Word: clam
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Better Chemists. Weiss and Shipman dried the clam flesh, reduced it to ash and dissolved the ash in dilute acid. The solution showed characteristic gamma rays that could come only from cobalt 60. This was odd, they thought; cobalt 60 is not a fission product, and it had not been found in other radioactive material, even in samples from much closer to Ground Zero. To make doubly sure. Weiss and Shipman ran a careful analysis. One clam proved to contain one-tenth of a microcurie of cobalt 60; the other had one-third of a microcurie...
These are not very dangerous amounts; the maximum permissible concentration of cobalt 60 in the human body is listed by the Bureau of Standards as three microcuries. A man would have to eat at least ten of the hot clams (20 Ibs. of flesh) to exceed this limit. But Weiss and Shipman cannot be sure that cobalt 60 was not heavily concentrated in some special part of the clam's tissue, increasing the danger proportionately...
Unsuspected Mechanism. Weiss and Shipman were not aware when they began their work that clams have a love for cobalt. To find out whether other species than the giant clam like to collect it, they added a little cobalt to San Francisco Bay water (which normally has no detectable trace) and put some local clams into it. Later analysis by the Navy team showed that these clams also have the trait of collecting cobalt...
Scientists yesterday reported that veinal infusion of calcium is a promising antidote for dangerous radioactive strontium from A-bomb or H-bomb fallout. They also said that the silent clam, due to its peculiar attribute of absorbing radioactive atoms, will reveal fine fallout, which would otherwise be hard to detect...
...attempt to answer this question. Welsh is studying the action of a bromine derative of LSD on the clam heart...