Beware the MMT.

Benzene.

Whee.

I don't look forward to putting gas into my car the next time that I think I "have to".

And that's just our little well-proven, leukemia-causing chemical friend from *way* back in the days of rubber cement, which has *still* not been banned because it's "useful" to companies more interested in profits than in public health.

No mention of Tom DeLay's favourite drink, MTBE (methyl tertiary butyl ether). No mention of MMT (methylcyclopentadienyl manganese tricarbonyl).

Watch out for MMT. If not today, then say, around 2008. Organic Manganese in motor vehicle fuel = super bad news. As in "Parkinson's Disease epidemic" bad news that *will* take us two or three decades to recognize as the public health threat that it is.

Remember leaded gasoline? Of course you don't.

I do, because my first car was a used '63 Wolfsburg VW Beetle with a very nifty cloth sunroof and a six-volt battery I had to lift up the horsehair-stuffed backseat in order to "recharge" from time to time with distilled water. Anyway -- it liked leaded gasoline *way* better than unleaded gas, before leaded gas finally got banned in this country, for reasons I didn't understand when it happened.

The lead was added as an "antiknock" agent, and I gladly drove out of my way to find the leaded gasoline to keep my stoopid car running happy. I guess I figured "lead is lead" and "lead is heavy and will settle near the pavement".

You think I knew, or cared, that the tetraethyl lead in my gas was molecularly "curious"? I certainly did not.

Winds up that tetraethyl lead is uniquely deadly because it is *organic* -- lead atoms fused with carbon atoms, meaning that the emissions get taken into and absorbed by the body far more readily than just plain old, pure elemental lead.

I honestly had no clue, whatsoever.

The Ethyl Corporation (now known as "Afton Chemical" under the name "NewMarket Corporation") which marketed organic lead as an "antiknock" gas additive (and still does in markets like China, where it's not yet banned) is currently trying to get federal clearance to market MMT (a.k.a. "HiTec 3000") as a commercial gasoline additive in the US. Indeed, it's already selling MMT to the US Navy under the name "Combustion Improver No. 2" to decrease "telltale exhaust" from jet fighter aircraft.

All of which, I am sure, is grand, except that elemental Manganese -- and MMT is an *organic* manganese compound -- is linked, directly, causally, to Parkinson's Disease, better known in the early 19th century as "Shaking Palsy".

Write your elected represenatives and senators. Or else get ready to start shaking.