Word: strontium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Highest Tree (by Dore Schary) is a disaster of good intentions. The author of Sunrise at Campobello is writing in protest: he is one of the people who, aware of the danger of strontium 90 in the air, would ban further nuclear test explosions. Playwright Schary's central figure, Dr. Aaron Cornish (Kenneth MacKenna) is a famous atomic scientist stricken, very possibly because of his nuclear activities, with acute leukemia. In any case, after self-searching, he determines to spend what months remain to him urging an end to nuclear-bomb tests...
...movement got its start last year when portly Dr. Teiji Ugai, 63, president of Shizuoka Pharmaceutical College, was worrying over reports that the tea plant avidly takes up strontium, including radioactive strontium 90 (TIME, Oct. 27) and that port of New York authorities had detected radioactivity in Japanese tea. Shizuoka prefecture, southwest of Tokyo, grows more than half Japan's tea, and the industry was already ailing before radiation sickness...
...Ugai remembered that strontium chloride combines with tannic acid to form an insoluble compound. From this he reasoned that strontium, instead of being deposited in the bones to do long-term damage, might be eliminated from the human system if there was enough tannic acid present. It worked in Dr. Ugai's laboratory, where mice stored up 30% less strontium in their bones when they also got tannic acid. Then he found that a standard brew of green or black tea worked like a weak solution of tannic acid...
...Britain a dozen scientists working for the Medical Research Council were taking test doses of two radioactive iso-fopes of strontium. With atomic numbers 85 and 87, these are less deadly than strontium 89 or 90, but still have enough activity for their presence and distribution in the body to be checked by radiation counters. Missing from the evidence being studied in this test: any mention of how much strong, black tea the volunteers were tippling...
While poking around the Animas Valley, Health Service scientists came across a second, even more alarming danger. Vegetables grown by irrigation contained not only 'radium (from the water), but also surprising amounts of strontium 90, which could have come only from nuclear-test fallout. Peas ranged as high as 250 micromicrocuries per kilogram (2.2 lbs.); cabbages went up to 315 micromicrocuries. One sample of lettuce had 970 micromicrocuries. The reading was twelve times the maximum permissible level set by the Atomic Energy Commission...