0:01

Just a warning out there. This is a

0:03

pretty gruesome first hand account,

0:06

and so if you would choose

0:08

not to listen to it, please fast forward a few

0:10

minutes. The

0:12

midsummer sun was already glaring. On the

0:14

morning of August sixth, nineteen forty

0:16

five. After the all clear signal

0:19

following the air raid warning, everything went

0:21

back to normal, with people busy doing their own

0:23

business. Going on an errand to

0:25

a post office in Mayuki, Bashi under

0:27

the scorching sun. I could not bear

0:30

the heat anymore, so I turned back

0:32

home to fetch my parasol. I was just

0:34

about to open the parasol at the threshold

0:36

when an intense flash burst upon me.

0:39

The flash was a yellowish orange color, just

0:41

like the magnesium light, but hundreds of times

0:43

stronger. I instinctively rushed

0:46

back into the house and laid myself down on my

0:48

stomach, as had been trained in evacuation drills.

0:51

Stepping outside, I found the clear blue sky

0:53

had turned dim as if it were at dusk. Dust

0:56

in the air blocked the view across the river.

0:59

The place was filled with an indescribable

1:01

smell. Pulling myself together,

1:03

I looked back at my house to see if my mother was all

1:06

right. Her hair was a mess and standing

1:08

on end. Her lips were cracked and

1:10

her head bleeding. She stood there like

1:12

some unearthly creature. Then

1:14

I saw my younger brother staggering about with

1:16

his white cotton kimono soaked with blood.

1:19

Are you both all right? I asked? That's

1:21

my blood. He's not hurt, replied my mother.

1:24

We carried her on a stretcher to the Mutual Aid

1:27

hospital, where the doctor sewed up the cuts and

1:29

her lips, jaws, and shoulders, but

1:31

he did not do anything for her wounded wrist,

1:33

as it had already been given first aid. Because

1:36

of this, it took a long time before the wound got

1:38

better, and the thumb and the index finger of her

1:40

right hand were left to be paralyzed. Mother

1:43

passed away in January nineteen ninety

1:45

five. I also

1:48

remember seeing a woman lying dead at

1:50

a house by the river bank, her neck stuck

1:52

through with a piece of glass blown by the blast.

1:55

The glass must have cut the artery. Blood

1:57

was scattered around her. She had been

2:00

her baby. The baby was still absorbed

2:02

and sucking the breast. There was a

2:04

middle school student who was severely burned

2:06

above the neck except for the top of his head, which

2:08

had been protected by his combat cap. He

2:11

was walking barefoot, saying, please give

2:13

me water. I'm hot hot. His

2:16

school uniform was burned to tatters. There

2:19

came a drove of people whose faces and clothes

2:21

were burned black, almost naked,

2:23

and burned beyond recognition. They came

2:26

tottering along, dangling their arms in front

2:28

of them like ghosts. Some had their

2:30

work pants burned away save the elastic

2:32

strings. Others had all their clothes

2:34

burned except for the front part. They kept

2:37

chanting, water, give me water, exposed

2:40

juicely wet flesh, peeled

2:42

skin hanging from their fingertips like seaweed.

2:45

An unfamiliar smell was floating in the air around

2:47

the Mutual Aid Hospital. Dead bodies

2:50

were piled up on the roadside. Strangely

2:53

enough, I never felt the dignity of life as

2:55

seriously as I do now, Faced with so

2:57

many deaths, had my mind stopped

2:59

working after experiencing such a sudden attack

3:01

by the bomb. I took my

3:03

father back home from Ninoshima on August

3:06

eighth. Flies swarmed around

3:08

him because of the odor his festered burns,

3:10

and the white ointment gave out. It

3:12

took some effort to chase the pests away.

3:15

On the way to the mutual Aid hospital, there

3:17

was a first aid station where wounded people

3:19

in a serious condition were laid on straw

3:22

mats. They were delirious, begging

3:24

for water. Those whose backs were

3:26

burned lay on their stomachs, and those

3:28

whose front was burned lay on their back. They

3:30

could not even move to change the position.

3:33

Their wounds and burns were covered

3:36

with countless flies laying eggs.

3:38

There.

3:38

Those eggs hatched into maggots, and

3:40

these crawled all over their bodies,

3:43

causing them infernal agony. My

3:46

father asked for water, knowing he would

3:48

die if he drank too much. I only gave him a

3:50

tiny cup of water. I did so because

3:52

I wanted him to survive. I am not

3:54

sure if I did the right thing, and my heart

3:56

aches whenever I think of it. On

3:59

the day of Japan, Sir, he mumbled,

4:01

Japan lost the war. He died

4:03

undramatically the next day, complaining

4:05

of the cold. The damage

4:07

caused by the bomb was not confined to those

4:09

who were actually exposed to it. People

4:12

who sustained no injuries e

4:14

g. Those who went near the hypocenter to look

4:16

for their children suffered a high fever

4:18

and got purple spots all over their bodies,

4:21

went almost mad, and died one

4:23

after another during the six months following

4:25

the bombing. My elder brother was

4:27

suddenly stricken with leukemia and died

4:29

many years after that dreadful experience,

4:31

when we had almost forgotten about it. I

4:34

myself suffered from diarrhea for some time

4:36

at the end of August. It

4:38

is not easy for me to talk about my experience

4:40

as an A bomb survivor. For me,

4:43

it is like airing my dirty linen in public.

4:45

But here I am to talk to you because

4:48

I really want all of you to remember

4:50

that the piece we have today has been

4:52

achieved through the sacrifice of those people

4:54

who were mercilessly killed without receiving

4:57

a drop of water to quench their thirst,

5:00

keep a lasting, permanent peace. I

5:02

want to convey the heart of Hiroshima,

5:04

hoping that what I do will be like

5:06

small ripples growing into big waves

5:09

and into a tidal wave. Oh

5:57

my god, yeah,

6:00

it's I

6:03

have no words.

6:05

No.

6:06

So that is the

6:08

story of Miyoko Wantanabi,

6:11

one of the Hiba

6:13

Kusha, which is the survivors

6:16

of the A bomb. And there

6:19

are so many of these that have been collected

6:22

in a big project, and I really encourage people

6:24

to go seek out more of them because

6:27

it is just yeah, yeah,

6:30

no, they're my goodness.

6:33

Yeah wow.

6:36

Yeah.

6:37

Hi. I'm Eron Welsh and

6:39

I'm Erin Alman Updyke and this

6:41

is this podcast will Kill You.

6:43

And today we're talking about radiation.

6:47

Yeah. It's a very very big

6:49

topic.

6:50

Massive topic. Absolutely.

6:52

I don't know how this episode's going to turn out

6:54

eron me neither. I

6:57

don't know if we're going to do it justice, but we'll try.

7:00

We'll try.

7:01

We'll do our best. That's all we can do.

7:03

Yeah. Well, we are very excited this week

7:06

because you know, radiation is

7:08

a very interesting topic. It's got a

7:10

massive history. The biology is super fascinating.

7:13

And we were fortunate enough

7:15

to speak with doctor Timothy Jorgensen,

7:18

who is Associate Professor of Radiation

7:20

Medicine and director of the Health Physics

7:22

and Radiation Protection Graduate Program

7:24

at Georgetown University in DC, and

7:27

he wrote the incredible book called Strange

7:30

Glow, which is really great. It's

7:32

really really it's like one of the best

7:34

examples of science writing. Yeah, I

7:36

have ever found.

7:37

I love that. I agree it explains, I

7:39

am, I never took

7:42

the time to learn physics properly back

7:45

in undergrad and so like

7:48

this was a very intimidating topic

7:50

for me, and I feel like in

7:52

our interview he explains it so beautifully

7:55

and his book is just so clear, and

7:58

it's it's engaging to read. It's really

8:00

really great.

