All language subtitles for 3BE35FF9FBB64FA88D0756B4C3B62631_eng

Once there was a man...

who went searching
for the true age of the Earth.

In his struggles to discover it,
he stumbled on a grave threat.

Beautiful spring day,
Pasadena, California, 1966.

Business is booming, life's good.

Except for one man...

a geochemist named Clair Patterson,
known as Pat.

He knows that everyone he sees
is in danger from an invisible menace.

And he's determined to put a stop to it,
no matter what the cost.

You can't really tell Pat Patterson's
story without going all the way back...

to the time long before the Earth,
our home, was built...

when the stars brought forth its substance.

Iron for the planet's molten core.

Oxygen for the rocks
and the water and the air.

Carbon for diamonds and life.

A star is born, ours.

For the first few million years,
things ran smoothly...

as dust grains snowballed
into progressively larger objects.

But once these objects grew massive enough
to have sufficient gravity...

they began pulling each other
into crossing orbits.

This is how our world looked
when it was new.

No part of the Earth's surface
could survive intact...

from that time to the present.

So with all its birth
and early childhood records erased...

how could we ever hope to know, with
any certainty, the true age of our world?

People have been wondering about this
since antiquity.

In 1650, Archbishop James Ussher of Ireland
made a calculation...

that seemed to settle the question.

Like almost everyone else
of his time and his world...

he accepted the biblical account
of creation as authoritative.

But the Bible does not give exact years...

so, Ussher searched for an event
in the Old Testament...

that corresponded
to a known historical date.

He found it in the Second Book of Kings...

the death of the Babylonian ruler
Nebuchadnezzar in 562 B. C.

Ussher added up the generations
of the prophets and the patriarchs...

the 139 "begets" of the Old Testament...

between Adam
and the time of Nebuchadnezzar...

and discovered that the world began
on October 22 in the year 4004 B.C...

at 6 p.m.

It was a Saturday.

Archbishop Ussher's chronology
was taken as gospel in the Western world...

until we turned to another book
to find the age of the Earth...

the one that was written
in the rocks themselves.

Most of the rock layers
in the walls of the Grand Canyon...

are made of sediments...

deposited as fine grains in a time
when this part of the world was a sea.

Over eons, the sediments
were compressed into rock...

under the weight of succeeding layers,
with the oldest ones at the bottom.

Pick a layer, any layer.

How about that one?

Once upon a time,
there must have been shallow water here.

Back in the Precambrian period,
about a billion years ago...

there was only one kind of life.

These blue-green bacteria...

were busy harvesting sunlight
and making oxygen.

For them, it was just a waste product...

but for the animals who evolved later,
including us, it was the breath of life.

Okay, pick another layer.

How about that one?

This layer is known
as the Bright Angel Shale.

It formed about 530 million years ago.

These tracks were left
260 million years ago.

So you want to know the age of the Earth?

Just figure out how long it took
to deposit each layer...

and then instead of counting the "begats,"
add up all the layers.

Easy, right?

Just one problem.

We know from observing this process...

Because it still happens today
in oceans and lakes around the world.

That sediments can be laid down
at widely different rates.

It usually happens very slowly,
say a foot of sediment per thousand years.

But when there's a rare catastrophic flood,
it can happen much faster...

as much as a foot in just a few days.

Many geologists tried this method
to calculate the age of the Earth.

They used the Grand Canyon and other
sedimentary sequences around the planet.

But their answers ranged too widely
to be of much use.

Anywhere between 3 million years
and 15 billion.

There were other problems
with this method.

Even the deepest layers of rock
are not the oldest things on Earth.

Why? Because not even rocks
could survive the Earth's violent infancy.

In space, it's another story.

Are there any mementos
from when the Earth was born...

objects that could possibly tell us
its true age?

I know a place where the unused bricks
and mortar left over...

from the creation of our solar system
can be found.

It lies between the orbits
of Jupiter and Mars.

Here is the stuff of the newborn Earth,
adrift in cold storage...

unchanged ever since that time.

A million or so years ago...

a large asteroid happened
to jostle a much smaller one...

sending it on a new trajectory...

a collision course that ended one night
some 50,000 years ago.

It must have shattered the peace of
the Grand Canyon as it sailed overhead...

to blast out this crater...

in what would one day be known
as Arizona.

Fragments of the iron asteroid
that made this crater have survived intact.

If we just knew how long ago
that iron was forged...

we'd know the age of the solar system,
including the Earth.

But how could we know that?

Pick a rock. Any rock.

How about that one?

