeah, I. This all tracks.

Chakena Perry: Chicago has more lead service lines than any other city in the country. We have approximately 409,000 known lead service lines.

Kate Dario: That's Chakena Perry, a native Chicagoan and a policy advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Chakena Perry: So we look at lead pipes as like you're drinking lead out of a straw. Essentially, sometimes these little particles that are within the lead service line kind of break off into our water. And when we turn on our tap, we can't see it, right? We can't taste it, but it's there and it's impacting the health of everyone that that drinks it every time. When they don't have the proper mechanisms in place to actually remove it.

Kate Dario: So the federal government banned new lead service lines from being installed in the 1980s, but many public health officials and scientists, along with activists like Chakena, they want to see Chicago get rid of all the old lines that are already there.

Chakena Perry: Water infrastructure needs are particularly burdensome in low income communities of color. On top of the other cumulative impacts and environmental justices that these communities already face.

Kate Dario: Shekinah also points that this is a form of environmental justice, because families of color are disproportionately likely to be renters who struggle to get lead lines changed themselves. Plus, they're more likely to live in older houses with more lead pipes and pollution.

[Biden clip]

Kate Dario: Advocates of lead replacement got a big win in 2024, when the Biden EPA said that we have to get rid of all lead service lines within the next ten years. But actually doing this much easier said than done. First and foremost, the cost. The Biden plan allotted $15 billion nationwide to do the work, but estimates say that replacing lead lines in Chicago alone will cost more than half of that, so that just isn't going to cover it.

Nate Hegyi: Okay.

Kate Dario: Second of all, lead lines are kind of an all or nothing problem. And that's because if you only do some sections, you can actually make lead exposure worse.

Nate Hegyi: Wait, how?

Kate Dario: Say you have multiple sections of a lead pipe. If you just switch out one of those sections, it's kind of like shaking up all the lead that already exists in that other pipe. And during the Obama years, the CDC actually warned that partial line replacements have been linked to a temporary increase in blood lead levels in children.

Nate Hegyi: Yeah, but can you imagine if you actually did it all at once? You would just not be able to go anywhere. All the roads would be closed. There'd be people with hard hats digging through the streets. It would just be a mess.

Kate Dario: Exactly. And that's the final point, which is that digging up these lead lines is going to be really disruptive, because the city needs permission to access the service lines under people's private property. And we're talking about digging up sidewalks, going into people's lawns, getting into people's basements, and especially for some communities of color who are bearing a disproportionate amount of this problem, they might be particularly skeptical of a government that has long discriminated against them coming in and tearing stuff up. And when you look at the scale of these complications, advocates and critics alike agree on one thing Chicago does not have the resources to do this fast. The Biden administration actually gave the city an exception for most places. They're required to get rid of all their lead service lines in ten years, but they let Chicago have 20. But get this, city officials think it's going to take 50.

Nate Hegyi: And are these like, uh, are these goals even in place anymore with the Trump administration?

Kate Dario: Well, that's a great question. Right now, the rules are technically still in place, but there is a bill in the House to roll them back. And Trump has directed the EPA to roll back the funding that would help states do this work in the first place. So yeah, stay tuned. I've basically been googling “Lead, Trump, EPA” every day for the past month, every day.

Nate Hegyi: Because things change rapidly in 2025.

Kate Dario: Exactly, exactly. So there's one last thing I want to say about all this.

Bruce Lanphear, the expert I spoke with. He got into lead research in the 1990s. By this time, the US had banned new lead pipes, and leaded gasoline was on its way out. There was this sense that the clock was ticking on this kind of work.

Bruce Lanphear: My advisor said I should be getting out of this line of research because the problem was going away and there wouldn't be any funding. They were right about no money being available. But the problem didn't go away.

Kate Dario: Because even as we try and clean up our act, other countries are just getting started.

Bruce Lanphear: So even as we've seen blood lead levels come down in the United States, we've seen it increase in industrializing countries.

Kate Dario: Basically, when a society is in its development mode, lead still seems really useful, right?

Nate Hegyi: Again, because lead is like this amazing, amazing metal that's flexible, dense, cheap, but it comes with problems.

Bruce LanphearThe world Bank found first that lead accounts for about 5.5 million deaths every year around the world, and 765 million IQ points lost in children every year. In the end, people pay.

Nate Hegyi: This really does seem like how we treat a lot of our our big systemic problems. It's like the cycle just keeps happening, right? You're trying to build something fast, as you said. We'll deal with the consequences later.

Kate Dario: It makes me think if Vitruvius came back today, what would he think when he was walking around the streets of Chicago?

Nate Hegyi: Mhm. I think he'd think a lot of things like, what are those people holding in their hands and what are these buildings and where am I, where am I?

Kate Dario: Yeah you're right. The lead service lines might rank relatively low.

Nate Hegyi: The lead would probably be the least of his concerns at that point.

This episode was recorded, produced and mixed by Kate Dario.

It was edited by our executive producer, Taylor Quimby.

I am your host, Nate Hegyi.

Our team also includes Justine Paradis, Felix Poon, and Marina Henke.

Rebecca LaVoie is our head of on demand audio.

Kate Dario: Special thanks to Ronnie Levin, Dean Wilcox, Brenda Santoyo, Mercedes Bravo, Aylin Aykanat, and Gerald Markowitz.

And if you want to learn more about how exactly the lead lobby was so successful at getting lead everywhere in this country, we have links to a few books and articles going more in depth. And if you suspect you may have lead in your home or in your drinking water, we have included resources for how to best test and respond.

Nate Hegyi: I feel like you really should have had more music by heavy metal bands Kate, considering the topic of this. But anyways, you didn't. Music from blue Dot Sessions and Dylan Sitts.

Outside/In is a production of NHPR.