8:00

Highly recommend it's yeah,

8:03

totally, it's really it's really great. And

8:05

so we are going to bring him on to

8:07

talk first about the physics of radiation

8:10

and radioactivity, how it works, what the different

8:12

kinds are, and then

8:14

we're going to dive into the biology and

8:17

then the history. So pretty much standard,

8:19

but we've got bring in some outside

8:21

expertise who can talk

8:23

about physics much better than you or I could

8:25

do.

8:26

I would never be able to do it.

8:28

Although I will admit that, like after this,

8:31

after reading his book, I was like, oh my gosh,

8:33

I wish I had taken more physics. I wish I had

8:35

like studied more about this because it

8:37

is so beautiful. Some

8:39

of the like examples

8:42

of the logic that you need to like understand.

8:44

Oh you know, how was Bragg's peak

8:46

measured? Whatever? Okay, getting too much

8:48

into the weeds, already, but

8:51

still anyway, absolutely,

8:54

oh yeah.

8:55

Well, well, first

8:58

of all, important business

9:00

before we get started. It's quarantin any

9:02

time.

9:03

It is quarantiny time. What are we drinking

9:05

this week?

9:06

We're drinking glow and Behold.

9:10

Great name, great

9:12

name. Shout out to Andy, thank you so much.

9:15

So what's in glow and behold?

9:17

Aaron? Fantastic question, Aaron Glow

9:20

and Behold has gin lemon

9:22

juice thedori, which gives it that lovely

9:25

neon green color and

9:28

egg white, so of course it's like a gin

9:30

fizz kind of a thing.

9:32

Fantastic. We'll post the full recipe

9:34

for that quarantiny as well as our non alcoholic

9:36

placey Berita, on all of our social media

9:39

channels and our website. Do

9:42

we have any other business?

9:44

I don't think so. I think we should

9:46

just dive in.

9:48

All right, let's start off by learning

9:51

some physics of how radiation works

9:54

right after this break.

10:18

My name is Tim Jorgensen, and I'm a professor

10:20

of radiation medicine and biochemistry

10:23

at Georgetown University School of Medicine.

10:25

I've been working there for a number of years,

10:28

and I have a PhD in

10:30

Radiation health Sciences from the John

10:32

Tompkins School of Public Health. And

10:35

my background is I'm really trained as a

10:37

radiation biologist, which

10:40

has led me into various aspects

10:42

of that, and I run a graduate program

10:45

in health physics at Georgetown excellent.

10:49

So could you start us off really broadly

10:52

just by explaining what is radiation

10:54

and how does it work?

10:56

Okay, So the simplest way to think about it

10:58

is it's energy on the

11:00

move. Basically, it's energy moving

11:02

through space, and that can be empty

11:04

space or that can be solid

11:07

space. It's because depending on type

11:09

of radiation, it has the ability to penetrate things

11:11

like X rays.

11:13

It's really there's two fundamental

11:16

types. There's the electromagnetic type

11:19

moves as waves and we're familiar with

11:21

that microwaves, radio waves, X

11:24

rays, gamma rays, and things like that. But then

11:26

there's another less well known type

11:28

called particulate radiation that

11:30

is actually little pieces of atoms,

11:32

and we also

11:34

have heard of those terms too, like alpha particles,

11:37

beta particles, things like that. Those are

11:39

the particular types of radiation. So it

11:41

comes in two flavors, electromagnetic

11:43

and particulate. But the

11:46

ones that we're most concerned about are those that are

11:48

called the ionizing radiations, so

11:50

they have enough energy that they can

11:52

actually damage chemicals,

11:55

they can break covalent bonds, and that's

11:57

what we think the mechanism for all health effects

11:59

are. So we focus a lot on the

12:02

electro the ionizing

12:04

radiation is because those are the ones that pack a punch

12:06

in terms of health effects.

12:08

Gotcha.

12:10

So you mentioned at

12:13

the beginning that there are these different

12:15

types of radiation electromagnetic particle.

12:18

Could you go into a little bit more detail on what

12:21

those different types are and sort

12:23

of the differences between them.

12:26

Sure, So let's start out with the

12:28

electromagnetic radiation. So

12:30

these are all essentially the same thing.

12:33

There are waves of electromagnetism

12:35

that are going through space, and they're

12:38

all the same. The only thing that's different is

12:40

their wavelength. So usually

12:43

people talk about light first because that's

12:45

right in the middle waves of lengths of

12:47

light are around just a few hundred nanimeters.

12:50

And the thing that's interesting about this is this is the

12:52

only part of the entire spectrum that

12:54

humans can see. When things get

12:57

longer than light, then

12:59

we start getting wavelengths are longer. These

13:01

are weaker types of radiation, and

13:04

think radio waves, think microwaves,

13:06

and things like that. These are traditionally

13:09

called the non ionizing radiations.

13:11

So some of these are very long, like radio

13:14

waves are about the length of a football field,

13:17

and X rays on the

13:19

opposite side, they're just like

13:22

a hundredth of the

13:24

width of the human hair. So that's the that's

13:26

the range that we're talking about. So

13:29

as we go to the shorter waves lengths, the

13:31

energy keeps going up and up and up. First

13:34

we hit the X rays, and then beyond them are

13:36

the gamma rays. Gamma rays are much

13:38

shorter, so they have they have the highest energies,

13:40

and everything would be shorter wavelengths

13:43

shorter than visible light. These are called

13:46

the ionizing radiations because they have enough

13:48

energy to actually rip electrons

13:51

off of atoms and produce ions. That's what

13:53

we call them ionizing radiation. And the reason

13:55

that that that's not good is because

13:58

they break chemical bonds, particularly

14:00

in biological molecules. So they're capable,

14:03

for example, of ripping electrons off

14:05

of DNA and causing breaks

14:07

in DNA and other chemical

14:09

reactions to happen. And so this

14:11

is the mechanism of what we think all the biological

14:14

consequences are. So we worry about

14:16

the ionizing radiation. We don't worry

14:18

so much about the non ionizing

14:20

radiation. And then there are the particular

14:23

radiations. So the particular radiations

14:25

are released from radioactive

14:28

materials. So radioactive materials

14:30

are all atoms are a combination

14:33

of protons and neutrons in their

14:35

nucleus. The stable

14:37

ones, the ones that are non radioactive, tend

14:39

to have an equal number of protons

14:41

and neutrons in their nucleus, but

14:44

that doesn't have to be the case, and

14:46

whenever there's excess protons

14:49

or excess neutrons, the atom

14:51

is unstable. And what it does is

14:53

it does something we call decay, and

14:55

that means that either a proton becomes a

14:57

neutron or a neutron becomes proton, and

15:00

when that happens, energy is released.

15:03

Now, the energy can be released

15:06

in the form of gamma rays,

15:08

which are the electromagnetegration, and

15:12

or it can also release particles,

15:14

and so those particles, the

15:17

most common ones are something called the beta particle

15:19

okay, which is a negative particle equal

15:22

in size and mass to an

15:24

electron in net but except that it comes out

15:26

of the nucleus. That's a beta particle larger

15:29

particles are alpha particles. An alpha

15:31

particle is really really like a helium

15:33

nucleus without the electrons

15:36

on it. Alpha particles on beta particles are

15:38

the classic examples. There are other examples

15:40

of things that are emitted fission products

15:42

and things like that, but those are the main ones. And

15:45

these particles also because they're charged

15:47

and they have high energy, they move through materials

15:50

and ionize things along the way, and

15:52

so that's why we call them ionizing

15:55

radiations as well. And we believe for the

15:57

most part, they act on materials,

16:00

biological materials in the same

16:02

way they rip electrons off cause

16:04

damage to chemicals,

16:07

particularly biological chemicals, and that's the mechanism

16:09

of their action.