Some atoms in this rock
could be radioactive...

which means they spontaneously
disintegrate and become other elements.

A uranium atom
first becomes a thorium atom.

On average, it takes a few billion years.

The thorium is much more unstable.

In less than a month,
it turns into protactinium.

A minute later, protactinium
becomes something else.

The atom undergoes
ten more nuclear transmutations...

until it reaches the last stop
on the decay chain...

a stable atom of lead.

And lead it will remain for eternity.

In the 20th century there was a huge effort
lasting decades...

to measure the time it takes
for each radioactive element...

to transmute into another element.

Physicists discovered that the atoms
of each unstable element decay...

at a constant rate.

The nucleus of an atom
is a kind of sanctuary...

immune to the shocks and upheavals
of its environment.

Hit it with a hammer.

Boil it in oil.

Vaporize it.

The nuclear clock goes on ticking,
keeping an absolute standard of time...

that does not look
to the sun and the stars.

What better way
to find the true age of the Earth...

than with the uranium atom?

If you knew what fraction of the uranium
in a rock had turned into lead...

you could calculate how much time
had passed since the rock was formed.

But there's a problem.

The rocks in the Earth that were present
when it was formed are no more.

They've all been crushed, melted, remade.

There is a way to calculate the amount of
lead that was present from the beginning.

It's a gift from the heavens: meteorites.

This one, a fragment of the one
that made this giant crater, was ideal.

The amount of lead
deep inside this meteorite

is exactly the same
as when Earth formed.

Since you know the constant rate
of uranium decay...

that should give you
the age of the meteorite,

which was made at the
same time as the Earth.

All you had to do was measure
the amount of lead in meteorites.

Easy, right?

A scientist named Harrison Brown,
at the University of Chicago...

first understood this in 1947.

He chose a young graduate student,
Clair Patterson, to do the work.

Patterson couldn't possibly know
how this assignment...

would alter the course of his life...

and ours.

What seemed like pure scientific research
turned out to be so much more.

Oh, the poor dear.

Clair Patterson,
son of a letter carrier from Iowa...

was rebellious by nature
and not very good in school.

But he was a natural-born scientist.

A geologist named Harrison Brown
gave Patterson...

what seemed like
a straightforward scientific assignment.

First off, Pat...
You mind if I call you Pat?

Now, I know you're no geologist. Probably
couldn't tell granite from feldspar.

But I hear you really know your way
around a mass spectrometer, Pat.

Good. You married, Pat?

Yeah, Laurie. Yeah, she's a chemist too.

We worked on the Manhattan Project
together at Oak Ridge.

Good, okay, well,
first thing you need to know:

There are these tiny
crystals called zircons.

Real small, size of a pinhead,
tight as a drum, and tough.

Nothing gets in or out of them,
and I'm talking for billions of years.

We know how old these grains are...

because we've already dated the rocks
they came from.

Each little zircon has only a few parts
per million of uranium inside...

and that uranium is decaying
to even tinier amounts of lead.

You figure out how to
measure that lead, and

you'll know how to
do it for a meteorite.

You think you can do that, Pat?

Yeah, yeah, I don't see why not.

Good, because when you do, you'll be
the first man to know the age of the Earth.

And you'll be famous.

And you'll see, it'll be easy.

Duck soup.

While Patterson tried to measure the trace
amounts of lead in the zircon grains...

another grad student, George Tilton...

was measuring the amount of uranium
in the same grains.

All Patterson had to do was measure
the amount of lead with equal accuracy.

She's all yours, Pat.
Measured it six times.

3.2 parts per million.

Yeah, nice going, George. Thanks.

Tilton's results were always the same.

But Patterson's results
on the lead content

of the same grains
were wildly inconsistent.

This made no sense.

Could the lab have been contaminated
by previous experiments with lead?

Maybe it was the naturally high amounts
of lead in the environment...

that were messing up his results.

Patterson did everything he could
to cleanse the lab of any lead.

There was still a hundred times
too much lead.

He had been at it for more than two years.

Duck soup, my ass.

Patterson realized he would have
to boil his containers and tools in acid...

and purify all his chemicals
to further reduce the lead in his lab.

Oh, I... I'm new here.
No!

Where's the men's room?
Ugh.

Damn it.

All of Patterson's
obsessive scouring and

sterilizing had still
not solved the problem.

He would need to design his own lab
and build it from scratch.

The opportunity arose
when Harrison Brown moved...

to the California
Institute of Technology in

Pasadena and invited
Patterson to join him.

Okay, Tom, that's enough.
We can move through the interlock now.

