A mother holding a baby gasses up her car at the gas station

Getting lead out of gasoline

Thomas Cahill and colleagues at the Crocker Nuclear Lab used the lab’s cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator that makes a beam of protons, to study air quality, among other things. In the 1970s, Cahill’s team provided evidence showing how lead pollution spread from freeways over neighborhoods, leading then-Gov. Jerry Brown to introduce the first controls on lead as a gasoline additive.

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