Lead, UCSC and the Sublities of Life

[I write about this because (1) it's interesting (2) it happening in Santa Cruz, UCSC and (3) in era of climate change we need our scientists and their clarity, precision, intellectual honesty more than ever before.]

Never thought I'd find seminars like "How Bacteria Breathe Arsenic" interesting, but after reading Toxic Truth (the fight against the scientists who fought against lead) or Ecological Intelligence (the full lifecycle impact of food and products we create and use) or reading about certain plants that can absorb the heavy metals in a brownfield (or, um, urban gardens), I have become very curious about the interplay of biology, chemistry and the environment and our health. A subject studied at UCSC's Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology Department.

[I was educated in a prior century where physics and then electronics seemed to be the key.]

"Toxic Truth" also describes a young scientist probing for environmental lead, A. Russell Flegal, who later joined UCSC's faculty. So when I heard about a public lecture honoring the 10th anniversary of UCSC's Microbiology and Environmental Toxicology Deptartment, I couldn't resist.

Dr. Howard Hu gave the talk last Tuesday:
"Lead Toxicity: Twenty Years of Research on the Poison that Keeps on Poisoning

Lead is just one of the thousands of toxins we've put into the environment. It is a "success" story because scientists and doctors got it out of paint, cosmetics, gasoline and out of our blood stream - only after decades of fighting corporations. (A little bit like climate change? Or smoking?) Thousands of other toxins have never been studied.

The amount of lead in our bodies, yours and mine, is "low" but still far above what pre-industrial revolution man had in his/her body. How "low" is safe? Maybe no level.

Unfortunately, the lead is now in our bones, in "low" doses, because the body is tricked into thinking lead is calcium. So we all now have "low" levels of lead - in our bones, if not blood. And what does "low" levels of lead do?

That is what Dr. Hu reported to about 100 scientists and students, in very clear, accessable lecture.

Here's a myth for you: As we age, our arteries naturally constrict and our blood pressure tends to rise. True? Seems plausible and the data seems to support it. But it is false. Only people in industrialized societies have this pattern. People in rural societies do NOT exhibit this pattern.

And nobody knows why.

What Dr. Hu and people in his field look at amount of lead in people's bones. Of course, there is a range - some have more lead, some less, even though it is all "low" level. There are studies, over time, of groups of individuals and what diseases they contract. Turns out that people with higher lead (still "low") have much higher liklihood of also having hypertension. Again, nobody knows exactly why, but is clearly observable.

And not just hypertension, but also higher likelihood of ALS, tooth loss.

What Dr. Hu studies is the interaction of "low" does of lead and the body's chemisty and genetic makeup. Lead interferes with all kinds of processes, but it also seems to interact with certain genes, or gene variations.

In fact, Dr. Hu has raised some interesting possibilities that lead exposure at very young age, perhaps even through the mother, can result in higher incidence of disease (or is this accelerating 'aging') later in life. In the middle, we have NO signs of illness. There is NO known level of lead that is safe.

These guys are the our heroes because they are pulling away the veil of "better life through chemistry" that I grew up and moving us toward a better understanding our own planet. [Chemistry certainly can make life better, but life is simply more complicated and subtle than we all thought it would be.]

Maybe they are getting closer to sublties of life itself.