16:10

Gotcha. Can you talk a

16:12

bit about why there's no safe

16:15

level quote unquote for radiation

16:18

exposure because of the cellular

16:20

damage.

16:21

Okay, So the key in

16:23

terms of safety is that everything

16:25

is related to dose. And

16:28

so what we mean by dose is the amount

16:30

of energy that's deposited in the

16:32

material. And so the

16:34

more energy you deposit in something,

16:37

the more likely you are to damage it.

16:39

So you can have relatively high doses.

16:42

At very high doses, the damage is

16:44

so severe that it will actually

16:46

kill a cell, and the way that it kills

16:49

a cell is by damaging the DNA. So

16:51

the DNA is the critical target and the reason

16:53

we keep saying DNA DNA. Everything

16:55

else in the cell can be replaced,

16:58

All the proteins can be replaced, all the

17:00

RNA's carbohydrates, everything

17:02

can be fixed and replaced. But there's

17:04

only one set of DNA

17:07

and each gene only has two copies. If

17:09

you cause a lot of damage to the DNA,

17:12

the DNA can repair some of that damage,

17:14

but it can't repair a lot

17:17

of damage, and so the cell will die. So

17:19

these are consequences when the dose

17:21

is a relatively high and that's what

17:23

causes radiation syndromes,

17:26

radiation sickness, and things like that. But

17:28

when you get to doses below

17:31

which you cannot kill cells,

17:34

then essentially you don't

17:36

have any of those effects, and

17:38

what you really have now is an

17:40

increase risk of mutagenesis.

17:44

Now, most of the time this

17:46

grambling or mutation is

17:49

of little consequence. Let's,

17:52

for example, suppose

17:54

you have a liver cell and

17:57

the radiation damages the hemoglobe

17:59

and gene liver cell. Well, liver

18:01

cells don't produce hemoglobin. They don't

18:03

really care that their chemoglobal

18:05

is damage. They just keep going

18:08

on.

18:08

But if you.

18:09

Should get a mutation in the gene

18:12

that regulates growth, then

18:15

you can have a problem. Because growth regulation

18:18

is what's keeping us from having a cancer.

18:20

So if the cell loses its ability control

18:22

its growth, it starts to proliferate

18:25

and then you have a cancer. So

18:27

we say that there is risk involved at

18:30

every dose. That's

18:32

rather controversial, and the reason it's controversial

18:35

is there are some scientists that believe

18:37

that that's not true. And the reason they don't think

18:39

it's true is because we know that

18:42

cells can repair low levels

18:44

of damage, but these levels are

18:46

so low that we cannot measure

18:48

the amount of damage and repair at those levels.

18:51

So that may be true, It could very well be true,

18:54

but conservative assumptions

18:56

are that some damage happens

18:58

at every level because we cannot rule

19:01

it out.

19:02

Gotcha, So kind

19:04

of switching gears a little bit and talking

19:06

about radiation not as much of something

19:09

that will give you cancer, but something that is used

19:11

to treat cancer. We've come a long way

19:14

in terms of the specificity

19:16

and how accurately you can target

19:18

certain tumors and so on. But you know,

19:21

can you talk a little bit about how that works

19:23

maybe in some of the risks associated.

19:25

Yeah, So the actual the

19:28

initial thought with radiation therapy

19:31

is that it would be an

19:33

ideal agent for treating cancer because

19:36

it exploits that sensitivity

19:38

of rapidly dividing cells. So

19:41

when you have a tumor embedded

19:43

within a normal tissue, the tumor

19:45

is dividing more rapidly than the normal

19:48

tissue is. So if you hit it with

19:50

radiation, it's the tumor that

19:52

will be preferentially killed

19:54

by the radiation radiation, and that is

19:57

the underlying basis for radiation therapy.

20:00

So it's also given infractionated

20:03

doses because so

20:06

if you've known't anyone who's had radios and therapy,

20:08

usually they come back every day for

20:11

a period of time and they spread the dose over

20:13

several weeks. And the reason

20:15

for that is is that the normal

20:17

cells repair better

20:19

than the tumor cells. So by

20:22

giving a rest between doses,

20:24

the normal cells can exploit

20:27

that rest and repair themselves better

20:29

than the tumor cells can. So you have another

20:31

differential, So you have two differentials. You have capitally

20:34

dividing cells and the better ability

20:37

of the normal tissue to

20:39

repair itself compared to the tumor, and

20:41

for that reason, it's a very effective treatment

20:44

for cancers.

20:46

I think a lot of people also don't necessarily

20:49

realize that we're exposed

20:51

to a certain level of background radiation

20:54

all the time just by living. Can

20:56

you talk a little bit about what that is and

20:58

where it comes from?

21:00

Yes, so we

21:03

had We receive background radiation from

21:05

a number of sources, both external

21:08

and external to our bodies. Okay,

21:11

a lot of natural chemicals that we

21:13

have in our body have atoms

21:15

that are radioactive, and some of the most famous

21:17

ones that we hear are about

21:20

potassium. And potassium

21:22

is a major part of the electrolytes

21:24

in our body, and potassium forty

21:27

component of that potassium

21:29

is radioactive. There's a lot of

21:31

potassium bananas, So

21:34

if you eat a banana and you have

21:36

excess potassium, you pee out the same

21:38

amount of potassium that you just ate.

21:41

So there's the radioactivity that's in your body. I

21:43

believe that your internal

21:46

normal radioactivity contributes just

21:48

a couple of percentage points to your total annual

21:50

background does. But then there are

21:53

external sources of exposure, and

21:55

a lot of that comes from the

21:58

ground, for example, your

22:00

uranium and radium in the ground. That varies

22:02

tremendously about where you are in the country,

22:05

but you get some of that. So people who live in

22:08

in brick buildings or mortar buildings,

22:10

they get some more radiation exposure,

22:12

and people who live in wooden buildings we

22:15

get a lot from cosmic radiation.

22:17

So cosmic radiation is radiation it's coming

22:19

from the from the Sun and out other areas

22:21

of the solar system and pinging on Earth.

22:24

And then we have exposure from raydon.

22:27

Raydon is a major source of exposure

22:29

for those people who have radon in their homes

22:31

largely, but it's it acts more

22:34

like a spring, so you know how a spring will

22:36

pop up here and not be there. So you could

22:38

put one house on top of a Raydon

22:40

spring and the next the neighbor

22:43

have nothing. But anyway, raydon is a concern

22:45

because you can breathe it and it

22:47

can produce It can irradiate your

22:49

lung, and it can produce lung cancer. It doesn't

22:51

do anything else other than produce lung cancer.

22:54

Those are the major sources. But then apart

22:57

from those things, we also have to consider

22:59

the average number of diagnostic

23:02

and therapeutic radiation procedures that people

23:05

have, and so now that's amounting

23:07

to I think about a third of

23:09

the total background those that people are getting

23:11

annually. But again that's spotty because

23:13

one person may have a lot of procedures and

23:16

then the other person may have none.

23:19

So anyway, but on average,

23:21

for people living at sea level, they

23:23

get about three milliseiverts

23:26

of background radiation a year,

23:28

but again it varies. So for example,

23:31

people that live in Denver they get about twelve,

23:34

okay milli siverts. And the reason

23:36

that they're getting it is because Denver is

23:38

the mile high city, right, so the

23:40

air is thinner up there. They end up

23:43

getting more exposure to cosmic

23:45

rays and so they have a higher background

23:48

level. So within the United States, the

23:50

range is generally between three

23:53

and twelve milliseiverts

23:55

per year, but it's very heterogeneous

23:58

among the population. But that's the general

24:00

range.

