All language subtitles for Cosmos S01E07 The Clean Room (1080p x265 10bit)

Once there was a man

who went searching
for the true age of the earth.

In his struggles to discover it,

he stumbled on a grave threat.

Beautiful spring day, Pasadena, California.

1966.

Business is booming, life's good.

Except for one man,

a geochemist named Clair Patterson,

known as Pat.

He knows that everyone he sees

is in danger from an invisible menace.

And he's determined to put a stop to it,

no matter what the cost.

"The Clean Room"

You can't really tell Pat Patterson's story

without going all the way back

to the time long before the earth,

our home, was built,

when the stars brought forth its substance.

Iron.

For the planet's molten core.

Oxygen.

For the rocks and the water and the air.

Carbon.

For diamonds. And life.

A star is born,

ours.

For the first few million
years, things ran smoothly

as dust grains snowballed into
progressively larger objects.

But once these objects grew massive enough

to have sufficient gravity,

they began pulling each
other into crossing orbits.

This is how our world looked

when it was new.

No part of the earth's
surface could survive intact

from that time to the present.

So, with all its birth and
early childhood records erased,

how could we ever hope
to know with any certainty

the age of our world?

People have been wondering
about this since antiquity.

In 1650 archbishop James Ussher of Ireland

made a calculation that
seemed to settle the question.

Like almost everyone else
of his time and his world,

he accepted the biblical
account of creation as authoritative.

But the Bible does not give exact years,

so Ussher searched for an
event in the Old Testament

that corresponded
to a known historical date.

He found it in the second book of kings,

the death of the Babylonian
ruler Nebuchadnezzar

in 562 B.C.

Usher added up the
generations of the prophets

and the Patriarchs,

the 139 "Begats" of the Old Testament,

between Adam and
the time of Nebuchadnezzar,

and discovered

that the world began on October 22

in the year 4004 B.C.

At 6:00 P.M.

It was a Saturday.

Archbishop Ussher's
chronology was taken as gospel

in the Western world.

Until we turned to another book
to find the age of the earth,

the one that was written
in the rocks themselves.

Most of the rock layers
in the walls of the Grand Canyon

are made of sediments,
deposited as fine grains

in a time when this part
of the world was a sea.

Over eons, the sediments
were compressed into rock

under the weight of succeeding layers,

with the oldest ones at the bottom.

Pick a layer, any layer.

How about that one?

Once upon a time, there must
have been shallow water here.

Back in the Precambrian period,

about a billion years ago,

there was only one kind of life.

These blue-green bacteria
were busy harvesting sunlight

and making oxygen.

For them, it was just a waste product,

but for the animals who
evolved later, including us,

it was the breath of life.

Okay. Pick another layer.

How about that one?

This layer is known
as the bright angel shale.

It formed about 530 million years ago.

These tracks were left
260 million years ago.

So you want to know the age of the earth?

Just figure out how long
it took to deposit each layer

and then, instead of counting the "Begats,"

add up all the layers.

Easy, right?

We know
from observing this process,

because it still happens today

in oceans and lakes around the world.

That sediments can be laid
down at widely different rates.

It usually happens very slowly,

say a foot of sediment per 1,000 years.

But when the's a rare catastrophic flood,

it can happen much faster,

as much as a foot in just a few days.

Many geologists tried this method

to calculate the age of the earth.

They used the Grand Canyon

and other sedimentary sequences
around the planet.

But their answers ranged
too widely to be of much use,

anywhere between three million
years and 15 billion.

And there were other problems
with this method:

Even the deepest layers of rock

are not the oldest things on earth.

Why? Because not even rocks could survive

the earth's violent infancy.

In space it's another story.

Are there any mementos from
when the earth was born,

objects that could
possibly tell us its true age?

I know a place where the
unused bricks and mortar left over

from the creation of
our solar system can be found.

It lies between the
orbits of Jupiter and Mars.

Here is the stuff of the newborn earth,

adrift in cold storage, unchanged

ever since that time.

A million or so years ago,

a large asteroid happened
to jostle a much smaller one,

sending it on a new trajectory,

a collision course that ended one night

some 50,000 years ago.

It must have shattered
the peace of the Grand Canyon

as it sailed overhead...

to blast out this crater

in what would one day be known as Arizona.

Fragments of the iron
asteroid that made this crater

have survived intact.

If we just knew how long ago
that iron was forged,

we'd know the age of the solar system.

Including the earth.

But how could we know that?

Pick a rock.

Any rock.

How about that one?

