Lead shifts down the entire bell curve of intelligence, as Dr. Reynolds and I knew, not only adding more people with severely reduced intellectual capacity but also reducing the number of exceptionally gifted people. We knew that lead is more prevalent in poor and minority communities, and thus lead exposure exacerbates our horrible trends in inequality and the too-wide racial education gap. We knew that if you were going to put something in a population to keep people down for generations to come, it would be lead.