24:01

Awesome. So you kind of

24:04

touched briefly earlier about this, but

24:06

I was wondering if you could explain a little bit more

24:08

about the differences in elements and

24:10

what makes some elements radioactive

24:12

and others not.

24:14

Okay, so let's

24:16

go back to the supernova

24:19

that that created our solar system.

24:21

So you can think of this as as

24:24

a huge explosion like the Big Bang,

24:27

and all the elemental

24:30

subatomic particles, the protons and

24:32

the neutrons, they all just scrambled

24:35

and coalesced and came back together. The

24:37

ones that came back together with five

24:40

protons and fourteen neutrons,

24:42

they were so unstable they disappeared

24:45

instantly, and so the further away from

24:47

being one to one ratio of

24:49

protons to neutrons, every

24:52

combination was possible, but the ones

24:54

that were too far out

24:56

of the mainstream instantly disappeared,

24:58

and so we're left with after time

25:01

are those things that are pretty close

25:03

to one to one, and they're still

25:05

in the process of becoming one to one.

25:07

They're still in the process that decay. So

25:09

if you draw a line they call the diagonal

25:12

of stability, you put the number of protons,

25:14

put the number of neutrons on a chart, and

25:17

you wrote all the stable ones, they would fall along

25:19

this line of stability. And then

25:21

if you if you had things with other

25:23

combinations, the further

25:25

away from that line, the shorter

25:27

their half life would be. So everything

25:29

we're left with now is clustered around the

25:31

line, because these are things

25:33

that have half lives anywhere

25:36

from you know, hundreds of years or

25:38

so to thousands of years, you know,

25:41

so they're long enough to persist in our environment,

25:43

okay, but they're still on their way to

25:45

this everything becoming stable.

25:48

That is so cool. I just

25:51

it's fascinating, son.

25:53

Talking about some of the times where

25:55

we see these unstable elements

25:57

is when we talk about nuclear bombs or we

25:59

talk talk about meltdown at

26:02

nuclear power plants. Can you talk a little

26:04

bit about, first of all, just

26:06

a little brief overview about maybe

26:08

what criticality is or what these self sustaining

26:10

reactions are and how that works in

26:13

nuclear energy, and then also a

26:15

bit about what happens in nuclear bombs

26:17

in that same sort of in a parallel way.

26:19

So basically we're talking about now fission.

26:22

So I didn't really talk about fission when

26:24

I talked about radioactivity. But there is another

26:27

way that very very

26:29

large things become stable

26:31

more stable quickly, okay, and

26:34

that is they just split. So

26:36

uranium is up there. The common

26:38

uranium elements are like two thirty five

26:40

to two thirty eight. These are huge atoms.

26:43

Some of those atoms will just spontaneously

26:47

break apart. That's what fission is.

26:50

When that happens, you will have fission

26:53

particles, you have two smaller pieces,

26:55

but also you'll have neutrons

26:59

that will just break off and fly out.

27:01

So the

27:03

thing about these neutrons are that

27:06

if they hit a neighboring

27:09

uranium atom, they can induce

27:11

them to split. And the ice

27:13

specific isotope we're talking about is uranium two

27:16

thirty five, and when it

27:18

splits, it releases about

27:20

two or three neutrons

27:23

I believe for every fission. Okay, so

27:25

you can imagine that if this one were to

27:27

split and release two let's just

27:30

say two, and it would hit two other

27:32

atoms and they produce two, and

27:34

then two other atoms and they produce

27:37

two. You can see you have a chain reaction.

27:40

And so you have all the uranium

27:42

atoms disintegrating.

27:44

That's a nuclear chain reaction. Is so

27:47

why doesn't that happen. The reason that

27:49

doesn't happen is because neutrons

27:52

are very penetrating, and so

27:54

if you have a massive uranium

27:57

like this, most of them will

27:59

escape that mass

28:02

before they interact with another uranium.

28:06

But if you keep increasing

28:08

the size of the mass of uranium.

28:11

You get to a point where most of them are not

28:13

escaping anymore, they're staying within that

28:15

mass, and that is a critical

28:18

mass. And what makes it critical is you

28:20

have enough mass there now that you will

28:23

have a chain reaction. You have a self sustained

28:25

chain reaction because the neutrons

28:28

cannot escape. So in

28:30

terms of how that's used in nuclear power, if

28:33

you can control that, and you can control

28:35

that by determining they

28:37

usually put the uranium in rods and they move

28:39

them in and out of a out of a contraption.

28:42

That determines how many neutrons

28:44

are going to escape and how many you're going to stay, and

28:46

they can control that reaction. Those reactions

28:49

produce heat and after that

28:51

it works just like any other power plant. It

28:53

produces heat, heat turns a turbine. Turbines

28:56

make steam, you know, on electricity,

28:58

and that's how it works. It's just a means to produce heat.

29:00

And as long as you can control that, you having

29:03

a nuclear power plant. In

29:05

a nuclear bomb, it's the same principle,

29:07

but you produce criticality instantly.

29:10

You push all the uranium

29:13

together at the same moment,

29:15

and you produce this instantaneous

29:18

criticality. Which results in it

29:20

in a huge explosion, and that's

29:22

the basis of a nuclear weapon.

29:53

That was awesome. Thank you so very

29:55

much, doctor Jorgensen. It was so great

29:57

to talk with you, and thanks again for writing such

29:59

an credible book.

30:01

Yeah, we really appreciate the time

30:03

that you took to explain everything so clearly

30:05

and how awesome that book is

30:07

really great. Yes, well,

30:10

then, now that we understand

30:13

some of the physics of how

30:15

radiation works, let's

30:17

talk about the symptoms that we see,

30:19

shall we.

30:20

Let's do it.

30:21

Okay, So, like

30:23

doctor Jorgenson so beautifully explained, a

30:26

lot of the damage that is due to radiation

30:29

has to do with the free radicals that it creates

30:32

that damage DNA directly.

30:35

So we'll talk a little bit

30:37

more in detail about that, and then we'll

30:39

talk about the acute and the chronic

30:41

effects that we see from radiation exposure.

30:44

Sound good, sounds great?

30:46

All right? I mean sounds terrible, but yeah,

30:48

yeah, I know. That's that's true

30:50

of all of our episodes though, so nothing new.

30:52

Yeah, all right.

30:54

So acutely, right,

30:56

like shortly after exposure to radiation,

31:00

like doctor Darkinson explained, you're making these free

31:02

radicals that are damaging your

31:04

DNA. So we

31:07

can guess then, and we are correct

31:10

that the cells that are going to be the most

31:12

affected by that type of damage

31:14

are cells that divide rapidly or divide

31:16

often. So we

31:18

can exploit this when we think of tumor

31:21

cells, which are rapidly dividing

31:23

cells, and that's why we can use radiation

31:26

as a treatment for cancers.

31:29

But it's also going to affect things

31:31

like our epithelial cells, which are the

31:33

linings of our gut and

31:36

our lungs, our skin cells,

31:39

the hair follicles, our cells that

31:41

replicate rapidly are blood cells,

31:44

all right.

31:45

So it explains leukemia, it explains the

31:47

GI symptoms exactly.

31:50

And it also I think I remember

31:52

reading this, But like cells,

31:55

you know, if you think about the opposite end of the

31:57

spectrum of like tumor cells, you

31:59

think of nerve nerves. YEA, why we don't

32:01

see a lot of that.

32:03

We'll talk about that in detail.

32:06

But yes, you are one hundred percent correct. In general,

32:08

nerves and your brain cells are actually

32:11

quite resistant to the effects of radiation,

32:14

and it's largely because they replicate so

32:16

infrequently.

