In the UK there is no publicly funded research, whether through taxes or charitable donations, on aluminum and life. However, funding bodies do receive applications to do aluminum research and their own miserly success rates for all grants would predict that one in four of such should have been successful.

Indeed, type aluminum or an associated keyword into the search tools on any of the UK Research Council Grant Databases and you will be lucky if for the past decade you get one hit which relates to aluminum and life. The success rate is the same for all of the major medical-related charities.

Moreover, whereas the first Keele Meeting on aluminum held in 1995 was attended by twenty UK-based research groups active in the field of aluminum and life, the eighth Keele Meeting, which took place earlier this year had a mere two such groups represented. What’s going on? Surely, our knowledge of the biology of aluminum is not complete, there must be a lot more to find out…shouldn’t we be supporting research in this field?

Aluminum is the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust after silicon and oxygen. However, unlike all other abundant metals aluminum has no known biological function. It is apparently neither essential nor a contributor to any life-affirming process. However, its ubiquity and multifarious chemistry combine to present the enigma of its non-selection as one of the elements of life. Such an unanswered question should be reason enough to study aluminum though there are others which relate to the myriad ways that aluminum is used in everyday life.

We live in what I call The Aluminum Age, a reference to other metal (for example iron and bronze) ages of the past, and, as a result, we are each of us accumulating a body burden of aluminum as we get older. While aluminum has no essential function in life it is highly biologically reactive. We should not forgot that it is the cause of the death of fish in lakes impacted by acid rain, and again, this should be sufficient in itself for us to want to know the repercussions for human health of a burgeoning body burden of aluminum.

While simple curiosity may no longer be a valid enough reason for funding research in the current economic climate, the obvious need to demonstrate the safety of the most widely used metal on the planet should warrant at the very least a modicum of grant support.

There is evidence of significant complacency and assumptions having been made that the requisite data on the safe use of aluminum are available. In the town of Camelford, UK, twenty tonnes of aluminum sulfate was mistakenly added to the public water supply in 1988. This is yet another case in point in that the Department of Health’s Committee on Toxicity (DH COT) charged with investigating the incident has found its task to be well-nigh impossible due to the paucity of quality information on the human toxicity of aluminum.

It has taken the poisoning of twenty thousand people and twenty years of subsequent deliberations to arrive at the tentative viewpoint that aluminum may not be safe after all. That is criminal.

The aluminum industry has to take some of the blame. Indeed, it might actually be applauded for orchestrating an ultimately completely successful propaganda campaign against aluminum research in the UK and globally. The global aluminum industry does not fund research into the safety of its product they actually fund individuals, often covertly, to make authoritative-sounding representations to the media, specialist panels, court hearings (whoever will listen) on the subject of aluminum and health.

When industry views are not countered they are believed and testimony to this is the shutting down of aluminum research both in the UK and globally. Another successful ploy of the aluminum industry is to fund so-called reviews of aluminum and human health.

Reviews funded by the aluminum industry are widely cited by individuals and organizations that are ignorant of their provenance and are simply looking for authoritative reviews of the field. They too have proven to be an extremely successful tool in breeding complacency in our understanding of aluminum and human health.

Several colleagues outside the UK have told me of anonymous telephone calls from individuals acting on behalf of the aluminum industry and warning them that their recent interest in aluminum and health will not be advantageous to their careers. Readers may baulk at such suggestions of cloak-and-dagger activities but should just take a moment to consider the implications of aluminum being unequivocally linked to chronic disease in humans. By comparison, the problems currently faced by the tobacco industry will be very small beer indeed!

Christopher Exley PhD is a Reader in Bioinorganic Chemistry at the The Birchall Centre, Lennard-Jones Laboratories, Keele University, Staffordshire, UK.