
An Exemplar of Perseverance
It is the 1940s period. The mechanism of using radiocarbon dating to figure out the age of Earth has been discovered. Harrison Brown, a geologist at University of Chicago, first understood this in 1947. He then chose a young graduate, one of my all-time heroes, Clair Patterson, to do the work. Back then, he would have no idea what would happen later and how his life is going to go into turmoil. He gave Patterson would seemed like a simple enough task, find a way to measure Lead from the decaying Uranium inside a meteorite rock. But it seemed like an impossible task. Each fragment he would observe for multiple readings, he would get very haphazard values. He redid all his experiments multiple times but to no success. He was still getting wildly inconsistent values. He wondered if it was because of the lead already existing in the environment that was creating errors in his results. So, he did practically everything to cleanse the lab of any lead. For months, he sterilized, cleaned to eliminate external lead, but still no result was being obtained.
Later, Brown moved to CalTech and invited Patterson to join him there. Here, he would get to design his own ‘clean room’. This is 6 years into this project. From this clean room, he got the results and was able to determine the age of the Earth accurately for the first time in the history of mankind. It seems like an amazing feat to achieve. But Patterson was worried for far worse reasons. He wondered how much amount of lead would there have been in the atmosphere and the environment to really affect his experiment? He looked at the reports indicating people dying due to lead poisoning. But the big car manufacturers and their subsidiaries like GM and Ethyl Corporation had hired a scientist, Dr. Kehoe to disperse and eradicate any ideas about lead being not good for humans and environment. Patterson would go around the world, including the Arctic circle to find the concentration of Lead, and published his findings with hard facts that the lead around us had increased in exponential figures since our use of it in fuel. For decades, he fought against these humongous corporations. He was unrelenting, persevered and passionate on getting a victory.
As history would have it, in 1986, The Supreme Court in America finally banned use of Lead in automobile fuels and in later years from everything around us we use. It was finally agreed that Lead in any concentration was harmful.
Patterson is a huge source of inspiration for me. He fought against all odds and against scientists too valiantly to help the people. He did not bow down to people with money or power and continued on his prospect fearlessly. That is the kind of person I wish to be, one that every person should aspire to be, not those corporate people, who were ready to put the general public at immediate health risk for the sake of maintaining a constant profit. An ideal organization must always ensure its products aren't to blame for any adversity or causing harm to any life.