32:17

If that's so interesting, it just makes like

32:19

it's just like, oh my gosh, it makes sense,

32:22

Like that makes such a big I

32:24

feel like there is such

32:26

a big black box around how

32:28

radiation works that makes people

32:31

like very scared of it or very

32:33

but like also rightfully so yeah, and

32:35

I think that, you know, part of assessing

32:38

where our fear level should really be is

32:40

just breaking down that black box.

32:42

Absolutely understanding like how it

32:44

actually works. I agree entirely. But

32:47

another thing I do want to say that another mechanism

32:50

of damage beyond just this DNA

32:52

damage is that these free

32:54

radicals that are produced by radiation. So

32:57

radiation isn't the only thing in the world

33:00

world that causes free radicals to be

33:02

produced, and actually bacterial infections

33:04

often results in the formation of free radicals.

33:07

So our body knows how to respond

33:09

to the production of free radicals

33:12

and can actually go ahead

33:15

and like minimize the damage.

33:17

The way that it does that is through

33:19

the inflammatory pathway.

33:22

So exposure to radiation

33:25

also results in our

33:28

pro inflammatory pathways

33:30

being activated. So that means

33:32

that kind of long term and chronic

33:34

exposure to radiation can

33:36

result in a lot of like long term

33:38

inflammatory symptoms,

33:41

Okay, does that make sense?

33:43

Yes, And long term inflammatory

33:45

symptoms isn't that like also increase

33:47

your risk for cancer?

33:49

And absolute absolutely, absolutely

33:51

absolutely yeah. Hey, okay,

33:54

so now that we have that even more context,

33:57

let's talk about some of the different symptoms that we

33:59

see depending on the amount of

34:01

radiation that you're exposed to. Okay,

34:04

all right, So first we'll

34:06

get the worst of it out of the way. And

34:09

you heard about this in our first hand accounts,

34:12

and that is acute radiation

34:14

sickness or acute radiation syndrome.

34:17

So this is what we saw from people

34:19

who worked at Chernobyl, this

34:21

is what we saw after the atomic bombs

34:23

in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and

34:26

it's also been described in some

34:28

cases after total body irradiation

34:31

for treatment of cancers. But that's not

34:33

normal and pretty rare. Okay, well

34:35

so yeah, oh I

34:38

guess you'll probably tell me why in

34:42

modern day okay, yeah,

34:45

all right, So there are a couple of different

34:47

three different clinical syndromes

34:50

that can happen after acute radiation

34:52

exposure, and the type that

34:54

you will get will depend

34:56

on the amount of radiation you were exposed

34:58

to. Three are neurovascular

35:02

which means central nervous system, and

35:04

vascular, so blood supply effects,

35:07

hematopoetic which means your

35:09

stem cells that produce blood

35:12

cells, white blood cells and red blood cells

35:14

and platelets, and gastrointestinal.

35:17

Those are the three syndromes, so

35:19

let's go through them. The

35:22

neurovascular syndrome requires

35:25

the highest doses of radiation

35:28

to see that syndrome. In

35:30

general, it's over

35:33

twenty thousand millisiverts

35:36

of exposure, which is a huge,

35:39

huge amount of radiation. Okay,

35:42

if you're exposed to that much radiation, that's

35:46

how much it takes for your brain and

35:48

blood vessels to actually become

35:50

affected. So the symptoms that you

35:52

see are things like headache which is very

35:55

severe headache, apathy,

35:58

lethargy, seizures. Yes,

36:01

because it affects the blood vessels, you'll

36:03

your heart will start to go into an arrhythmia,

36:06

and basically you're dead within twenty

36:08

four to forty.

36:08

Eight hours, just to your

36:10

body just shuts down.

36:12

Absolutely. Your brain and all of your blood vessels

36:14

just are wiped out.

36:16

The cells are just destroyed, and

36:20

so you die. Not great, Okay.

36:23

Next syndrome, the gastrointestinal

36:26

syndrome. This generally

36:28

happens after exposure to also

36:31

very very high amounts of radiation between ten

36:33

and twenty thousand milliseiverts.

36:35

Okay, and

36:38

your GI tract we already talked about is very susceptible

36:40

to the effects of radiation. So these symptoms

36:42

are going to be like nausea, vomiting,

36:45

diarrhea, anorexia, so not

36:47

wanting to eat anything, huge amounts

36:49

of abdominal pain. You can get distension.

36:53

It can affect the cells

36:55

of your gastrointestinal attract so much

36:57

that they are unable to undergo paris

37:00

dolcis, so they stop moving, so

37:03

you're not basically able to move

37:05

any food or liquid through, so you're

37:07

not absorbing things properly. You can

37:09

become massively dehydrated and

37:12

you'll likely die, but it's a slower,

37:14

more prolonged death than with

37:17

the neurovascular syndrome. Wow. The

37:19

hematopoetic syndrome is what happens

37:22

when your bone marrow, your blood cell

37:24

regeneration stem cells are affected.

37:27

So the first cells that tend to be affected

37:30

are your lymphocytes, which are

37:32

one group of your white blood cells, and then

37:34

your granulocytes, which are like your neutrophils,

37:37

another white blood cell, then your platelets,

37:39

than your red blood cells, so basically,

37:42

whichever cells turn over the quickest are the

37:44

first ones to start to die off and

37:46

not be able to be replaced. Those

37:49

purple spots that you described

37:51

in the first hand account, those

37:53

are because of hemorrhages because

37:56

your platelet count is low, so

37:59

that's not good. And so basically

38:01

because your blood cells, especially your white

38:03

blood cells, as those start to decrease, your

38:05

body is defenseless against other pathogens.

38:08

So if you don't die from that

38:11

and then from bleeding because you don't have any

38:13

platelets to clot your blood, then

38:15

you die from superinfections, so bacterial

38:18

infections or viral infections, or

38:21

reactivation of any latent infections.

38:23

So it's really common if you have like an underlying

38:25

A lot of us have viruses just sort of hanging

38:27

out in our bodies that never cause problems

38:30

until you have no white blood cells to

38:33

fight them off. Right, So

38:36

you generally see the hematopoetic stem

38:39

cell effects anywhere

38:42

from about a

38:44

thousand millisverts

38:46

all the way up to ten thousand millisiverts

38:49

of exposure to radiation, but

38:52

you usually won't die from it unless

38:54

it's at least more than five thousand

38:56

milliseiverts of exposure.

38:58

So one of the things that I thought was interesting is that

39:00

in one of the books that I was reading, it talked

39:03

about how, you know, in some

39:05

of these tests when they tested like the hydrogen

39:07

bomb or something, there would be soldiers

39:10

at different distances from that. Yeah,

39:13

and within that same distance, which first

39:15

of all you could then see like the stages of

39:17

the very dose dependent, but even within a

39:19

certain quote unquote dose, you had

39:22

differences in reaction. Why absence

39:24

is that?

39:25

That's a good question, don't I don't fully know the

39:27

answer. Whether it has to do with like how

39:30

much your body just happens to be

39:32

able to be resistant to it, Like if you're really young

39:34

and healthy and you don't

39:37

have any latent infections, then maybe

39:39

you can survive that hematopoetic

39:42

effect, whereas someone

39:44

else who like has CMV,

39:46

you know, that gets reactivated so they end up

39:49

deteriorating faster, or

39:52

whether it just has to do with like maybe

39:54

even though you were standing at the same distance, you

39:56

were at a different angle, so you got exposed

39:58

differently. You were wearing different clothes,

40:01

so your exposure was different. It's

40:03

a really good question. Yeah,

40:07

But so that's kind of the acute

40:10

radiation syndrome. And again

40:12

this if you are exposed to less

40:15

than about five hundred milliseiverts

40:17

of total body radiation, you

40:20

basically won't see any of these syndromes

40:25

of the acute of the acute exactly.

