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SCIENTISTS, ENGINEERS, AND THE BURDENS OF OCCUPATIONAL EXPOSURE: 60 THE CASE OF THE LEAD STANDARD original typesetting files. Page breaks are true to the original; line lengths, word breaks, heading styles, and other typesetting-specific formatting, however, cannot be About this PDF file: This new digital representation of the original work has been recomposed from XML files created from the original paper book, not from the retained, and some typographic errors may have been accidentally inserted. Please use the print version of this publication as the authoritative version for attribution. Scientists, Engineers, and the Burdens of Occupational Exposure: The Case of the Lead Standard Ronald Bayer The toxic effects of lead exposure have long been known. By the late nineteenth century the consequences of working with lead had become the focus of attention of writers like Dickens, Hardy, and Shaw (Hunt, 1979, p. 201). However, despite the recognition of how lead could maim workers, efforts to control exposure remained rudimentary. For Alice Hamilton, writing in the early twentieth century, "lead intoxication" was the most prevalent of occupational diseases. Not only were the medical implications to be found in workers but in their children as well. Because lead could be passed on through exposed women to their children, Hamilton termed it a "race poison" affecting not just one generation but two (Hunt, 1979, p. 202). About a half century later, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reported on an epidemiological study of workers exposed to lead at a scrap smelter (Levine et al., 1976). Of the 37 employees who had been followed, 30 displayed signs of toxicity. Nine had at some point been hospitalized with lead-related disorders. Commenting on this evidence, Morton Corn (1976), a former director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), referred to the "grim" details of "this alarming story.'' This discovery on the part of the CDC reveals that although the most extreme examples of lead poisoning had by and large been eliminated from the American industrial landscape by the early 1970s, the toxic consequences of such exposure remained a critical problem. For those concerned Work on this paper was supported by the Program in Ethics and Values in Science and Technology, National Science Foundation.
