Word: radiumed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Died. Frederic Joliot-Curie, 58, atomic physicist, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1935, member of the French Communist Party's Central Committee, winner of a Stalin Peace Prize in 1950; following surgery for an internal hemorrhage; in Paris. Marrying Irene Curie, daughter of Radium Discoverers Pierre and Marie Curie, Frederic Joliot added their name to his own. With his physicist wife, who died of leukemia in 1956, he won the Nobel for discovering that radioactivity could be produced in the laboratory in elements which were not naturally radioactive. This first opened the possibility of widespread use of radioactivity...
When Muller made this discovery, he may have heard a roll of distant thunder, but he could not have known what it meant. In the year 1926, long before Hiroshima, no man-made radioactivity was at large on earth outside the range of X-ray machines and radium capsules, and none was expected. No one suspected that in less than 20 years the mutation-producing effects of radiation would be a worldwide worry...
...danger skyrockets: part of the shielding may be removed for nucleonics technicians to work on the power plant. Another oddity: though detectable radiation gets into the air and might conceivably build up to health-hazard proportions, it does not come from the reactor. The heavy villains are the radium-painted luminous dials and markers used to permit operating in the dark. In a completely closed ventilating system with recycled air, the radon gas emitted by such markers becomes so concentrated that it could hinder detection of an actual reactor leak. After the markers were replaced by a nonradioactive type...
That night Joke began to vomit. Her parents wrapped the vomit in newspaper and tossed it into the stove. Next morning Joke seemed all right and went off to kindergarten; her father threw the ashes from the stove on a backyard dump. A doctor, checking radium needles at the hospital, noticed that the tip of the one used on Joke (it had already been condemned because of oxidation at the junction of head and shaft) was missing. When it could not be found in the treatment room, out went the alarm...
...times what can be safely left in the body for a lifetime-had broken off in Joke's nasopharynx. She had swallowed it. During the evening, the radiation made Joke sick. When she vomited, up came the needle. In the stove, the capsule was destroyed and the radium salt was scattered through the ashes...