40:28

And there are also phases of this illness,

40:31

especially as you're exposed to the lower,

40:33

lower but still higher than five hundred

40:36

dosages, where first

40:38

onset you'll have like a prodromal

40:40

phase where you'll still get nausea and vomiting

40:43

even minutes or hours after exposure,

40:46

or it might be kind of days or

40:48

weeks after exposure, and

40:50

then there'll be a period of time where you're kind of asymptomatic,

40:53

where like your GI symptoms have cleared up,

40:56

and then you'll go

40:59

on to have more of the stem

41:01

cell of your blood cell effects where your blood

41:03

cell council drop, et cetera. So

41:06

you go through all of these phases, and

41:08

how long each of those phases last

41:10

and how long it takes between them depends

41:12

on the total total body exposure

41:15

to that radiation. What symptoms

41:17

you're going to see, depend on what cell type, and how

41:19

long the turnover is, how quickly those

41:22

cells replicate, So the GI symptoms

41:24

are some of the first that you see because

41:26

the turnover of our epithelial cells

41:28

of the GI tract are like seven or

41:30

eight days, like it's really fast. Whereas

41:33

our red blood cells have a lifetime

41:36

of about one hundred and twenty days, so it takes

41:38

a long time before you'll see any anemia

41:41

from radiation exposure. Uh huh

41:44

yeah, okay, but then white blood

41:46

cells have a shorter half life. Platelets

41:48

are somewhere in between. So

41:51

yeah, so it's really

41:53

gnarly. But again, that's all acute

41:56

radiation syndrome, which is from exposure

41:58

to very very high light levels of

42:00

radiation, which is

42:03

very very rare in the modern day and age.

42:05

It's not impossible, but it's very rare. Right,

42:08

So what about chronic effects?

42:10

What about the normal kind of radiation

42:12

that we're all exposed to?

42:15

What is that?

42:16

How does that affect us? Okay, Basically

42:20

the biggest risk overall of

42:23

late radiation exposure,

42:25

so kind of cumulative radiation exposure

42:28

over your lifetime, whether

42:31

small amounts over time or

42:33

a large amount all at once but not

42:35

enough to cause ars. The biggest

42:37

risk is the development of cancer. Oka.

42:41

Question, Yeah, is

42:43

there any treatment?

42:45

Oh? Good question. So for acute radiation

42:47

syndrome, no, absolutely not if

42:51

you have, for example, like the

42:53

hematopoetics. So if you don't die from

42:55

the CNS effects, the central nervous system

42:58

effects, or the GI syndrome, if

43:00

you have high amounts of exposure and you

43:02

have this hematopoetic response,

43:05

the best treatment is essentially supportive care,

43:08

making sure they're supersterile so

43:10

they don't get a secondary infection, so

43:13

that there are stem cells

43:15

have time to regenerate and heal.

43:17

Essentially, they

43:19

have used blood transfusions and

43:21

bone marrow transplants to

43:24

try and give someone back those stem cells.

43:27

But again, because it's generally so rare

43:29

and there's been so few cases of it

43:31

throughout the world comparatively,

43:34

there isn't like a treat there's not like an antidote

43:36

to radiation exposure and then

43:38

even chronically like from you

43:40

know, overall exposure when

43:43

we use radiation for cancer treatment,

43:45

there's no treatment

43:47

for those effects. There's

43:50

symptomatic relief. So for radiation

43:53

induced nausea, for example, which is

43:55

really common, we have drugs that help

43:57

to treat the nausea associated with it. They

43:59

don't do anything to change

44:01

the effects that radiation is having on the

44:03

GI tract, but they help your brain

44:06

deal with the nausea so that you don't feel nauseous.

44:08

Okay, but so in any case,

44:11

like you cannot reverse the effects of radiation

44:13

on yourselves.

44:14

Nope.

44:21

I mean we're not even in the history yet,

44:23

Aaron, No, I know.

44:24

Yeah, So tell me about that, Aaron. I want

44:26

to know how depressing it can get and where

44:29

this all came from, Like how did we first figure

44:31

out radiation? Oh?

44:34

I can't wait to tell you. We'll take a quick

44:36

break first. Okay,

45:08

this is a massive history, as you might

45:10

expect, with tons and

45:12

tons of different aspects to cover, and

45:14

I'm going to do the best that I can to tell

45:17

the story, but it's not going to be

45:19

super in depth because then we'd have literally

45:21

like a ten hour episode. We could do a mini

45:24

series on this, of course, but

45:27

each part of the story of radiation has

45:30

its own history, and I'll recommend a ton

45:32

of books and some documentaries

45:34

to watch to get more in depth info on

45:37

each of these topics. And I have

45:39

to say, just across the board, every

45:42

single book that I read for this

45:45

was absolutely incredible,

45:47

like really fascinating

45:49

and interesting and well written and horrifying

45:52

and all.

45:53

The things everything you want in a book,

45:55

basically.

45:57

All right, So here's what I'm

45:59

gonna do. I'm gonna start with the early discovery

46:01

of radiation from a physics perspective, and

46:04

then I'm going to talk about how the harmful effects

46:06

of radiation were first discovered, particularly

46:09

from an occupational exposure standpoint,

46:12

and then a little bit about human experimentation

46:15

because of the studies, of course, and

46:18

then I'm going to talk about how radiation

46:21

has been used as medical therapy.

46:24

I'm not gonna go into

46:27

too much of the

46:29

story of meltdowns

46:31

like Three Mile Island or Chernobyl or Fukushima,

46:34

simply because like each one of those

46:36

is an entire story

46:38

and I wouldn't be able to do it justice. But

46:41

I'll recommend some reading, so perfect

46:44

there you go. Okay, let's

46:46

dive in. I

46:49

have discovered something interesting, but I

46:51

do not know whether or not my observations

46:53

are correct.

46:58

God if that is not written in every

47:00

student's lab notebook.

47:04

And then but most of the time, ninety nine percent

47:06

of the time, it's like, Nope, just miscounted.

47:09

Nope, my model had a weird variable

47:11

in it. But

47:13

those are the words that Wilhelm Conrad

47:16

Rotkin said to a colleague of his in

47:18

December eighteen ninety five, just

47:21

a few days after discovering invisible

47:23

rays that could pass through solid objects.

47:27

And I mean, it's maybe not that surprising

47:30

that he was so skeptical of his own observations,

47:33

because invisible rays that don't follow

47:36

the rules of physics, it seems

47:38

like magic. Yeah, sci fi novel

47:40

type stuff.

47:41

Yeah.

47:42

Ronkin who was an experimental research,

47:44

empirical evidence kind of guy. He

47:46

wasn't like a super big thinking theoretician.

47:49

He had been conducting some experiments in

47:51

his lab on running an electric current through

47:53

a Crooks tube looking at cathode rays,

47:56

and he had observed a faint glow that

47:58

appeared on fluorescent's screens that

48:01

weren't near the tube where he was doing his experiments.

48:03

Okay, this glow even appeared

48:06

if he blocked the tube with books or

48:08

cardboard, anything he could find in his

48:10

lab. So he was like, okay,

48:12

this has to be a new kind of ray. Was

48:15

one that couldn't be bent by a prism, it couldn't

48:17

be deflected by a magnet, but it could

48:20

pass through solid objects. So

48:22

he gave these rays a temporary name

48:25

X ray because X.

48:27

He wasn't really sure what X stood for yet.

48:30

Yeah, it's like disease X.

48:32

We don't know. But then it stuck

48:36

and he continued to toy around with these rays

48:39

and discovered that while they could pass through

48:41

wood, they couldn't pass through metal.

48:45

So then he got to wondering, what

48:47

about human flesh?

48:49

Of course, isn't that the next thing you would wonder?