Patterson had now
been at it for six years...

doggedly tracking down
and eliminating the many sources of lead...

that were compromising his instruments.

He had built the world's first
ultra-clean room.

He was finally able to measure
how much lead was actually in the rock.

One whose age had already
been established.

Now at last Patterson was ready
to tackle the iron meteorite...

to find the true age of the Earth.

He brought his meteorite specimen back
to the Argonne National Laboratory...

where the world's most accurate
mass spectrometer...

had just become operational.

Doc, this can't wait till tomorrow?

Okay, little buddy,
we're gonna have to vaporize you.

A mass spectrometer uses magnets...

to separate the elements contained
in a sample...

so that the amounts of each element
can be quantified.

This would provide the last missing piece
in the puzzle of the Earth's true age.

Now I'm gonna ionize you, yeah.

Sounds worse than it is.

What's an electron between friends?

Having isolated the sample
from any outside lead contamination...

Patterson was at last ready to measure the
amount of lead and uranium in the sample...

and calculate how many years before
it had formed.

The true age of the Earth.

Thank you to all the scientists
who came before.

Thank you, geologists.

Thank you, Charles Lyell.

Thank you, Michael Faraday.

J.J. Thomson.

Ernest Rutherford.

And thank you, Harrison Brown.

The world is 4 and a
half billion years old.

We did it.

Mom? Morn?

Patterson wanted his mother
to be the first person...

to know what he had struggled
for so many years to discover.

The true age of the Earth.

His reward for this discovery?

A world of trouble.

He didn't know it,
but he was on a collision course...

with some of the most powerful people
on the planet.

To the ancient Romans...

the majestic ringed planet Saturn was not a
real place, not a world, but a god-king...

a son of the marriage of heaven and Earth,
the god of lead.

These columns are all that remain
of this oldest temple in the Roman Forum...

first consecrated to Saturn
2500 years ago.

It also served as Rome's treasury
and its bureau of weights and measures.

Tonight is Saturnalia, the wild December
holiday in Saturn's honor...

and everyday life
will be turned upside down.

The masters will serve the slaves...

no wars or executions will be allowed,
and gifts will be exchanged.

A couple of hundred years from now...

when the early church fathers
look for a way to attract more pagans...

they'll decide to turn Saturnalia
into Christmas...

making it the latest in a long line of
winter solstice holidays to be repurposed.

This towering statue of Saturn...

may have looked something like this
on the night of Saturnalia.

In ancient Rome,
this god had another darker side.

That other Saturn
is a cold and sullen, sluggish ghoul...

given to irrational bouts of rage.

He committed an unspeakable act of violence
against his father...

and devoured his own children.

Of all the planets
visible to the unaided

eye of the ancients,
Saturn is the slowest...

which could explain why they
named the planet after the god of lead.

But there's no denying that the more
negative aspects of Saturn's personality...

reflect the age-old knowledge
of the symptoms of lead poisoning.

Funny thing about the Romans.

Even though they knew that contact
with lead inevitably poisoned people...

rendered them sterile
and drove them mad,

what metal did they
use to make the pipes...

that carried the water
through their legendary aqueducts?

I'll give you a hint.

The word "plumbing" comes from
the Latin word for lead, "plumbum."

What metal did they use
to line their famous baths?

And how did they sweeten their wines
when they were too sour?

What did they use to line
their vats and cooking pots?

There are some historians who believe
that the widespread use of lead...

was a major cause in the decline
and fall of the Roman Empire.

Why did they continue to use lead
long after they knew it was toxic?

It was cheap, very malleable,
easy to work with.

And the ones who were exposed to it
at its most lethal levels...

the miners and workers who processed
the lead, were considered expendable.

Their lives didn't
matter. They were slaves.

Most of the Earth's lead started off
at a safe distance from living things...

down below the surface.

But about 8500 years ago,
humans began figuring out...

how to dig into the Earth
and extract metals from rock.

By the time this villa was new,
just a couple thousand years ago...

the Romans were producing
80,000 tons of lead a year.

Why is lead so poisonous to us?

Because when it gets into our bodies, lead
mimics other metals, like zinc and iron...

the ones our cells actually need
to grow and flourish.

Enzymes in the cell are fooled by the
lead's masquerade, and they begin to dance.

But it's a dance of death,
because the lead is an

imposter that can't fulfill
the cell's vital needs.

Lead also blocks neurotransmitters, the
communication network between the cells.

It interferes with the molecular receptors
that are vital to memory and learning.

This is especially damaging to children,
but lead poisoning spares no one.

