REVIEWS


FORENSIC SCIENCE Death watch


Marie and Pierre Curie discovered radium in 1898, using the word ‘radio-active’ for the first time. With its mysterious property of glowing in the dark, it intrigued scientists and laypeople alike, and marks the starting point of the 20th century’s obsession with all things nuclear. At the time, before the discovery of antibiotics, bacterial infections were the leading public health problem, so the discovery that radium can kill bacteria and thereby cure infections quickly elevated the new element to the status of a miracle cure. A whole industry sprang up selling products based on the claims of the health-bringing properties of radium. But the element was astronomically expensive, so many of these products contained little or none of it. In 1901, one scientist suffered


severe skin burns after forgetting a small sample of radium kept in his pocket, and others confirmed this property by experimenting on their own skin. Scientists realised that the element had a dangerous side and took precautions when handling visible chunks of the material, but in diluted form they still considered it harmless. Two crucial pieces of knowledge


were missing to them: first, that radioactivity can cause cancer by damaging DNA – at the beginning of the 20th century people didn’t know about the role of DNA in the cell. They hadn’t been dealing with radioactivity for long enough to be able to observe its slow, accumulating risk as a possible cause for cancer. Secondly, as chemists should have realised, radium is an alkaline earth metal and thus tends to behave like calcium. Thus, radium entering the body can get incorporated into the bones and carry on sending out its radiation from there for centuries. Of its numerous radioactive isotopes, Ra-226 is the most persistent with a half-life of 1600 years. The devastating effect of these


two facts were recognised much too slowly and, at great human cost, from the physical decline of the young women who used luminescent paint


to paint the dials of watches and instruments for night use, especially for armed forces in World War I. In two US companies producing these dials, workers were taught to ‘lip-point’, ie to sharpen the point of their camel-hair brushes with their lips. As a result, they ingested dangerous amounts of radium every day. Moreover, their bosses assured them that the paint was harmless and indeed healthy, so they failed to take any precautions against further exposure via their skin. By 1922, several former workers of the USRC plant in Newark, New Jersey, were experiencing tooth problems, then bone decay in their jawbones. Other bone problems, sarcomas and anaemia followed. Young women who had worked as


dial painters during the war and then moved on to other things started dying of mysterious symptoms, but it took years before the dots were duly joined. In June 1925, a male employee died and his post-mortem marked the first time that radioactivity was detected in a human body. The case should have been clear


after that, but the companies still escaped legal consequences due to the statute of limitation for industrial exposure, which was shorter than the time it normally took for radiation damage to manifest itself. A lawyer found the way around this, arguing that the radium incorporated into the bones keeps irradiating the workers even after they have left employment, such that the exposure persists, and the statute of limitation does not apply. On this basis, the workers in New Jersey won compensation in an out-of-court settlement in 1928. At another US company, Radium


Dial in Ottawa, Illinois, which had started business a few years later, legal proceedings dragged on until the 1930s. The company went all the way to the Supreme Court to deny responsibility – a lost cause considering it had paid for newspaper ads saying radium was harmless at a time when it knew better. Kate Moore has meticulously described the lives of the women who were either involved in the two


The radium girls


successful court cases in New Jersey and Illinois or died before then, using both archival sources and interviews with surviving family members. The resulting account is highly dramatic in its description of the suffering and the brave fight for legal recognition and compensation.


Author Kate Moore


Publisher Simon & Schuster UK Pages 480 Price £16.99 ISBN 978-14711-5387-7


Reviewer Michael Gross is a science writer based in Oxford, UK


The book is light on the science, but the history of the discovery of radium, and its use and misuse, has been described in many other places. Understandably, Moore wanted to give a voice to the women who were at the sharp end of this crisis. As she explains, their fight for recognition of radiation damage as an occupational hazard saved many lives, not only in the handling of radium, but also in the Manhattan Project and the nascent nuclear industry.


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TED KINSMAN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY


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