Some atoms in this
rock could be radioactive,

which means they spontaneously disintegrate

and become other elements.

A uranium atom first
becomes a thorium atom.

On average, it takes a few billion years.

The thorium is much more unstable.

In less than a month
it turns into protactinium.

A minute later, protactinium
becomes something else.

The atom undergoes ten more
nuclear transmutations...

Until it reaches the last
stop on the decay chain:

A stable atom of lead.

And lead it will remain...

For eternity.

In the 20th century there was
a huge effort, lasting decades,

to measure the time it takes
for each radioactive element

to transmute into another element.

Physicists discovered that the
atoms of each unstable element

decay at a constant rate.

The nucleus of an atom
is a kind of sanctuary,

immune to the shocks and
upheavals of its environment.

Hit it with a hammer.

Boil it in oil.

Vaporize it.

The nuclear clock goes on ticking,

keeping an absolute standard of time

that does not look
to the sun and the stars.

What better way to find
the true age of the earth

than with the uranium atom?

If you knew what fraction
of the uranium in a rock

had turned into lead,

you could calculate
how much time had passed

since the rock was formed.

But there's a problem.

The rocks in the earth that
were present when it was formed

are no more.

They've all been crushed, melted, remade.

There is a way to
calculate the amount of lead

that was present from the beginning.

It's a gift from the heavens:

Meteorites.

This one... A fragment of the one

that made this giant crater... Was ideal.

The amount of lead
deep inside this meteorite

is exactly the same as when earth formed.

Since you know the
constant rate of uranium decay,

that should give you
the age of the meteorite,

which was made
at the same time as the earth.

All you had to do was measure

the amount of lead in meteorites.

Easy, right?

A scientist named Harrison Brown,

at the University of Chicago,

first understood this in 1947.

He chose a young graduate student,
Clair Patterson, to do the work.

Patterson couldn't possibly
know how this assignment

would alter the course of his life...

And ours.

What seemed like pure scientific research

turned out to be so much more.

Clair Patterson, son of a
letter carrier from Iowa,

was rebellious by nature
and not very good in school.

But he was a natural born scientist.

A geologist named Harrison Brown

gave Patterson what seemed
like a straightforward

scientific assignment.

First off, Pat...

You mind if I call you Pat?

Now, I know you're no geologist...

probably couldn't tell
granite from feldspar...

but I hear you really know your way

around a mass spectrometer, Pat.

Good. You married, Pat?

Yeah, Laurie. Yeah,
she-she's a chemist, too.

Uh, we worked on the
Manhattan Project together,

at Oak Ridge.

Good. Okay, well, first
thing you need to know:

There are these tiny
crystals called zircons.

Real small, size of a pinhead,
tight as a drum and tough.

Nothing gets in or out of 'em.

And I'm talking for billions of years.

We know how old these grains
are because we've already

dated the rocks they came from.

Each little zircon has only
a few parts per million

of uranium inside, and that
uranium is decaying

to even tinier amounts of lead.

Now, you figure out how
to measure that lead,

and you'll know how to
do it for a meteorite.

You think you can do that, Pat?

Yeah. Yeah, I... I don't see why not.

Good, because when you
do, you'll be the first man

to know the age of the earth.

And you'll be famous.

It'll be easy.

Duck soup.

While Patterson tried to measure

the trace amounts of
lead in the zircon grains,

another grad student, George Tilton,

was measuring the amount
of uranium in the same grains.

All Patterson had to do

was measure the amount
of lead with equal accuracy.

She's all yours, Pat.

Measured it six times. Same result:

3.2 parts per million.

Yeah, nice going, George, thanks.

Tilton's results were always the same.

But Patterson's results on the
lead content of the same grains

were wildly inconsistent.

This made no sense.

Could the lab have been contaminated

by previous experiments with lead?

Maybe it was the naturally high amounts

of lead in the environment
that were messing up his results.

Patterson did everything he could

to cleanse the lab of any lead.

There was still 100 times too much lead.

He had been at it for more than two years.

Duck soup, my ass.

Patterson realized he would
have to boil his containers

and tools in acid and
purify all his chemicals

to further reduce the lead in his lab.

Hey, you... Oh, I...

No! I'm new here.

Uh, where's the men's room?

Ugh, damn it.

All of Patterson's obsessive
scouring and sterilizing

had still not solved the problem.

He would need to design his own
lab and build it from scratch.

The opportunity arose
when Harrison Brown moved

to the California Institute
of Technology in Pasadena

and invited Patterson to join him.

Okay, Tom, that's enough.

