Great stuff!
Midgley was one of those curious overly-practical dogmatic types who, when they have gained noteriety for developing something new, adamantly defend its superior attributes by going too far in the effort to prove them. In fact, he had once declared that lead was so safe that:
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.. he poured tetra-ethyl lead over his hands, then placed a bottle of the chemical over his nose and breathed it in for sixty seconds, declaring all the while that he could do this every day without succumbing to any problems whatsoever. ---- Wikepedia.
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He was eventually forced to take sick leave to take a cure for lead poisoning.
Professor Bernard Cohen of the Universtiy of Pittsburgh once claimed that the dangers of Plutonium to the environment and the general public were much too overstated. He once offered to eat a gram of plutonium to demonstrate that eating it is no more dangerous than eating a gram of caffeine.
Plutonium is one of the most dangerous materials on earth. One thirty-thousandth of an ounce will cause cancer if inhaled. In its purest form it has a half-life of 24,000 years.