Poison?

If city streets were filled with an invisible, slow-working poison, touched and breathed by every passerby, so that vast portions of the population lost the use of some of their muscles, became impotent and sterile, sickened, sagged and died, that would be a very sorry pass indeed.

Whether or not tetraethyl lead, as prepared for dilution in gasoline to quiet "knocking" motors, would constitute such a poison, scientists disagree.

Last week, U. S. Surgeon General Hugh S. Cumming gave notice that the case would be tried by official conference this month in Washington. For the defense of tetraethyl lead, there will be agents of the company (a joint subsidiary of the General Motors Corporation and the Standard Oil Co. of New Jersey) at whose plant at Bayway, N.J., workers manufacturing tetraethyl lead went mad with lead poisoning last fall and died in straight jackets (TIME, Nov. 10). For the prosecution there will be scientists who maintain that a U. S. Bureau of Mines report, issued at Pittsburgh in November and accepted by health authorities as a clean bill of health for leaded gasoline, was inconclusive and premature.

At the Surgeon General's conference, no one will suggest that tetraethyl lead is not poisonous. The question will be: Would the exhausts of automobiles burning tetraethylized gasoline spray the country with creeping infirmity and death ?

Manufacture of the gasoline was suspended until the conference meets, decides.