We can move through the interlock, now.

Patterson had now been at it for six years,

doggedly tracking down and eliminating

the many sources of lead

that were compromising his instruments.

He had built the world's
first ultra-clean room.

He was finally able
to measure how much lead

was actually in the rock.

One whose age had already been established.

Now, at last, Patterson was ready

to tackle the iron meteorite,

to find the true age of the earth.

He brought his meteorite specimen

back to the Argonne National Laboratory...

Where the world's most
accurate mass spectrometer

had just become operational.

Doc, this can't wait till tomorrow?

Okay, little buddy, we're
gonna have to vaporize you.

A mass spectrometer uses magnets

to separate the elements
contained in a sample,

so that the amounts of each
element can be quantified.

This would provide the last missing piece

in the puzzle of the earth's true age.

Now I'm gonna ionize you, yeah.

Sounds worse than it is.

What's an electron between friends?

Having isolated the sample from
any outside lead contamination,

Patterson was, at last,
ready to measure the amount

of lead and uranium in the sample

and calculate how many
years before it had formed.

The true age of the earth.

Thank you to all the
scientists who came before.

Thank you, geologists.

Thank you, Charles Lyell.

Thank you, Michael Faraday.

J.J. Thomson.

Ernest Rutherford.

Thank you, Harrison Brown.

The world is four and
a half billion years old.

We did it.

Mom?

Mom.

Patterson wanted his mother to be

the first person to know
what he had struggled

The true age of the earth.

His reward for this discovery?

A world of trouble.

He didn't know it, but he
was on a collision course

with some of the most
powerful people on the planet.

To the ancient Romans,

the majestic ringed planet
Saturn was not a real place,

not a world, but a God King,

a son of the marriage of heaven and earth,

the God of lead.

These columns are all that remain

of this oldest temple in the Roman forum,

first consecrated to
Saturn 2,500 years ago.

It also served as Rome's treasury

and its bureau of weights and measures.

Tonight is Saturnalia,

the wild December
holiday in Saturn's honor.

And everyday life
will be turned upside down.

The masters will serve the slaves,

no wars or executions will be allowed,

and gifts will be exchanged.

A couple of hundred years from now,

when the early church
fathers look for a way

to attract more pagans,

they'll decide to turn
Saturnalia into Christmas,

making it the latest in a long line

of winter solstice
holidays to be re-purposed.

This towering statue of Saturn
may have look something like this

on the night of saturnalia.

But in ancient Rome, this God
had another, darker side.

That other Saturn is a cold
and sullen, sluggish ghoul,

given to irrational bouts of rage.

He committed an unspeakable act
of violence against his father,

and devoured his own children.

Of all the planets visible

to the unaided eyes of the ancients,

Saturn is the slowest,

which could explain why it's named

after the God of lead.

But there's no denying

that the more negative
aspects of Saturn's personality

reflect the age-old knowledge of
the symptoms of lead poisoning.

Funny thing about the Romans.

Even though they knew

that contact with lead
inevitably poisoned people,

rendered them sterile and drove them mad,

what metal did they use to make the pipes

that carried the water through
their legendary aqueducts?

I'll give you a hint.

The word "plumbing" comes

from the Latin word for lead, "plumbum."

What metal did they use
to line their famous baths?

And how did they sweeten their
wines when they were too sour?

What did they use to line
their vats and cooking pots?

There are some historians who believe

that the widespread use
of lead was a major cause

in the decline and fall
of the Roman Empire.

Why did they continue to use lead

long after they knew it was toxic?

It was cheap, very
malleable, easy to work with,

and the ones who were exposed
to it at its most lethal levels...

the miners and workers
who processed the lead...

were considered expendable.

Their lives didn't matter.

They were slaves.

Most of the earth's lead
started off at a safe distance

from living things, down below the surface,

but about 8,500 years ago,

humans began figuring
out how to dig into the earth

and extract metals from rock.

By the time this villa was new,

just a couple of thousand years ago,

the romans were producing
80,000 tons of lead a year.

Why is lead so poisonous to us?

Because when it gets into our bodies,

lead mimics other
metals, like zinc and iron,

the ones our cells actually
need to grow and flourish.

Enzymes in the cell are fooled
by the lead's masquerade,

and they begin to dance.

But it's a dance of death,
because the lead is an imposter

that can't fulfill the cell's vital needs.

Lead also blocks neurotransmitters,

the communication
network between the cells.

It interferes with the molecular receptors

that are vital to memory and learning.

This is especially damaging to children,

but lead poisoning spares no one.

