Patterson Scientific

Patterson announced his findings at a scientific meeting in September 1953. Three years later, he refined Earth s age to 4.55 billion years, a figure that stands unchanged 50 years later. As he declared, The age of the Earth is known as accurately and with about as much confidence as the concentration of aluminum is known in the Westerly Rhode Island granite. ... 

Patterson s passion was scientific research and, by canceling his grants, industry was striking where he was most sensitive. He would have trouble funding research projects for the rest of his career. 

Patterson was vulnerable on another score, too. Patterson realized that he was a poor lecturer, and he wanted to do research full-time, so he had refused to become a tenured faculty member at Caltech. He sometimes complained about not being a professor and once demanded—without success—a more elegant title, like Geochemist. Lawyers for the Ethyl Corp. testified at Legislative hearings that I was a mere technician at Caltech, without academic stature and credibility in the scientific arena (no tenure), who was held in low esteem by the medical world. ... 

Ultimately, Patterson decided, his refuge lay in facts. I was driven to. . . prove my theoretical points unequivocally with solid experimental data. Instead of collecting reams of sloppy data, he chose problems where a few bedrock values would illuminate broad scientific vistas. His theories and chemical analyses would have to be painstakingly perfect in every detail because his thesis was premised on his laboratory s being right and almost every other trace metal laboratory s being wrong. 

During the media blitz that followed, Patterson urged the public to buy Chicken of the Sea tuna because the Van Camp Sea Food Company s molded steel cans were lead-free. With characteristic bluntness, Patterson lambasted a host of government laboratories from the Environmental Protection Agency and its Bureau of Foods to the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Asked if any other laboratories agreed with his findings, Patterson declared loftily that scientific questions are not determined by majority vote. 

Patterson needed every ounce of cantankerousness that he could muster in order to maintain his battle against lead in the environment. A series of three prestigious scientific reports encapsulate his decades-long campaign. In 1971, the first comprehensive study of lead levels in 30 years was issued by a National Research Council panel for the National Academy of Sciences. The committee, which included six representatives from the lead industry, excluded Patterson entirely because he was considered too extreme and unwilling to compromise. The report concluded that the concentration of lead in urban air was rising slowly. 

Thinking back on humanity s 2000 years of lead pollution, Patterson often asked himself, What led us to poison the Earth s biosphere with lead He suggested that the brains of those involved in materialistic and utilitarian engineering might be different from those involved in aesthetic and scientific endeavors. Patterson s brain theory embarrassed many of his colleagues who regarded it as off the wall stuff. ... 

Today, the scientific community can identify tiny trace amounts of chemicals in the environment. A quarter-century after Wallace Carothers introduced science-based industrial research to the United States, Clair Patterson adapted techniques developed for determining the age of the Earth to identify microtraces of global pollutants. Today scientists can analyze industrial contaminants in the parts per billion in 1991 when a university scientist discovered in the atmosphere a harmful, low-level contaminant produced by the manufacture of nylon, industry volunteered within weeks to change production methods. 

Clair C. Patterson, T. J. Chow, and M. Murozumi. The Possibility of Measuring Variations in the Intensity of Worldwide Lead Smelting during Medieval and Ancient Times Using Lead Aerosol Deposits in Polar Snow Strata. In Scientific Methods in Medieval Archaeology. Rainer Berger, ed. Berkeley University of California Press, 1970, pp. 339-350. 

While some contemporary alchemists such as Hunter, Emmens, Jollivet-Castelot, and Ayton had indeed tried to make gold, Ramsay s attempted transmutations led to a rush toward a different kind of treasure scientific immortality. Multiple chemists pursued the same kinds of experiments that Ramsay had, believing that they too had found positive results. They attempted to position themselves within the scientific world as the first to have proven artificial transmutation. Between 1907, when Ramsay announced his supposed copper transmutations in Nature, and 1914, when he abandoned his efforts, several significant chemists (including J. N. Collie, Hubert Patterson, E. C. C. Baly, Thomas Merton, Irvine Masson, and A. C. G. Egerton) all participated in experiments to use either radium emanation or cathode rays and X-rays to cause chemical transmutation. 

Prof. Smithells opened the discussion by saying that he was somewhat breathless at the papers they had heard. It required a great deal of courage for scientific workers to bring forward such results, and they must admire it. Their courage, he thought, was justified, for their experimental record was such as to justify what in others would have been extremely rash. He paid a generous tribute to the care and patience with which Mr. Patterson had conducted the experiments in his laboratory at Leeds. Of the work of Prof. Collie and Sir... 

This already has several names (see Patterson and Capell, p 116, compd 712), such as Pyrido-2,1—C -s-triazole, Triazole-pyridine, 2 3-Diazo-pyrrocoline, Benztriazole and 1,23-Benzisotri-azole. Of these, only the first name is really scientific and would allow for writing the formula, once one leams what the letter C signifies. This system, however, not only uses numerals for positions, but also introduces letters, a,b,c,d,e, etc, for each side of a ring compd. This, in our opinion, is an unnecessary complication... 

Jackson, R. E. Patterson, R. J. Graham, B. W. Bahr, J. Belanger, D. Lockwood, J. Priddle, M. Contaminant hydrogeology of toxic organic chemicals at a disposal site. Gloucester. Ontario NHRI Paper No. 23 IWD Scientific Series No. 141 National Hydrology Research Institute Ottawa, Canada, 1985. 

Patterson DG Jr., Isaacs SG, Alexander LR, Turner WE, Hampton L, Bernert JT, Needham LL (1991), in IARC Scientific Publication No. 108.,Environmental Carcinogens Methods of Analysis and Exposure Measurement, Vol. 11 Polychlorinated Dioxins and Dibenzofurans . determination of specific polychlorinated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in blood and adipose tissue by isotope-dilution high-resolution mass spectrometry", p. 299-342, Eds. Rappe C, Buser HR, Dodet B, O Neill IK, International Agency for Research on Cancer, Lyon... 

Tour awards show a strange pattern. In addition to one college award, and the Si ma Xi Scientific Research Society Award (shared with Jerry Karle) in the late 1950s, you received the Patterson Award (also shared with Jerry) of the American Crystallographic Association in 1984, at 67, and then, after 1985, of course, there is a lonp list of awards and memberships. 

L.M. Parker, J.E. Patterson, Chemistry Division Report No CD2330, Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Zealand. 

D.H.R. Barton, at MIT with H. G. Khorana and at Wesleyan University with Max Tishler. He has served on the chemistry faculties of Tufts University, New Mexico State University, and is currently Dishman Professor of Science at Southwestern University. He carried out sabbatical research in the Pharmaceutical Sciences Department at DeMontfort University, Leicester, UK with Laurence Patterson under a Fulbright Fellowship and with Henk Hiemstra at the University of Amsterdam. His scientific interests include the chemistry of organoselenium compounds, extrusion reactions, functionalizing deamination reactions, and sterically hindered molecules. Collaborating with his wife Lynn Guziec he is also involved in the design and synthesis of anticancer compounds. 

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