Word: polonium
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Watson and Francis Crick, of the double-helix structure of DNA. In 82 years of Nobel history, just six other women have won honors in scientific categories; and only two of these were named alone, without fellow honorees: France's Marie Curie in 1911, for discovering radium and polonium, and Britain's Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin in 1964, for deciphering the structure of penicillin and other compounds. McClintock is the first to win unshared honors in medicine and physiology. Said Watson, who has been director at Cold Spring Harbor and hence McClintock's boss for 15 years...
...Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Edward P. Radford Jr. and Dr. Vilma R. Hunt worked with polonium,* one of the rarest of the naturally occurring elements and until recently one of the hardest to detect. Many radioactive elements are found in tobacco leaves, as in all vegetation; they occur naturally and have nothing to do with man-made fallout, and they have been exonerated as causes of lung cancer. Polonium is different, the Harvard researchers reported in Science, because it vaporizes at a mere 500° C., far below the 800° temperature of a burning cigarette...
Experiments with machine-smoked cigarettes showed that polonium attaches itself to smoke particles and may also pass into the lungs with the inhaled smoke in the form of gas. The amount of polonium in tobacco, as in a tossed green salad, would be negligible if, like the salad, it passed quickly through the system. But the polonium-bearing smoke appears to get trapped in the tissues and crevices of the airways, say Drs. Radford and Hunt. Because of this trapping, they suggest, polonium builds up to concentrations that are high enough so that its radioactivity could begin the process that...
There is reason to believe, Radford said, that the polonium content of pipe and cigar tobacco is about the same as in cigarettes, but that the cancer rate is lower for pipe and cigar smokers since they do not inhale as much. However, he added that cancer of the mouth and esophagus is about as frequent in all smokers...
...researchers findings to date are reproduced in full in this month's issue of Science magazine. Radford and Mrs. Hunt plan to continue their studies of all radioactive elements in tobacco and of the other effects of polonium on the tissue of smokers...