48:51

I mean human flesh kind

48:53

of, And

48:56

so when he held his hand

48:58

in front of the screen, he could

49:00

see his bones, but not his flesh.

49:03

Can you imagine?

49:06

I I would love to imagine.

49:09

Is there a show about this yet? Because

49:11

I want to watch that episode?

49:12

Good question? I don't know.

49:14

Okay, well there should be, Like,

49:18

I mean, to see

49:20

your bones when no one has ever seen

49:22

their bones unless they take off the

49:25

skin and muscle to take a look at

49:27

it, Like to see your bones without cutting your

49:29

skin?

49:29

What? Yep? Oh yeah,

49:32

it's magic. Well, and it gets

49:34

even better because, like, he was

49:36

never described as a big theoretical thinker,

49:39

but he connected these dots pretty quickly

49:41

between this new technology and its

49:44

possible application in medicine. Like

49:46

he was like, oh, this could be used for medicine. We could use

49:49

we could look for things inside the body like yeah,

49:51

okay, I mean it makes sense, but like holy

49:53

cow. And he also

49:56

realized that if he replaced the fluorescent

49:58

screen in his lab with photographic

50:00

film, we could capture the

50:03

images.

50:04

Side note, I still think that photographic film

50:07

is also like magic, like oh totally.

50:09

I mean sc records and CDs.

50:11

Yeah, and computers all

50:13

of its actual like records

50:16

especially.

50:16

I remember laying X my record player being like,

50:19

I don't understand. I've

50:21

since I have since watch YouTube videos

50:23

about how it works. I still don't get it. Okay,

50:26

but you have probably seen one of the very

50:28

first X rays ever taken. It's

50:31

of his wife's hand with her wedding

50:33

ring on it. It's very

50:36

cool. And apparently after

50:38

he showed her the image, she was like, I've

50:40

seen my own death. Oh that's what

50:42

you said. But

50:44

I mean it is sort

50:46

of like this is eventually

50:49

what you return to. It's very interesting anyway. So

50:53

I feel like in so many of the histories that I've researched,

50:56

it's like someone discovers something amazing

50:58

and then people ignore it for decades or they

51:00

don't believe them, or whatever, Yeah,

51:03

this is not the case with radiation

51:06

and X rays at all at all.

51:09

So in almost record time, Ronkin

51:11

got his finding published in a scientific journal,

51:14

and less than two weeks later, there

51:16

were newspapers all over the

51:19

world announcing this discovery,

51:21

this new kind of ray that allowed you to

51:23

peak at your skeleton.

51:24

Oh my gosh.

51:26

Researchers were able to easily replicate

51:28

Ronkin's experiments because the equipment

51:31

was pretty simple, and some kicked

51:33

it up a notch like immediately

51:35

applying it to medical intervention. So

51:38

the first time that it was used in a

51:40

medical intervention way was to help surgeons

51:43

locate a bullet in a guy's leg, which

51:45

they were able to successfully remove.

51:47

And we still do that.

51:48

How cool we still do that? Okay,

51:51

So December twenty eighth, eighteen ninety

51:53

five, X rays are first published in a

51:55

scientific journal. Okay, February

51:57

fourth, eighteen ninety six,

51:59

So like less than two months later later,

52:02

they are used to help save a person. Has

52:06

anything ever moved from

52:08

discovery to applications so quickly.

52:11

Certainly nothing we've ever talked about.

52:13

No, And you know, like it's

52:16

sort of a mixed blessing because we had

52:18

this amazing power. You know,

52:20

ethics and knowledge moves at a much

52:22

slower pace than technology. So

52:26

anyway, for his work, Ronken

52:28

was awarded the Nobel Prize in

52:30

Physics in nineteen oh one.

52:33

And side note, in the

52:35

first half of the twentieth century there

52:37

were over twenty one Nobel Prizes

52:39

in physics for research

52:41

related to radiation and one in physiology

52:44

or medicine. Wow, that's a

52:46

lot of Nobel prizes.

52:47

Yeah, it is.

52:49

As you can imagine, the history

52:51

of radiation is filled with

52:54

many, many sad stories, and

52:56

some of those are about people not

52:59

knowing the danger of radiation and dying

53:01

horrible early deaths. Rotkin

53:05

actually always protected himself. I don't

53:07

know whether it was out of just like and you

53:09

know, extreme caution, but

53:12

he died in old age, apparently not ever having

53:15

been negatively impacted by the rays that he discovered.

53:18

But not so lucky were Edison,

53:21

who, through his work on a fluoroscope,

53:23

nearly lost his eyesight. And

53:26

Edison's assistant Clarence Dally, fared

53:28

even worse. So you first got

53:31

severe burns that covered his hands,

53:33

leading to ampitated fingers and then

53:35

a hand, and then cancer creeping up

53:37

his arms into his chest, which is what ultimately

53:39

killed him.

53:42

Okay, So, as we have talked about,

53:45

radiation is a broad word for

53:48

you know, this whole episode, because there's

53:50

ionizing and non ionizing radiation,

53:52

there's particulate and there are differences

53:55

in which of these types of radiations can hurt

53:57

you and how they can hurt you, and

53:59

the doses and blah blah blah blah blah.

54:01

Yeah.

54:02

So I've talked about one type of radiation

54:04

and how it was discovered, X rays, But

54:07

I want to talk about how particular radiation

54:09

was discovered. Yes, and

54:11

it actually wasn't long after Ronkin's

54:13

discovery of X rays when a guy

54:16

named Antoine Bequerel started

54:18

wondering about the link between X rays

54:20

and fluorescence, in particular,

54:23

where was that visible glow from the

54:25

fluorescence coming from.

54:27

Yeah, Becquerel, isn't that a

54:29

unit or something?

54:30

Uh huh? Yeah.

54:31

Okay.

54:31

Basically, if you worked in if you were one of the first people

54:34

who worked on radiation, you had a unit named after

54:36

you. Curi's next Rokin,

54:39

Bequerel, Currie.

54:41

Great.

54:42

So in eighteen ninety six, Becherel tested

54:45

a bunch of chemicals and long story,

54:47

short, found that the presence of uranium

54:50

sulfate alone would expose film

54:52

without the help of other light source or

54:55

X rays. So he

54:57

concluded that uranium atoms

54:59

emitted so some kind of invisible radiation

55:01

along the same lines as X rays.

55:05

In short, he discovered radioactivity.

55:08

Yes, so Becherel

55:10

along with Marie Currie and Pierre

55:12

Curie aka the French Trifecta

55:14

is what they were called. They were awarded

55:17

the Nobel Prize in Physics in nineteen

55:19

oh three. So again just

55:21

rapid pay stuff going on.

55:23

Yeah, nineteen oh three, that's only a few years later.

55:26

Oh yeah yeah.

55:29

And uranium, of course would go on to play a

55:31

major role in the history of

55:33

the world, as I'll talk about

55:35

later, with the development and deployment of atomic

55:37

bombs as well as with human

55:40

experimentation naturally. So

55:43

Beckerel got out of the radioactivity

55:46

game pretty early, but the Curis would go on

55:48

to contribute to the field for years and

55:50

years. They were the ones who actually

55:53

coined the term radioactive, which

55:55

is pretty cool for their share

55:57

of the Nobel Prize. The Curies realized that

55:59

uranium or actually emitted more

56:01

radioactivity than could be accounted for

56:03

by just uranium alone. They

56:06

found that there were at least three radioactive

56:08

elements in the ore uranium and two

56:10

new ones, one which they named

56:12

polonium after Poland, which was

56:14

where Marie was from, and radium,

56:17

which is from the Latin word for ray.

56:21

Side note, Marie also died of

56:24

radiation poisoning, and her

56:28

body is in like a lead casket

56:30

that's protected by like a lead whatever

56:33

because there was so much radiation in it.