Starting at the turn of the 20th century...

the makers of leaded paint
hired the fledgling advertising industry...

to persuade the consumer
that lead was child-friendly.

A little toy lead soldier
once to the Dutch Boy said:

"We have some fine relations
who all contain some lead."

Why don't you give a party
so folks can meet and see...

"...the other happy members
of the great lead family?"

The first one at the party
was Gay Electric Light.

He said, "I'm very brilliant.
I always shine at night."

No little of my brilliance
is due to my glass head...

"...which gives a light much brighter
because it's made with lead."

A pair or rubbers entered
and took the Dutch Boy's arm.

They said, "We are protectors
who keep you dry and warm."

You know, when we were molded,
the man who made us said...

"...we re strong and tough and lively
because in us, there's lead."

But lead production didn't really shift
into high gear until the early 1920s...

when chemist Thomas Midgley and inventor
Charles Kettering of General Motors...

found that tetraethyl
lead could be marketed

as an anti-knock
additive to gasoline.

They formed a new company
called the Ethyl Corporation.

It had once been considered for use as a
poison gas by the U. S. War Department.

Unlike the lead in paint,
tetraethyl lead was fat-soluble.

A half a cup of it on
your skin could kill you.

The manufacturers calculated that they
could sell 60 million tons of it a year.

Only problem was some of the workers
who processed the stuff...

in factories in Delaware and New Jersey...

were going insane, hallucinating...

jumping out of windows.

They died screaming.

This was a selling job that would require
a lot more than dancing light bulbs.

What was needed was
a man of science to calm

the public's fears and
improve lead's image.

They found the right man for the job.

This was one of the first times
that the authority of science was used...

to cloak a threat to public health
and the environment.

Robert Kehoe, a young doctor
from Cincinnati, was hired by GM.

He raised scientific doubts in the
public mind about the dangers of lead.

Lead was naturally occurring
in the environment, he said.

Yes, there might be occupational hazards
for the people who worked with lead.

But that could be best handled
by industry self-regulation.

And there was no evidence to suggest
that lead posed any threat to the consumer.

For decades no one challenged him.

Until Clair Patterson went searching
for the age of the Earth.

Clair Patterson's research
on the age of the Earth...

had made him the world's leading expert
on measuring trace amounts of lead.

And like everyone else
at the time, he assumed

the prevalence of
lead occurred naturally.

True scientist that he was, he set
out to discover everything he could...

about how lead circulates
through the environment.

On a grant from
the American Petroleum Institute...

he carefully measured the concentrations
of lead in deep and shallow seawater.

Once again Patterson found
that his initial data made no sense.

There were only minuscule concentrations
of lead in the deep ocean water.

But in shallow waters and at the surface...

the concentrations of lead
were hundreds of times greater.

In any ocean, it takes
a few hundred years

for the shallow waters
to mix with the deep.

This told Patterson
that the large amount of

lead in the surface
waters had arrived recently.

Otherwise it would have been
more evenly distributed.

Knowing the quantity of lead
in the shallow seas...

and the time needed to mix it
into the deeper layers...

he was able to estimate the rate
of lead contamination at the surface.

Patterson asked himself...

what could possibly supply lead
to the world's oceans at such a rate.

Where's all that lead coming from?

I think I know, Harrison.

It's from leaded gasoline.

Well, then we've got a
problem, Pat, because

that's the same place
the money comes from.

But Patterson would not give in.

He went right to work
on publishing the scientific paper...

that would make the case
against leaded gasoline.

When he sent the paper to the prestigious
scientific journal Nature...

Patterson put his own name second.

He often did that with his students
to advance their reputations.

He made a lifelong
point of shunning the

limelight and the
privileges that come with it.

Only three days after publication...

the push-back began.

Hello, Dr. Patterson.

Pleasure to meet you.
Very impressed by your work.

Your work is of great interest to us
in the petroleum and chemical industries.

Well, it wouldn't have been possible
without your funding.

Precisely.

And there's so much more
we'd like to do for you.

Well, I've been thinking about
measuring lead in polar ice...

to see if it shows the same kind
of pattern as the oceans.

Lead? But you've already done that.

We're thinking its time you move on
to other trace elements.

In fact, Dr. Patterson, our ability to
fund you in any other line of research...

is virtually limitless.

Lead is a neurotoxin.

When you ship your
tetraethyl lead from the

factory, before you
add it to the gasoline...

it's handled just like a chemical weapon.
There's a reason for that.

Where do you suppose all that lead goes
after it leaves the tailpipe?

