Bruce Lanphear

And that's going to be when blood lead is at its highest because estrogen pushes lead into the bone.

Not only that, women lose lead into the developing fetus when they're pregnant.

So what Ellen found is that there was less of a spike around menopause for the women that had three or four pregnancies because they had offloaded that into their babies.

So all of this, if you put it together, and this is, of course, in a very short note of it, you can see that lead...

increases dyslipidemia.

It leads to tears in the endothelium of the arterial wall.

It's going to increase thrombosis.

All of these things that we think of as the classic atherosclerosis.

Well, what estrogen does is the opposite of those.

decreases dyslipidemia.

It repairs the arterial endothelial wall.

So how much of it is that estrogen is protective?

And how much is it that it's moving lead out of the system, making it less biologically available?

Yeah, I've been doing this for about 30 years.

And this is one of my mentors, Herb Needleman, spent 40 years of his career on it.

And in some ways, Eric, it seems to me, particularly in these very difficult, entrenched problems like lead, we don't have any pharmaceutical company reaching out to us to promote what we do.

We've got industry trying to squash pharmaceuticals.

Yeah, right.

It really does take a career to really make a dent in this stuff.

And in a way, you can look at my trajectory, and it's really following up on what Herb Edelman did and what Claire Patterson did, and that was finding the effects at lower and lower levels.