
My Great-Great-Aunt Discovered Francium, and It Killed Her - siyer
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/my-great-great-aunt-discovered-francium-and-it-killed-her.html
======
zobzu
Random tidbit, I lived a few hundred meters away from Marie Curie's place in
my younger days (long after her death, in the 80's). A friend of mine in fact
lived at her place. One day, the city decided to have radiation studies done
and everyone in the area got visits from scientists - they took ground and
water samples at multiple locations.

Results were communicated later - and radium, radon levels were more elevated
especially at the old Marie Curie's house. However, nothing had been done
following these findings.

Several areas in the city with radium and other radioactive materials have
been found (older and newer dumps really!). Some areas are blocked off with
radioactive signs, some houses have been destroyed for safety now.

Both our families moved. Note that the house also is at chemin du radium in
France.

My friend's family and mine have left a few years later. All that to say, even
recently there was still very little awareness and safety precautions being
taken.

Some reference: [http://www.franceinfo.fr/emission/le-plus-france-
info/2013-2...](http://www.franceinfo.fr/emission/le-plus-france-
info/2013-2014/dechets-radioactifs-j-habite-chemin-du-radium-12-02-2013-09-15)

------
siyer
I thought this article was one of the best descriptions I've seen of the
perils (both personal and teleological) of the scientific process.

"We should celebrate scientists not solely for their accomplishments but also
for their courage and the tenacity required to discover anything at all. There
are brave people out there working right now. They are brave not because they
are killing themselves slowly or leaping from airplanes or catching rare
tropical diseases, although scientists have done all those things. They are
brave because of the intense emotional risks of trying to do something no one
has done before by following your own lead. Radiation is a potent allegory for
human life. Everything is always, inevitably falling apart; we are all in
arrested decay. Our greatest achievements may become at best footnotes; few
people remember us; we can’t know what will eventually come of our work."

~~~
woodchuck64
"Radiation is a potent allegory for human life. Everything is always,
inevitably falling apart; we are all in arrested decay. Our greatest
achievements may become at best footnotes; few people remember us; we can’t
know what will eventually come of our work."

And yet the human race is always, inevitably improving in every conceivable
measure as a consequence of this individual sacrifice.

------
guiomie
"Perhaps the most tragic demonstration of this involved workers at the United
States Radium Corporation factory in Orange, N.J., which in 1917 began hiring
young women to paint watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium paint. The
workers were told that the paint was harmless and were encouraged to lick the
paintbrushes to make them pointy enough to inscribe small numbers. "

How awful is this ? I had never realized radiation had been so misunderstood
back then...

~~~
dalke
The Radium Craze up to the nuclear bomb watching tourism of the Atomic Age are
indeed quite bizarre to modern sensibilities. Or you could say they reflect an
optimistic and romantic hope of what the future could bring, which we no
longer have.

You might be interested in [http://www.academia.edu/3586500/Half-
Lives_The_Rise_and_Fall...](http://www.academia.edu/3586500/Half-
Lives_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_American_Radium_Craze_Through_Print_Culture_1900-1933)
, which writes that

> Prescribed Radithor by his doctor in 1928, Byers was dead by 1932 (aged 51),
> with his autopsy revealing that he had consumed approximately 1,400 bottles
> in afew short years — at least one every day. Radithor was a radium drinking
> solution promoted by one Dr. William Bailey (a fake name) whose products did
> in fact contain significant amounts of the element. The recognition that
> rich patients — and not just female industrial dial painters — were dying
> because of these products led “the federal government to act with far
> greater alacrity to help consumers than to assist workers.”

~~~
sethrin
The Wall Street Journal published an influential article about Byers, "The
Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off" which can be found on p. 18
here:
[http://www.case.edu/affil/MeMA/MCA/11-20/1991-Nov.pdf](http://www.case.edu/affil/MeMA/MCA/11-20/1991-Nov.pdf)

~~~
dalke
Thanks for the pointer!

The comment about the jaw coming off reminds me of a story about phosphorus as
a tonic:

> [I]n 1931 a Dr. G. Coltart wrote to the Lancet about an interesting case. A
> patient of his had come to him in 1904 complaining of feeling run down and
> so the doctor had prescribed a popular brand of tonic pills that contained
> both elemental phosphorous and strychnine but told the patient to stop
> taking them if the strychnine made him twitch. The patient had returned
> twenty-seven years later with an advanced case of phossy jw, the industrial
> disease that afflicted those in the match-making industrys, having taken the
> pills regularly during the intervening years. Asked why he had taken the
> pills for so long, he replied that he continued with them because they had
> never caused him to twitch! ("The Shocking History of Phosphorous", John
> Emsley, p. 58.)

The comment about the FDA reminds me of the 1937 Elixir Sulfanilamide tragedy.
As the WSJ article points out, the FDA only had the power to regulate
adulterants or false advertising. They only had the authority to track down
the toxic Elixir Sulfanilamide because it, technically speaking, was not an
elixir. Hence why they couldn't control the sales of radium water which truly
did contain radium.

(With free market beliefs, the idea was that the customer should decide, not
the government.)

And the speculation about the possible stimulative effect echos the 1925
publication in JAMA by Martland, et al.,at
[http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=238584](http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=238584)
:

> Minute particles of the radioactive substances ... produce, for a period of
> time, seemingly curative or stimulative reactions, to be followed later by
> exhaustion and destruction of the blood producing centers.

------
blueskin_
De-paywall-ified: [https://archive.today/fxhwJ](https://archive.today/fxhwJ)

------
stefantalpalaru
>[...] Irène Joliot-Curie “had a penchant for asserting that anyone who
worried about radiation hazards was not a dedicated scientist.” There are
photographs of Joliot-Curie sucking a fluid up a glass tube to move it from
one container to another, a practice called mouth pipetting. The historian
Anne Fellinger has asserted that the substance is polonium [...]

We would be better served by the condemnation of lethal stupidity than the
hollow glorification of scientific "heroes". We need the truth more than we
need role models.

~~~
EliRivers
The truth at the time was that there was no known hazard to health.

~~~
stefantalpalaru
Have you read the article? The hazards were known, alright. And heroically
ignored.

~~~
saalweachter
The article gives me the impression that the Curies' medical knowledge was
primitive or nonexistent by today's standards. It makes it seem like they
thought radiation would just magically cure cancer, like a philosopher's
stone.

Does anyone know if this is correct? The article mentions that they knew
radiation would kill tumors; did they know it just killed everything, but
would kill the thing it was closest to fastest, or did they think it had
magical specificity? Perey noted that francium would accumulate in tumors; did
she know that tumors have faster metabolisms (the basis of a lot of treatments
today) or did she think it had magical tumor seeking properties? If they were
in fact ignorant by today's standards, were they ignorant by their own's?

