As a teenager in 1975, I had my first job at the Princeton Brain Bio-Center, where I was assigned the important task of helping Dr. Carl Pfeiffer write Zinc and Other Micro-Nutrients. When we wrote that book it was considered that lead was safe at 80 parts per million; we argued that a safe level was zero. Subsequently, every five years or so, the Environmental Protection Agency lowered this limit to 60, then 40, then 20, then 10, and some groups even lowered it down to zero for children. At that time, we discovered the important role for zinc, which was connected to a hundred enzymes. (Iron was involved with only eight enzymes and received far more attention.) Later, when I was evaluating medical schools, I was told by the Dean at Harvard Medical School that my work on nutrition was completely meaningless and obsolete, and unimportant for medicine. The importance of micro-nutrients in our soil and the impact on behavior is still not as well known as it should be. The importance of magnesium in heart disease and of selenium as an anti-cancer agent, and the long term toxic effects of aluminum, lead, cadmium, and mercury on the brain were all identified in my first book.