Starting at the turn of the 20th century,

the makers of leaded
paint hired the fledgling

advertising industry
to persuade the consumer

that lead was child-friendly.

A little toy lead soldier
once to the Dutch boy said,

"we have some fine relations
who all contain some lead."

"Why don't you give a party
so folks can meet and see

the other happy members
of the great lead family?"

The first one at the
party was gay electric light.

"He said, " I'm very brilliant."

"I always shine at night."

"No little of my brilliance
is due to my glass head,"

which gives a light much brighter

"because it's made with lead."

A pair or rubbers entered
and took the Dutch boy's arm.

"They said, " we are protectors
who keep you dry and warm.

"You knew when we were
molded, the man who made us said,"

we're strong and tough and lively

"because in us, there's lead."

But lead production didn't
really shift into high gear

until the early 1920's

when chemist Thomas Midgley and inventor.

Charles Kettering of General Motors

found that tetraethyl
lead could be marketed

as an anti-knock additive to gasoline.

They formed a new company
called the Ethyl Corporation.

It had once been considered for use

as a poison gas by the U.S. war department.

Unlike the lead in paint,
tetraethyl lead was fat soluble.

A half a cup of it
on your skin could kill you.

The manufacturers calculated

that they could sell
60 million tons of it a year.

Only problem was,

some of the workers who processed the stuff

in factories in Delaware and
New Jersey were going insane,

hallucinating, jumping out of windows.

They died screaming.

This was a selling job
that would require a lot more

than dancing light bulbs.

What was needed was a man of science

to calm the public's fears
and improve lead's image.

They found the right man for the job.

This was one of the first times

that the authority of science was used

to cloak a threat to public
health and the environment.

Robert Kehoe, a
young doctor from Cincinnati,

was hired by GM.

He raised scientific
doubts in the public mind

about the dangers of lead.

Lead was naturally occurring
in the environment, he said.

Yes, there might be occupational hazards

for the people who worked with lead, but

that could be best handled
by industry self-regulation.

And there was no evidence to suggest

that lead posed any threat to the consumer.

For decades no one challenged him...

Until Clair Patterson went searching

for the age of the earth.

Claire Patterson's research
on the age of the earth

had made him the world's leading expert

on measuring trace amounts of lead.

And like everyone else at the time,

he assumed the prevalence
of lead occurred naturally.

True scientist that he was, he set out

to discover everything he could

about how lead circulates
through the environment.

On a grant from the American
Petroleum Institute,

he carefully measured
the concentrations of lead

in deep and shallow seawater.

Once again, Patterson found

that his initial data made no sense.

There were only minuscule
concentrations of lead

in the deep ocean water.

But in shallow waters and at the surface,

the concentrations of lead
were hundreds of times greater.

In any ocean, it takes a few hundred years

for the shallow waters
to mix with the deep.

This told Patterson
that the large amount of lead

in the surface waters had arrived recently.

Otherwise it would have
been more evenly distributed.

Knowing the quantity
of lead in the shallow seas

and the time needed to
mix it into the deeper layers,

he was able to estimate the rate of
lead contamination at the surface.

Patterson asked himself

what could possibly supply lead to
the world's oceans at such a rate.

Where's all that lead coming from?

I think I know, Harrison.

It's from leaded gasoline.

Well, then we've got a problem, Pat,

because that's the same
place the money comes from.

But Patterson would not give in.

He went right to work on
publishing the scientific paper

that would make the case
against leaded gasoline.

When he sent the paper to the
prestigious scientific journal

Nature, Patterson put his own name second.

He often did that with his students

to advance their reputations.

He made a lifelong point
of shunning the limelight

and the privileges that come with it.

Only three days after publication...

the push-back began.

- Hello, Dr. Patterson.
- Pleasure to meet you.

Very impressed by your work.

Your work is of great interest

to us in the petroleum
and chemical industries.

Well, it wouldn't have been
possible without your funding.

Precisely. And there's so
much more we'd like to do for you.

Well, I've been thinking about
measuring lead in polar ice

to see if it shows the same kind
of pattern as the oceans.

Lead? But you've already done that.

We're thinking it's time you
move on to other trace elements.

In fact, Dr. Patterson,

our ability to fund you in
any other line of research is...

Virtually limitless.

Lead is a neurotoxin.

When you ship your
tetraethyl lead from the factory...

before you add it to the gasoline...

it's handled just like a chemical weapon.

There's a reason for that.

Where do you suppose all that lead goes

after it leaves the tailpipe?

