In 1917 a young female right out of high school started working at a radium factory in Orange, New Jersey. The job was mixing water, glue and radium powder for the task of painting watch dials, aircraft switches, and instrument dials. The paint is newly inventive and cool so without hesitation she paints her nails and lips with her friends all the while not knowing that this paint that is making them radiant, is slowly killing them. This was the life of Grace Fryer. Today there are trepidations on the topic of radiation from fears of nuclear fallout, meltdowns, or acts of terrorism. This uneasiness is a result of events over the past one hundred years showing the dangers of radiation. Although most accidents today leading to death from radiation poisoning occur from human error or faults in equipment, the incident involving the now named "radium girls" transpired from lack of public awareness and safety laws. (introduce topics of the paper)
The Radium Luminous Material Corporation was founded in 1914 (renamed in 1921 to the United States Radium Corporation) by Dr. Sabin Arnold von Sochocky and Dr. George S. Willis becoming the first U.S. company to produce radioluminescent paint. The paint used by this particular company was the trademarked "Undark", invented by William J. Hammer through mixing radium, zinc sulfide and glue with the help from Marie and Pierre Currie and Henri Becquerel. The corporation hired hundreds of women having no trouble finding employees, being one of the few companies at the time to hire women. Business was surging with the defense contract obtained by filling the demand during World War I by making equipment for soldiers luminescent, enabling reading at night. The company even marketed other i...
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...to establish the tolerance level for radium. The center for Human Radiobiology was established in 1968 with the primary purpose of examining living dial painters.
The events involving the radium girls is significant today because of the awareness brought to the public about the dangers of radium, ending the consumer craze. Public awareness was and still is the most powerful tool of prevention. The corrupted corporations of the early 1900s have been forced to conform to a standard in protecting their employees from occupational exposure thanks to the dial painters who stood up for a better future. Events involving the dial painters have lead to the gathering of scientific information without such events would not be possible. The individual in the United States now has rights as a worker because of sparks set off from the mortars dropped by the radium girls.
In chapter 8 titled "Radium (Ra)" of The Poisoner's Handbook by Deborah Blum, the most interesting story developed within this chapter was the death of dial workers at Orange, New Jersey after been exposed to radium every day. It was interesting due to the fact that radium was used everywhere in the community and was never thought it could harm anyone. Radium was a super element that was used everywhere, but its continuous use unmasked its fatal habits. As it was stated in the text, "Radiant health, the ads proclaimed-beautiful skin, endless vigor, and eternal health—ingesting radium seemed the next best thing to drinking sunlight." (Blum 179). People were accepting radium as a natural gold element but they haven't realized constant contact
(Brown 166). This radioactive element that workers produce is not just affecting the environment, but is also affecting the workers and their families. Brown has given an immense amount of evidence to explain to the readers how it affected so many of the workers’ health; she gives a vivid picture of how the radioactivity and particles of plutonium linger in the air. The effects to the workers and their family range from cancerous cells to organ deterioration, when a pregnant woman is exposed to it, the health of her baby is also at risk. The fourth and last part of the book is “Dismantling the Plutonium Curtain,” this curtain is the curtain of secrecy.
Granted that Catherine “won her case six times, for the Radium Dial Company appealed six times. After losing all six, the company appealed one last to the United States Supreme Courrt and finally the Illinois Industrial Commission awarded Catherine five thousand, six hundred, and sixty-one dollars” (Scene 20, p. 65). This case probably shed a new light to the countless of workers who probably had been affected by the radium. Moreover, assuming that the company eventually went bankrupt, it is not a stretch to say that injustice transformed to justice. Even if only by some measurable degree; by some tick of
Throughout the novel, Skloot recounts some of the great advancements in biomedical research. Media outlets often prematurely declared these great advancements as the solution to all disease. Similar to this case is the discovery of radium. In the 1800’s, radium was deemed to be “a substitute for gas, electricity, and a positive cure for every disease” (Skloot 46). Radium kills cancer cells, but it also kills healthy cells, as well. Notably, to treat Henrietta’s aggressive cervical cancer, doctors used radium, “[Henrietta] began burning inside, and...
People discussed in the book includes those such as scientist Marie Curie whose discovery of Radium,almost ruined her career, and the writer Mark Twain, whose short story Sold to Satan featured a devil who was made of radium and wore a suit made of . Also discussed is Maria Goeppert-Mayer, a German-born American who earned a Nobel Prize in Physics for her groundbreaking work, yet continually faced opposition due to her gender.
...d them to end the war with Japan. But not only did they create bombs, but they also found a new way to power the spreading cities of America. Also, even though many knew the power of a nuclear bomb, they couldn’t have predicted the lasting effects on the land and the people. So within this scientific experiment we have learned that nuclear radiation can cause genetic mutations, the formation of cataracts, leukemia, and a shortened life (Document I).
In consequence, and following the normality of things, where the regard of science as a given is widely-spread, at least in western cultures, the notion of a current present in decay leaves us with no choice but to believe that the future is directly threatened, far out of reach, and eventually even non-existent. For this reason, and given the human race’s need for some sort of temporal reference - an attempt to validate the inner urge and constant struggle for survival, the inhabitants of Chris Marker’s radioactive Paris, the researchers, and even at a later stage, our main character, start to believe that the only escape and potential resolution to this ultimately cynical dilemma, is indeed the past.
