The Quandary of Environmental Research: A History of Lead, Children and Scientific Investigation 1970-2000

近几十年来，大众媒体、科学界和政治领袖都承认，在过去的半个世纪里，铅中毒一直是美国儿童的一个严重问题。20世纪50年代和60年代的头条新闻提醒全国注意，成千上万的儿童因接触贫民窟中的含铅油漆而死亡或遭受永久性脑损伤；20世纪70年代和80年代，报纸报道了数十万儿童因低水平铅暴露而患有各种神经和行为问题；20世纪90年代，研究人员发现，即使儿童体内微量的铅也可能导致潜在的、但改变生活的智商、行为和学校表现的变化。今天，儿童环境中玩具、灰尘、土壤和油漆中的铅已被确定为损害近50万美国儿童的原因。这项由科学和社会资助的研究通过儿童铅中毒的视角调查了20世纪70年代至21世纪初美国环境健康的部分历史。这项研究利用口述历史、档案记录、法律文件和传统历史方法，分析了儿童接触低水平铅的大众和科学意识的近代历史，揭示了科学和社会政策之间不断变化的历史关系的各个方面。具体地说，该项目着眼于关于低水平铅暴露的影响的不断变化的科学观念和政策如何刺激旨在确定减少儿童暴露的方法的广泛研究；不同的利益集团如何抵制减少儿童接触含铅油漆的房屋墙壁中的铅，从而在研究界引发不同的观点，即“完全”或“部分”减少是保护儿童免受铅中毒的最佳方式；研究人员可用资金的数量和种类的限制如何影响科学家提出的智力问题，并最终影响科学家在20世纪90年代和21世纪初开发的研究设计；这是关于儿童环境研究的最令人不安的伦理和历史争议之一。更详细地研究的一个案例涉及肯尼迪·克里格研究所的科学家，该研究所是与约翰·霍普金斯大学有关的国际著名的发育障碍儿童研究中心。20世纪90年代初，他们启动了一个研究项目，该项目引发了激烈的争议，因为该项目允许儿童在巴尔的摩市中心社区的家中接触到低水平的铅。这项研究的目标是找出一种减少铅污染的方法，这种方法既便宜到足以鼓励房东参与减排计划，又足够有效，对儿童造成的损害很小，甚至没有。但是，当一些研究公寓中的一些儿童被确认血铅水平升高而不是降低时，两组父母对肯尼迪·克里格提起诉讼，要求停止这项研究。尽管这起诉讼在初审法院一级被驳回，但马里兰州上诉法院裁定，这项研究提出了关于在脆弱人群上进行人体实验的令人担忧的问题。肯尼迪·克里格的研究吸引了科学家和那些对人体实验感兴趣的人的注意。这个项目为我们理解环境史和科学史中这段令人不安和复杂的事件增加了一个新的和关键的历史维度。

In recent decades the popular media, the scientific community and political leaders have acknowledged that lead poisoning has been a significant problem for U.S. children in the past half century. Headlines in the 1950s and 1960s alerted the nation to the thousands of children who were dying or suffering permanent brain damage from exposures to lead paint in slum housing; in the 1970s and 1980s, newspapers reported on the hundreds of thousands of children who were suffering from a variety of neurological and behavioral problems due to low-level lead exposure; in the 1990s, researchers discovered that even minute amounts of lead in a child's body could lead to sub-clinical, but life altering, changes in IQ, behavior, and school performance. Today, lead in toys, dust, soil and paint in the child's environment have been identified as causes of damage to nearly half a million American children.This study, funded by Science and Society, investigates part of the history of environmental health through the lens of childhood lead poisoning in America from the 1970s through the early 21st century. Using oral histories, archival records, legal documents and traditional historical methodologies, the study analyzes the recent history of popular and scientific awareness of low level lead exposure to children, uncovering aspects of the changing historical relationship between science and social policy. Specifically, the project looks at how changing scientific ideas and policies regarding the effects of low level lead exposure stimulated a wide range of studies aimed at identifying ways of reducing children's exposure; how various interest groups' resistance to abatement of lead from walls in the housing stock where children were exposed to lead paint led to different perspectives in the research community as to whether "complete" or "partial" abatement was the best way to protect children from lead poisoning; how the limitations on the amount and kind of funding available to researchers affected the intellectual questions that scientists asked, and, ultimately, the research designs that scientists developed in the 1990s and early 2000s; and what is emerging as one of the most troubling ethical and historical disputes regarding environmental research on children.A case examined in more detail involves scientists at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, the internationally renowned center for the study of children with developmental disabilities associated with Johns Hopkins University. In the early 1990s, they initiated a research project that aroused intense controversy because it allowed children to be exposed to low levels of lead in their homes in inner city neighborhoods in Baltimore. The goal of the research was to identify a method of lead abatement that would be cheap enough to encourage landlords to participate in abatement programs yet effective enough to result in little or no damage to the children. But when some children were identified with elevated, rather than diminished, blood-lead levels in some of the study apartments, two sets of parents filed suit against Kennedy Krieger to stop the research. Although the suit was thrown out at the trial court level, the Court of Appeals of Maryland decided that the research raised troubling issues regarding human experimentation on vulnerable populations. The Kennedy Krieger study has attracted the attention of scientists and those interested in human subject experimentation. This project adds a new and critical historical dimension to our understanding of this troubling and complex episode in environmental history and the history of science.