Midgely Kettering

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In a new book, American Poison: A Deadly Invention and the Woman Who Battled for Environmental Justice, environmental scientist and author Daniel Stone explores the battle for regulation through the lens of the century-long fight to remove lead from gasoline — and in the process explores how public health began and how American business elites built the reputation-laundering philanthropic machine that let them conceal their involvement in creating our biggest problems behind a facade of combatting other problems via charitable donations — familiar territory for anyone who’s read Winners Take All.

Stone tells the intertwined stories of Alice Hamilton, the crusading doctor who pioneered occupational health in the 1920s, the engineer Thomas Midgley, Jr., who developed leaded gasoline, Robert A. Kehoe, who defended Midgely’s innovations against Hamilton’s efforts, and Charles F. Kettering, the founder of Delco and research chief at General Motors, who put Midgley’s ideas into action — but is today remembered by most as the founder of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.

We talked to Stone about the origins of public health and environmental regulation, the long battle between innovators and capital and regulators and the public, how American society continues — against all evidence — to privatize gains and socialize costs, and what people dedicated to building a safer world can and need to do as we come to the end of an era of environmental regulation.