Pierre and Marie Curie likely never realized the full impact of what they were releasing on the world.
In their joint announcement to the French Academy of Sciences on December 26, 1898, the Curies described the years of painstaking work that had led to the discovery of a remarkable new element which they later christened radium. First extracted from pitchblende, the new element received its name from the Latin word for "ray" (due to the mysterious rays which the new substance emitted). Although Pierre Curie had already made a name for himself with the discovery of nuclear energy as well as the Curie Dysymmetry Principle, it was through his work with the brilliant Marie Sklodowska hat he is best known.
In the years that followed, Pierre and Marie Curie would continue their work with radium as well as with another element which they discovered together (named "polonium" after Marie's native Poland). While Pierre was quick to give Marie much of the credit for their work, forcing the scientific community to recognize her contribution was often an uphill battle. Even after Pierre's untimely death from a street accident in 1906, Marie Curie often faced considerable opposition from the male-dominated scientific and academic community. Despite this resistance and her grief over her husband's death, she went on to develop the process by which pure radium could be extracted. Marie Curie also presided over the first medical research using radium in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Her fame as a scientist, the growing public fascination with the mysterious properties of radium, and its value in medical research ensured that a strange new industry would soon get underway.
Marie Curie actually helped launch the radium industry with her decision not to patent the radium-isolation process which she had perfected through her research. Although she had intended this move to permit scientists to work with radium without legal interference, it also meant that companies around the world could pursue industrial applications using radium without having to pay patent fees. By 1917, the United States Radium Corporation had patented the first glow-in-the-dark radium-based paint (with the brand name of Undark).
Between 1917 and 1926, the company employed hundreds of female workers to paint luminous watch dials under uncontrolled conditions. The workers (later known as the Radium girls) had been reassured that radium-based paint was harmless and no industrial safeguards were in place to limit contamination. Since the factory workers spent hours in pain-staking work painting watch dials, the brushes that they used to apply the paint often lost its shape and, to keep the brushes sharp and clean, the factory managers encouraged the workers to use their lips and tongues to wipe off the paint. Some of the workers even went to far as to use Undark to paint their fingernails as an odd fashion statement. By the time the toxic consequences of radium exposure became apparent, it was far too late for them.
The notion that radium was harmless was hardly limited to that one factory. The use of radium as an ingredient in patent medications had quickly become big business by the early 1920s. Numerous radium-laced products soon became widely available (including radium-laced beauty creams, toothpaste, chocolate bars, soap, etc). Given the lack of real consumer protection legislation, the companies selling the products were free to make grandiose claims about the effectiveness of radiation in curing disease. It was an interesting quirk of the times that the only companies to bw prosecuted were the ones whose products didn't contain the promised radioactive substances (false advertising was a criminal offense).
The radium industry managed to lurch along through the 1920s despite disturbing revelations concerning the real health risks associated with radium. By 1922, the first of the Radium Girls, Grace Fryer, went to her doctor complaining of tooth loss and an inflamed jaw. Though a primitive x-ray machine was soon used to diagnose serious jaw decay, similar cases began appearing throughout her hometown. All of the victims were women who had been employed at the same radium paint factory where Grace Fryer had worked. By 1925, Grace Fryer's unusual condition attracted enough attention that United States Radium began a disinformation campaign against her and other former workers at their factory. A "doctor" who had examined Fryer and declared her to be in excellent health later turned out to be a toxicologist on the company's payroll. When former workers began dying, the company was quick to blame the deaths on syphilis (thus further stigmatizing the women who had worked at the plant).
When U.S. Radium hired Harvard physiologist Cecil Drinker to investigate the plant in the early 1920s, he provided them with a grim analysis of the factory and its working conditions. Not only did the company ignore the series of far-reaching recommendations that Drinker made, but they falsified the report that they released to the New Jersey Department of Labor. Although Drinker was still listed as the author, the altered reported stressed that all of the affected workers were in perfect health. After Drinker discovered the fraud and published his original report in a scientific journal, the company threatened him with legal action. With all of the company's influence, it took years before Grace Fryer was finally able to bring a lawsuit against U.S. Radium on the behalf of all the affected workers. The lawsuit demanded $250,000 in compensation for each of the plaintiffs.
By 1928, when the case finally came to trial, the affected women were in such poor health that they were unable to raise their hands which the bailiff attempted to administer the oath to testify. Grace Fryer was unable to walk and required a back brace just to sit up while several of the other plaintiffs were completely bedridden. The trial of the "Radium Girls" generated international publicity and even Marie Curie took a personal interest in the case. She publicly stated that she wished to do all that she could to help but could offer no solution for the deadly effects of radium poisoning.
Throughout the trial, U.S. Radium attempted to put up roadblocks to delay proceedings for as long as possible. While it was painfully apparent that the plaintiffs had little time left, the company's lawyers still arranged for the case to be adjourned since several key witnesses were "summering in Europe" and unavailable to testify until September. Walter Lippmann wrote a series of damning editorials blasting the judge for allowing the adjournment and nationwide outrage led to the hearing being rescheduled to June.
