By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years, a figure far more accurate than estimates existing at the time, and one that has remained largely unchallenged since 1956.

Later, his work on this subject led to a total (US and worldwide) re-evaluation of the unregulated growth of concentrations of industrial lead in the atmosphere and in the human body.

He then attended nearby Grinnell College, meeting his future wife, Lorna (Laurie) McCleary, there and graduating with a degree in chemistry in 1943.

[4] Both were then employed on the Manhattan Project as civilians, first at the University of Chicago and then at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he specialized in mass spectrometry.

[7] Patterson's postdoc work the University of Chicago was under Harrison Brown, who teamed him with George Tilton to study geological aging of zircon crystals.

[8] Such evidence caused him to doubt the commonly held view that anthropogenic activities had increased lead concentrations only by a factor of (about) two over naturally occurring levels.

Aware of the significant public-health implications of his findings, he devoted the rest of his life to eliminating lead from being introduced into the environment.

In his campaign to have lead removed from gasoline (petrol), Patterson took on the lobbying power of the Ethyl Corporation (which employed Kehoe), and the legacy of the late Thomas Midgley Jr. (who invented tetraethyllead (TEL) and chlorofluorocarbons), as well as the additive-lead industry as a whole.

Following his criticism of the lead industry, he was refused contracts by several supposedly-neutral research organizations, including the United States Public Health Service.

[8] In 1971 he was excluded from a National Research Council (NRC) panel on atmospheric lead contamination, even though he was by then the foremost singular expert on the subject.

[8] In his ultraclean laboratory at Caltech, considered one of the first clean rooms, Patterson measured isotopic ratios in a setting free of the contamination that confounded the findings of Kehoe and others.

Where Kehoe measured lead in (claimed) "unexposed" workers in a TEL plant and among Mexican farmers, Patterson studied mummies from before the Iron Age, and tuna raised from pelagic waters.

[15] Patterson focused his attention and his advanced laboratory techniques on lead contamination in food, for which official testing data also reported marked increases.

[20] Patterson expressed his opinions in a 78-page minority report, which argued that control measures in certain sensitive sectors—including all leaded fuels, public water distribution systems, food containers, paints and glazes—should start immediately.

[27] Patterson was also featured in "The Clean Room" is the seventh episode of the American documentary television series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.