Word: shipman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Since the March 1954 thermonuclear test explosion in the Marshall Islands, the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory at San Francisco has been checking the radioactivity of animals, plants, materials, etc., in the vicinity of the crater. In Science, Herbert W. Weiss and William H. Shipman tell what they found when they checked the flesh of two giant "killer" clams (Tridacna gigas) collected last year from the shore of Rongelap atoll, 150 miles away from the South Pacific test site...
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...
...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...
...Thanks to Turf Columnist Evan Shipman's complaint, New York's Metropolitan Jockey Club belatedly arranged to televise its last race of the spring meeting: the $111,700 mile-and-a-furlong Wood Memorial. And thanks to the desperate courage of Belair Stud's big bay colt, Nashua, closing from behind in the final jump to nip Mrs. John W. Galbreath's Summer Tan by a neck, millions of televiewers saw a thriller...