Within half an hour of the RCEP report being published,[4] the Environment Secretary, Tom King, announced that the government would support the introduction of unleaded petrol, that oil companies would have to provide it on forecourts, and that car manufacturers would have to make engines that could use it.
Ultimately it depended upon a junior hospital doctor (Russell-Jones) and a respected scientist (Robert Stephens) with sufficient confidence in their own judgement to risk their professional reputations in pursuit of a cause.
However, by 1979, in the face of growing evidence of the harmful effects of lead on children's behaviour, neuro-cognitive development and IQ, the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) commissioned a report under the Chairmanship of Professor Lawther.
In 1980 the Conservation Society Pollution Working Party published a response to the Lawther report “Lead or Health”[11] co-authored by Professor Derek Bryce-Smith PhD, DSc, C Chem, FRSC, Professor of Organic Chemistry at Reading University, and Dr Robert Stephens, PhD, DSc, C Chem, FRSC, Reader in Organic Chemistry at the University of Birmingham, but HMG resisted their call for unleaded petrol under pressure from both the motor manufacturers and the petroleum industry.
In 1979, Professor Needleman had published a seminal paper in the New England Journal of Medicine that demonstrated dose-dependent relationships between elevated levels of lead in shed milk teeth and a host of negative outcomes in children, including distractibility, hyperactivity, lower IQ and a tendency to get easily frustrated.
[13] Clair Patterson had built an ultra-clean laboratory in the early fifties in order to measure the minuscule quantities of lead isotopes in an iron meteorite from the birth of the solar system; by which means he was able to date the age of the Earth at 4.55 billion years, an estimate that has never been superseded.