Lead Wars: The politics of science and the fate of America's children

In August 2001, Maryland's highest court, its Court of Appeals, handed down a strongly worded opinion in what has become one of the most contentious and bitter battles in the history of public health, a battle that goes to the heart of beliefs about what public health should be. The court had been asked to decide whether or not researchers at Johns Hopkins University, among the nation's most prestigious academic institutions, had engaged in unethical research on children. The case pitted two African-American children and their families against the Kennedy Krieger Institute (KKI), Hopkins's premier children's clinic and research center, which in the 1990s had conducted a six-year study of children who were exposed by the researchers to differing amounts of lead in their homes. Underlying the KKI case was a much more complex and troubling story of America's public health, the public health profession, and the conundrum that we, as a society, face as institutions confront a host of new environmental threats in a very conservative political culture.