Describing the immediate aftermath of Hiroshima, Boyer argues, “It would be wrong to conclude that Americans took the bomb casually or that its impact quickly faded. Just below the surface, powerful currents of anxiety and apprehension surged through the culture” (pg. 12). Further, “Physically untouched by the war, the United States at the moment of victory perceived itself as naked and vulnerable. Sole possessors and users of a devastating new instrument of mass destruction, Americans envisioned themselves not as a potential threat to other peoples, but as potential victims” (pg. 14). Scientists entered the public foray during these early years, helping to shape the narrative. Regarding the role of scientist activists, Boyer writes, “Many scientists concluded after August 6, 1945, that it was their urgent duty to try to shape official policy regarding atomic energy…Many of the post-Hiroshima cultural developments…cannot be fully understood without attention to the remarkable public role played by the atomic scientists” (pg. 49). While they did not create fears of annihilation, scientists did act upon them and help inform those public fears. Unfortunately for the scientists, the immediate results of the first
When taking a radiograph there are some precautions that can be taken to reduce some of the radiation that can be exposed to a patient, what would be used on all patients is call a lead apron and thyroid collar, these aprons are used to protect the patients that may be a bit more radiosensitive and also may give the patient a little of reassurance that they will be protected. “Radiosensitivity is the relative susceptibility of cells, tissues, organs, organisms, or other substances to the injurious action of radiation.”
Chernobyl was the greatest nuclear disaster of the 20th century. On April 26th, 1986, one of four nuclear reactors located in the Soviet Union melted down and contaminated a vast area of Eastern Europe. The meltdown, a result of human error, lapsed safety precautions, and lack of a containment vessel, was barely contained by dropping sand and releasing huge amounts of deadly radioactive isotopes into the atmosphere. The resulting contamination killed or injured hundreds of thousands of people and devastated the environment. The affects of this accident are still being felt today and will be felt for generations to come.
I don’t want finger marks getting all over them”. This quote shows how naive and how uneducated they are about nuclear bombs. Hilda is worried about her cushions even though they’ll be damaged from the nuclear attack regardless of plastic coverings. Not only are they constantly exposed to the radiation but when they run out of water they decide to drink the radioactive rainwater. This again shows how little they know about radiation.
When most people think of the Scientific Revolution, they think of scientists such as Galileo, Newton, Brahe, and Boyle. However, many people do not even know about the many women who played a vital role in the scientific advancements of this period. Even when these women were alive, most of society either ignored them or publicly disapproved their unladylike behavior. Because of this, these women were often forgotten from history, and very little is known about the majority of them. Although their names rarely appear in history books, the female scientists of the Scientific Revolution still impacted the world of science in several ways. In fact, all of the scientists listed above had a woman playing an influential role assisting them in their research. However, assisting men in their studies was not the only role open to women; several women performed experimentation and research on their own, or advancing science in some other way, even though the society of the time looked down upon and even resisted their studies.
...S make amends for human radiation experiments." JAMA. v274, n12. September 27, 1995. pp. 933.
Uranium, a radioactive element, was first mined in the western United States in 1871 by Dr. Richard Pierce, who shipped 200 pounds of pitchblende to London from the Central City Mining District. This element is sorta boring but I found something interesting, they used it to make an an atomic bomb in the Cold War. In 1898 Pierre and Marie Curie and G. Bemont isolated the "miracle element" radium from pitchblende. That same year, uranium, vanadium and radium were found to exist in carnotite, a mineral containing colorful red and yellow ores that had been used as body paint by early Navajo and Ute Indians on the Colorado Plateau. The discovery triggered a small prospecting boom in southeastern Utah, and radium mines in Grand and San Juan counties became a major source of ore for the Curies. It was not the Curies but a British team working in Canada which was the first to understand that the presence of polonium and radium in pitchblende was not due to simple geological and mineral reasons, but that these elements were directly linked to uranium by a process of natural radioactive transmutation. The theory of radioactive transformation of elements was brilliantly enlarge in1901 by the New Zealand physicist Ernest Rutherford and the English chemist Frederick Soddy at McGill University in Montreal. At dusk on the evening of November 8, 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen, professor of physics at the University of Wurzburg in Germany, noticed a cathode tube that a sheet of paper come distance away. He put his hand between the tube and the paper, he saw the image of the bones in his hand on the paper.
The impact of nuclear power on the modern world has improved Various sectors of the economy and society .i.e. Food and Agriculture, Insect control, Food Preservation, Water Resources, Military, Medicine, Research and Industry. “In 1911 George de Hevesy conducted the first application of a radioisotope. At the time de Hevesy was a young Hungarian student working in Manchester with naturally radioactive materials. Not having much money he lived in modest accommodation and took his meals with his landlady. He began to suspect that some of the meals that appeared regularly might be made from leftovers from the preceding days or even weeks, but he could never be sure. To try and confirm his suspicions de Hevesy put a small amount of radioactive material into the remains of a meal. Several days later when the same dish was served again he used a simple radiation detection instrument - a gold leaf electroscope - to check if the food was radioactive. It was, and de Hevesy's suspicions were confirmed.