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Absurdly, he was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel appointed to investigate the dangers of atmospheric lead poisoning even though he was by now unquestionably the leading expert on atmospheric lead.
荒唐的是，一個美國研究委員小組被指派來調查大氣中鉛毒的危險程度，他竟然被排除在外，盡管他這時候毫無疑問已經是美國大氣鉛問題的主要專家。
To his great credit, Patterson never wavered or buckled. Eventually his efforts led to the introduction of the Clean Air Act of 1970 and finally to the removal from sale of all leaded gasoline in the United States in 1986. Almost immediately lead levels in the blood of Americans fell by 80 percent. But because lead is forever, those of us alive today have about 625 times more lead in our blood than people did a century ago. The amount of lead in the atmosphere also continues to grow, quite legally, by about a hundred thousand metric tons a year, mostly from mining, smelting, and industrial activities. The United States also banned lead in indoor paint, "forty-four years after most of Europe," as McGrayne notes. Remarkably, considering its startling toxicity, lead solder was not removed from American food containers until 1993.
幸好，彼得森從來沒有動搖過。由于他的努力，最后提出了《1970年潔凈空氣法》，并于1986年在美國停止銷售一切含鉛汽油。美國人血液里的鉛濃度幾乎馬上下降了80%。但是，由于鉛是一種難以消除的物質，今天每個活著的美國人血液里的鉛濃度，仍要比一個世紀以前的人高出大約625倍。大氣里鉛的含量還在以大約每年10萬噸的速度繼續增加，而且完全是以合法的方式，主要來自采礦、冶煉和工業活動。美國還禁止在家用油漆中添加鉛，正如麥格雷恩所說，“比大多數歐洲國家晚了44年”。考慮到鉛的驚人毒性，美國直到1993年才在食品罐頭上停止使用焊鉛，這是不可思議的。
As for the Ethyl Corporation, it's still going strong, though GM, Standard Oil, and Du Pont no longer have stakes in the company. (They sold out to a company called Albemarle Paper in 1962.) According to McGrayne, as late as February 2001 Ethyl continued to contend "that research has failed to show that leaded gasoline poses a threat to human health or the environment."
至于四乙公司，它仍在發展，雖然通用汽車公司、美孚石油公司和杜邦公司在該公司已經沒有股份。（1962年，它們把股份賣給了奧爾馬爾造紙公司。）據麥格雷恩說，直到2001年2月，四乙公司依然堅持認為，“研究表明，含鉛汽油無論對人的健康還是對環境都不構成威脅”。
