Document r6pKJ0Kz7bpZB1kkXpVM2EQqJ

September 28, 1971 Mr. H. E. Hesselberg Ethyl Corporation 1600 West Eight Mile Road Ferndale, Detroit, Michigan 48220 Dear Howard: I have before me a memorandum, on the subject of the Report of the National Research Council, entitled ''Lead in Perspective," uddressed to you by Sue A. Gendernalik, who, presumably, is a member of the Staff of the Detroit Laboratory. I would suppose that you either gave or sent this to me, but for some strange reason, I have no recollection of reading it before, although there is no accounting for some of my lapses of memory, and I may have seen it before. On the other hand, it came to me from one of the members of the staff to whom I loaned my copy of this report I am simply curious about this, and sometime when you write to me about something else you might fill me in on whether you sent this, or gave it, to me awhile ago. I write primarily, however, to say that this memo is a remarkably clear and straight forward statement of the work of this Committee, and the lady in question (should I remember her?) is a very competent analyst of the message of this report. You may have seen the article by Paul Craig in the last issue of the Saturday Review. It is as fine a representation as you might wish to see of the mind of this man. I am astonished by the article, although I should not be, perhaps, after the short statement which he made to attach to the Petition presented by a group of men for a complete ban on the use of lead in gasoline. This article, however, inasmuch as it is in stark and very authoritative opposition to this Report, represents a remarkable degree of assurance, as well as an enormous dearth of sound scientific viewpoint. When a supposedly able scientist (especially, perhaps, if he has had or has seemed to have the benefit of the rigid training of a modern physicist) makes flat statements, as a fact, about matters of opinion or speculation, he is either emotionally unstable or is deliberately undertaking a deception, and in either case is wholly unreliable. My real surprise is that such a man works (or at least is associated with) at the Brookhaven National Laboratory, the staff of which is supposed to belong to the upper crust of the scientific world. However, he is no youngster (born in July 1933), and he has been around (California Institute of Technology, Los Alamos, and now Brookhaven) and he should know better than to have strong convictions on matters entirely outside his field of training and competence. (I need not be saying these things to you, who have seen this phenomenon of the tutored but irresponsible human mind over and over again, but I fail to get over my surprise at this every time I encounter it in a wouldbe exponent of the scientific method of thought.) I think I'll write to my friend George Cotzias (M.D.) at Brookhaven and ask him (a penetrating observer) what manner of man Paul Craig really is. He may have suffered a "revelation" which has altered his mental apparatus. Best regards, N15300