Jerry Moran: “with today's celebration of Earth Day marked locally by public anxiety over lead contamination in our area drinking…”

“with today's celebration of Earth Day marked locally by public anxiety over lead contamination in our area drinking water, I thought it fitting to commemorate the life of Clair Patterson, a scientist who worked singlehandedly to reduce our exposure to lead and, in the process, save millions of lives. As a scientist specializing in the environment, Clair Patterson's pioneering work stretched across an unusual number of sub-disciplines, including archaeology, meteorology, oceanography, chemistry and geology. Despite these many areas of expertise, he is best known for determining the age of the Earth. The son of a postal worker, Clair Patterson began a lifelong attraction to chemistry that began at an early age and ultimately led to a thesis in molecular spectroscopy. Besides working on the Manhattan Project, he continued his dissertation in 1951 and analyzed lead samples that gave lead isotopic compositions for minerals separated from a billion-year-old sample of Precambrian granite.”