Think about what it might
be doing to us and our kids.

Dr. Kehoe has shown that the level of lead

in the environment is
as natural as snow in December.

Then why doesn't it
show up in the deep water? Here,

let me just show you.

Thanks for your time.

Wait, you're just gonna keep on putting

millions of tons of poison
into the air we breathe?

If my research doesn't
put you out of business,

some future scientist will.

Patterson's funding from the oil industry

vanished overnight.

In fact, they tried to get him fired.

But the U.S. government...
The Army, the Navy,

the atomic energy commission,
the public health service,

and the National Science
Foundation... Stood by him,

supporting his research on lead pollution.

His investigations took him
from Greenland in the far north

to Antarctica in the far south,

and to rivers, mountains
and valleys in between.

In even the most hostile conditions,

Patterson and his team worked to replicate

the immaculate environment
of the clean room.

Their plastic suits were replaced daily.

Working ten-to 12-hour
days in subzero weather,

they dug a 200-foot-long shaft

into the ice of Antarctica.

It was a form of time travel,

to recover snow that
had fallen three centuries ago,

before the start
of the Industrial Revolution.

Nose!

Wipe your nose, damn it!

There's a thousand times more lead in you

than in this ice!

You want to contaminate
the whole damn sample?!

After four grueling weeks

of painstaking sample collection,

Patterson was ready to go back to the lab.

As with the oceans, he
found that the amount of lead

was much lower in the snow
of a few hundred years before.

No matter where he searched on earth,

no matter how far he traveled back in time,

the results always told the same story:

The naturally occurring levels
in the air and water in the past,

were far lower.

For thousands of years, lead had been known

to cause brain damage,
developmental impairment,

violent behavior, and even death.

In searching for the age of the earth,

Patterson had stumbled on the evidence

for a mass poisoning
on an unprecedented scale.

But Kehoe and the other scientists

employed by the lead industry

persuaded the public they
had nothing to worry about.

Until one man started to pay attention.

Patterson went public with his discoveries

about lead in a big way.

He published his findings

in a major environmental health journal

and sent copies to
various government leaders,

including one highly influential senator.

Edmund Muskie of Maine was the chairman

of the senate subcommittee
on air and water pollution.

In 1966 he held hearings
on the lead question.

The first witness

was Dr. Robert Kehoe,
longtime scientific advocate

for leaded gasoline.

Is it, uh, your conclusion that, in 1937

to the present time, there has been

no increase in the amount of lead

taken in from the atmosphere by
the average traffic policeman,

service station attendant,
or... Or motorist?

There is not the slightest evidence

that there has been
a change in this picture

during this period of time.

Not the slightest.

The hearings were scheduled to take place,

when the fiercest critic, Claire
Patterson was off in Antarctica.

But he unexpectedly appeared

on the fifth day of testimony.

Uh, looks like there
seems to be an increase

in the concentration of lead in people

as a result of exposure to the environment.

Is that correct?

That is correct.

In identifying typical lead levels,

you use actual measurements
you've taken in the field?

Yes.

Are these observations different

from the ones we've been
hearing about from other witnesses?

No, th... They're the same observations.

You... You've testified that there has been

no change in natural
lead levels, is that correct?

That is correct.

You're sure about that?

Absolutely.

The levels we see in
people today may be typical.

But they are
not by any means natural.

So you don't disagree
with Dr. Kehoe's numbers?

Uh, no, no.

You're saying that the same numbers

are leading to different conclusions?

Yes.

You know, this is the kind of thing

we expect to hear from
lawyers, not scientists.

I would agree with that, yes.

You seem to be very sure
of your conclusions, Dr. Kehoe.

It so happens that I have
more experience in this field

than anyone else alive.

At these levels, lead
is a severe chronic insult

to the human body.

There is no medical evidence
that lead has introduced

a danger to public health.

It's irresponsible to mine millions of tons

of toxic material and disperse
it into the environment!

If there was proof of harm,
we would have found it.

Not if your purpose is to sell lead.

Patterson fought the
industry for another 20 years

before lead was finally banned
in U.S. consumer products.

The man who figured
out the age of the earth

was also responsible for one

of the greatest public health
victories of the 20th century.

In just a few years, average lead levels

in the blood of children
plummeted by some 75%.

Today, the medical
consensus is unanimous...

there's no such thing as a nontoxic level

of lead in humans, however small.

Today, scientists sound the alarm

on other environmental dangers.

Vested interests still hire
their own scientists

to confuse the issue.

But in the end,

nature will not be fooled.