Think about what it might be doing
to us and our kids.

Dr. Kehoe has shown that
the level of lead in the environment...

is as natural as snow in December.

Then why doesn't it show up
in the deep water?

Here, let me just show you.

Thanks for your time.

You're just gonna keep on putting millions
of tons of poison into the air we breathe?

If my research doesn't put you out
of business, some future scientist will.

Patterson's funding from
the oil industry vanished overnight.

In fact, they tried to get him fired.

But the U.S. government, the Army,
the Navy, the Atomic Energy Commission...

the Public Health Service
and the National Science Foundation...

stood by him, supporting his research
on lead pollution.

His investigations took
him from Greenland in

the far north to Antarctica
in the far south...

and to rivers, mountains and valleys
in between.

In even the most hostile conditions,
Patterson and his team...

worked to replicate the immaculate
environment of the clean room.

Their plastic suits were replaced daily.

Working 10- to 12-hour days
in subzero weather...

they dug a 200-foot-long shaft
into the ice of Antarctica.

It was a form of time-travel.

To recover snow
that had fallen three centuries ago...

before the start
of the Industrial Revolution.

Nose!

Wipe your nose, damn it!

There's a thousand times more
lead in you than in this ice.

You want to contaminate
the whole damn sample?

After four grueling weeks
of painstaking sample collection...

Patterson was ready to go back to the lab.

As with the oceans,
he found that the amount of lead...

was much lower in the snow
of a few hundred years before.

No matter where he searched on Earth, no
matter how far he traveled back in time...

the results always told the same story.

The naturally occurring levels in the air
and water in the past were far lower.

For thousands of years, lead had
been known to cause brain damage...

developmental impairment,
violent behavior and even death.

In searching for the age of the Earth...

Patterson had stumbled on the evidence for
a mass poisoning on an unprecedented scale.

But Kehoe and the other scientists
employed by the lead industry...

persuaded the public
they had nothing to worry about.

Everyone thought Patterson was a crank
until one man started to pay attention.

Patterson went public with his
discoveries about lead in a big way.

He published his findings
in a major environmental health journal...

and sent copies
to various government leaders...

including one highly influential senator.

Edmund Muskie of Maine...

was the chairman of the Senate
subcommittee on air and water pollution.

In 1966, he held hearings
on the lead question.

The first witness was Dr. Robert Kehoe...

longtime scientific advocate
for leaded gasoline.

Is it, uh, your conclusion that in 1937
to the present time...

there has been no increase in the amount
of lead taken in from the atmosphere...

by the average traffic policeman,
service-station attendant or motorist?

There is not the slightest evidence...

that there has been a change in
this picture during this period of time.

Not the slightest.

The hearings were scheduled
to take place...

when their fiercest
critic, Clair Patterson...

was off in Antarctica.

But he unexpectedly appeared
on the fifth day of testimony.

Looks like there seems to be an increase
in the concentration of lead in people...

as a result of exposure to the environment.
Is that correct?

That is correct.

In identifying typical
lead levels, you use

actual measurements
you've taken in the field?

Yes.

Are these observations different
from the ones...

we've been hearing about
from other witnesses?

No, they're the same observations.

You've testified that
there has been no change

in natural lead
levels, is that correct?

That is correct.
You're sure about that?

Absolutely.

The levels we see
in people today may be typical.

But they are not by any means natural.

So you don't disagree
with Dr. Kehoe's numbers?

No, no.

You're saying that the, uh, same numbers
are leading to different conclusions?

Yes.

You know, this is
the kind of thing we

expect to hear from
lawyers, not scientists.

I would agree with that, yes.

You seem to be very sure
of your conclusions, Dr. Kehoe.

It so happens that I have more experience
in this field than anyone else alive.

At these levels, lead is a severe
chronic insult to the human body.

There is no medical evidence that lead
has introduced a danger to public health.

It's irresponsible to mine
millions of tons of toxic material...

and disperse it into the environment.

If there was proof of harm,
we would have found it.

Not if your purpose is to sell lead.

Patterson fought the industry
for another 20 years...

before lead was finally banned
in U. S. consumer products.

The man who figured out
the age of the Earth...

was also responsible
for one of the greatest

public health victories
of the 20th century.

In just a few years...

average lead levels in the blood
of children plummeted by some 75 percent.

Today the medical consensus
is unanimous.

There's no such thing as a nontoxic
level of lead in humans, however small.

Today scientists sound the alarm
on other environmental dangers.

Vested interests still hire their
own scientists to confuse the issue.

But in the end, nature will not be fooled.