Just days before the trial was set to begin, U.S. Radium and the plaintiffs' attorney Raymond Berry agreed to allow U.S. District Court Judge William Clark to mediate an out-of-court settlement. According to the terms of the proposed settlement, each of the plaintiffs would receive $10,000 and payment of all legal and medical bills as well as an annual sum of $600 for as long as each plaintiff lived. The fact that Judge Clark was a U.S. Radium stockholder gave the Radium Girls pause but they had little real choice but to accept the settlement. All of the plaintiffs would be dead after another decade passed and the resulting publicity over the case would spur the passing of the first laws protecting U.S. workers from occupational health hazards. Of the thousands of workers who were exposed to radium in the years before more stringent safeguards were in place, only those five received anything resembling justice.
While the resulting publicity over the U.S. Radium case led to reform for factory workers, it had surprisingly little impact on the sale of the various health products containing radium. "Dr" William J. Bailey was a prime example of the entrepreneurs who dominated the radium industry at the time. A former employee of U.S. Radium, Bailey founded his own company in 1918 and energetically advertised radium as a cure for a wide range of ailments (including coughs, flu, anemia, and constipation). A Harvard University dropout with no university credentials (though he was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science), Bailey's lack of real academic standing didn't deter him from marketing radium-laced products. For years, Bailey Radium Laboratories' main product was a patent medicine called Radithor. Billed as a "cure for the living dead" as well as "perpetual sunshine", Radithor was basically distilled water with concentrated amounts of radium 226 and 228 as the active ingredients. Not only was Radithor touted as a cure for a lengthy list of diseases, but it was also billed as a rejuvenating agent that could revitalize inactive glands and force bodies to become young again.
Bailey was hardly the only radium entrepreneur around though. Numerous newspaper and magazine boasted of the healing powers of radium and how it could combat the effects of old age. One best-selling hair care product, Caradium, featured "radioactive water" as its main ingredient and was advertised as a cure for dandruff and gray hair. Another product, the Radiendocrinator, was a three-inch gold case containing 250 millicuries of Radium. Patients were urged to wear it nightly over their endocrine glands or, in the case of men, to wear like an athletic supporter directly under the scrotum (the instructions also advised patients to "radiate as directed"). Products such as Radithor were often sold over the counter as well as being prescribed by physicians. William J. Bailey even offered physicians a hefty rebate for each does of Radithor prescribed and patients soon came to demand it for dealing with assorted ailments.
Patients such as Eben McBurney Byers...
The son of a prominent American industrialist, Eben Byers acquired a well-deserved reputation as an athlete and an international playboy. After injuring his arm in a 1927 accident, Byers was advised to take Radithor by his physiotherapist, Charles Moyar. While the pain relief that he received was purely due to the placebo effect, Byers was sufficiently impressed by the benefit of Radithor to begin taking increasingly large doses. The instructions on each bottle of Radithor suggested that patients consume an entire bottle after each meal but Byers decided that he needed even more. He began consuming three bottles of Radithor a day and was impressed enough to keep taking it on a regular basis.
In fact, Byers became a walking testimonial for Radithor. Not only did he recommend it to all of his friends (including sending them free cases), he also gave it to one of his sick racehorses. By 1930, he had consumed up to 1400 bottles before the first symptoms began to set in. These symptoms included severe headaches and jaw pain which an x-ray specialist (who had also treated several of the Radium Girls) diagnosed as radium poisoning.
Bur it was too late for Eben Byers by then. The scandal of a prominent socialite and athlete being fatally poisoned by a health drink led to a massive media campaign to ban Radithor. In a final interview with a representative from the Federal Trade Commission, Byers was described as "Young in years and mentally alert, he could hardly speak. His head was swathed in bandages. He had undergone two successive operations in which his whole upper jaw, excepting two front teeth, and most of his lower jaw had been removed. All the remaining bone tissue of his body was slowly disintegrating, and holes were actually forming in his skull." By the time he died on March 31, 1932, Eben Byers only had six teeth left and both jaws were rotted. An autopsy turned up 36 micrograms of radium in his body (two micrograms is considered a fatal dose). He was buried in a Pennsylvania cemetery in a lead-lined coffin.
Eben Byers wasn't the only Radithor casualty. A close friend, Mary F. Hill, died of similar causes (remember those cases of Radithor he freely distributed to his friends?) Despite the adverse publicity and calls for federal regulation, William Bailey was never actually prosecuted for the Radithor deaths. He defended himself by maintaining that Radithor was only sold by prescription and that Byers had died from natural causes. He also maintained that he drank as much Radithor as Byers did and never experienced any health problems. Although the Federal Trade Commission issued an order against his business, that didn't keep Bailey down for long. He founded a new company, the Radium Institute, and continued marketing radioactive products (including radioactive paper-clips, belt-buckles, and irradiated water). He also manufactured a line of aphrodisiac tablets which "renewed happiness and youthful thrill into the lives of married peoples whose attractions to each other had weakened"
Although publicity over the Radithor deaths (and Marie Curie's own high-profile death from radium poisoning in 1934) ensured that no more physicians would be prescribing radium-laced products, the radium industry still managed to lurch along. William Bailey managed to die a wealthy man in 1949 (of what, I haven't been able to learn) although the same couldn't be said for many of his business competitors. As consumer protection legislation became stronger (spurred on partially by the Eben Byers case), more stringent protections for consumers helped prevent additional radium deaths. While radium still plays a role in medical diagnosis and treatment, the history of misuse in the early days following its discovery represents a sobering example of how easily revolutionary inventions can lead to tragedy.
Especially when gullibility and greed are involved.
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