Robert A. Kehoe

Robert A. Kehoe (November 18, 1893 – November 24, 1992) was an American toxicologist and leader in occupational health. Kehoe was the foremost medical apologist for the use of tetraethyllead as an additive in gasoline.

Kehoe was born in Georgetown, Ohio, on November 18, 1893 to Jeremiah and Jessie Kehoe.

Robert studied at Ohio State University. After his graduation at the University of Cincinnati (UC) medical school in 1920 he was a resident in pathology at the Cincinnati General Hospital.

Shortly after obtaining his M.D. he married Lucille Marshall.

When he was an instructor in the UC Department of Physiology in 1924, he was hired by Charles Kettering for General Motors (GM) to examine health issues related to the production of tetraethyllead (TEL). In 1925 Kehoe became the chief medical advisor of the Ethyl Corporation, a position he held until his retirement.

In 1930, he became the director of the newly created UC Kettering Laboratory of Applied Physiology, the first university-based laboratory devoted to toxicological problems peculiar to industry. The laboratory was funded by the stakeholder industry, GM, DuPont, and Ethyl Corporation.

At the Kettering Laboratory, Kehoe was commissioned by DuPont to produce a study to show that the carcinogen 2-Naphthylamine, then widely used by DuPont and shown to produce cancer in nine out of ten employees exposed to it, was safe. Kehoe was named Professor of Industrial Medicine at UC and put together an interdisciplinary team to investigate occupational health issues.

Working at the GM Research Laboratory at Dayton, Ohio, Thomas Midgley and Charles Kettering studied anti-knocking agents. In 1921, they discovered TEL's anti-knocking property and proceeded to patent its use in gasoline, allowing engines to work with higher compression. Two years later, GM and Standard Oil established the Ethyl Corporation to produce TEL as a gasoline additive with the help of DuPont. Soon, workers at Ethyl plants fell ill and a number of them died from lead poisoning. Kettering hired Kehoe to develop protocols for the workers handling TEL. Kehoe soon became the main medical advocate for the position that the use of TEL in gasoline is safe and gained prominence as the industry's expert at government and public health hearings. As almost all research support concerning leaded gasoline came from industry, and most was channeled to him, he held "an almost complete monopoly" on data for half a century. Kehoe believed that presence of lead in humans and other organisms was normal and that exposure to low lead levels was not harmful.

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