> Cynics might point out that any old farmer could distill ethyl alcohol from grain. It couldn't be patented, or its distribution profitably controlled. Tetraethyl lead could.

Were they cynics, though? As the article itself points out, the dangers of tetraethyl lead were already well know. And then there is this:

> And, as Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner point out, "For the next four decades, all studies of the use of tetraethyl lead were conducted by laboratories and scientists funded by the Ethyl Corporation and General Motors".

It doesn't take a cynic to see what was going on here.