56:35

Oh my gosh.

56:37

Research on X rays and radioactive

56:40

elements continued at full speed

56:42

throughout the nineteen twenties and the nineteen thirties,

56:45

and the start of World War Two brought

56:47

this increased urgency to it,

56:49

as well as a narrowing focus on

56:51

the possibility of nuclear weapons,

56:54

which.

56:54

Is just so typical

56:57

of humans. I know,

57:00

you know, so powerful

57:03

thing. How can we weaponize it?

57:05

Uh yeah, rinse and repeat.

57:07

That's let's experiment on our most vulnerable

57:09

populations without their permission and find out.

57:12

Oh yes, let's

57:14

not jump the gun now, Aaron, there's plenty of that,

57:17

plenty of that in here, Okay.

57:22

So for a while it had been thought to be

57:24

too impractical, like there's no

57:26

way we could actually make these nuclear weapons.

57:29

But then when the concept

57:31

of these self sustaining chain reactions,

57:33

so criticality is doctor Jorganson talked

57:35

about. Once that was discovered, then it

57:37

was like, oh,

57:40

we can do this. So

57:43

if you can get that criticality to happen,

57:45

you've harnessed an absolute, unbelievable

57:48

amount of energy. But if you lose control

57:50

of it, you're looking at a meltdown as

57:53

we've seen happen or a bomb. Okay.

57:56

In a project headed by Enrico Fermie

57:58

under the University of Chicago, criticality

58:01

was achieved on December twod nineteen

58:04

forty two. Wow, about the midway

58:06

point of World War two. Okay,

58:08

Yeah, And this work would

58:11

pave the way for the Manhattan Project and the

58:13

development of nuclear weapons.

58:16

And I'm not going to go too much into the history

58:18

of the Manhattan Project itself, but

58:21

by the time that the project was underway,

58:23

the dangers of working with radiation had

58:26

been well recognized and

58:29

research done by Hermann Muller. So he

58:31

was a Nobel Prize winner and also a

58:33

huge proponent of eugenics. He

58:36

loved eugenics.

58:37

Great, what a stand up

58:39

guy, not at all.

58:42

So he showed that radiation induced

58:44

genetic mutations in fruitflies,

58:46

and that finding attracted a lot

58:49

of medical science attention because

58:51

if it caused mutations in fruit flies and

58:54

their DNA, what would it do to

58:56

humans? How much could hurt you? What

58:58

was a safe level was their safe level?

59:02

And as more and more people worked with radiation,

59:04

it's dangers, both short and long

59:06

term, became more clear. So

59:09

whereas the dangers of electricity were

59:12

very much feared in its early days, maybe

59:14

helped along by the alternating current

59:17

smear campaign by Edison more,

59:20

I would love to do an episode

59:22

on Edison in Tesla, just because the history is

59:24

so interesting.

59:25

I was waiting for you to smear Edison like you mentioned

59:27

him earlier, and then didn't smear him, and I was a little

59:29

shocked.

59:30

Oh no, it's happening now. It's

59:33

not even really relevant to the discussion

59:35

of radiation, but I just had to.

59:36

Throw in that.

59:38

But did you know.

59:42

Anyway? So, but

59:45

electricity, you could directly see

59:48

the damage that it could cause, right, you could electrocute

59:51

a person, an animal, a tree, whatever.

59:54

But the effects of radiation were mostly

59:56

invisible, right, And so precautions

59:59

weren't all taken, and when

1:00:01

they were taken, it was often too late.

1:00:03

Well, and also, like we talked about, sometimes the effects

1:00:06

are so long after exposure

1:00:08

it's even hard to correlate back, right.

1:00:12

But still a lot of the people who

1:00:14

had been working with radiation were working with

1:00:17

these incredibly high doses, and so the

1:00:19

negative health effects of radiation had

1:00:21

been known basically ever

1:00:23

since its discovery.

1:00:25

Man, oh ma'am.

1:00:26

Yeah, Like I said, many of the people

1:00:28

who used X rays and had studied radioactive

1:00:31

elements had suffered or died from

1:00:33

their exposure to radiation. But

1:00:35

I think it's really interesting that these

1:00:38

people, the researchers who worked on this,

1:00:40

weren't actually the first to experience

1:00:42

this. That prize goes

1:00:45

to some miners in Schneberg, Germany,

1:00:48

who, for as long as people

1:00:50

could remember, had gotten sick

1:00:53

with a mysterious lung ailment. Later

1:00:56

research showed the mind to be full of radon

1:00:58

gas, which is produced

1:01:01

when radium decays and so is

1:01:03

a source of radiation.

1:01:04

Wow.

1:01:06

Uh huh. So they all had lung cancer

1:01:08

at a time when lung cancer wasn't as common as

1:01:10

it is now. Wow, And

1:01:13

so that was sort of a pre x

1:01:15

ray thing.

1:01:18

But those mines full of raid on gas weren't the

1:01:20

only radioactive workplaces. Fluorescent

1:01:23

paint containing radium glowed

1:01:25

in the dark, which made it perfect

1:01:28

to paint the numbers on a watch face so that

1:01:30

people could tell the time in the dark. So

1:01:33

in the early nineteen hundreds, wrist watches

1:01:35

were largely worn by women while

1:01:38

men used pocket watches. But

1:01:40

World War One changed that because

1:01:43

you needed to see the time in a trench. It

1:01:45

was much you needed to have when it was much faster to

1:01:47

just look at your wrist rather than pull something out

1:01:49

of your pocket which could easily be lost. And

1:01:52

so these glow in the dark wrist watches with

1:01:55

the numbers painted made

1:01:57

coordinating night maneuvers possible.

1:02:00

WHOA and World War One

1:02:03

once it was over, also made these watches

1:02:05

like the thing to have, like

1:02:07

they were super popular. Everyone had to have

1:02:10

one. I mean, demand absolutely skyrocketed,

1:02:13

and so these these watch factories were a great

1:02:15

place for a young woman

1:02:18

to work. At the time. You were paid

1:02:20

by the dial, so if you were a fast painter, you

1:02:22

could make up to twenty four dollars a week,

1:02:26

which is three hundred

1:02:28

and seventeen dollars in twenty

1:02:30

fifteen dollars. And

1:02:32

that was at a time when the average

1:02:35

weekly wage for a woman was fifteen dollars.

1:02:37

Okay, so it was good money.

1:02:39

It's good money. Factories popped

1:02:41

up all over in New Jersey, Illinois,

1:02:43

Connecticut, and it was

1:02:45

in Connecticut where a seventeen

1:02:47

year old named Francis sweat Choker had

1:02:50

started working in nineteen twenty one.

1:02:53

Four years later, Francis went to the dentist

1:02:55

complaining of facial pain and toothaches.

1:02:58

The dentist pulled a two and

1:03:01

a piece of her jaw came out with it. Oh

1:03:04

yep. The tissues in her mouth

1:03:06

basically at that point started to deteriorate.

1:03:09

A hole appeared in her cheek, and

1:03:12

a month later she was dead. And

1:03:15

unfortunately, her story is

1:03:17

not unique, not at all. All

1:03:20

Over these factories, dial

1:03:23

painters were getting sick and dying,

1:03:25

earning them the name Radium Girls,

1:03:28

which is an excellent piece

1:03:30

of nonfiction. You should definitely

1:03:32

read it. Apparently it's also a movie, but I haven't

1:03:34

watched it.

1:03:35

I've heard of it. Yeah, I haven't seen it either.

1:03:37

Oh my gosh, the book is so good. Okay.

1:03:41

One of the keys to being a good

1:03:43

dial painter was that if you

1:03:45

ever tried to paint like fine, you

1:03:47

have to keep the bristles get so smudged

1:03:50

so easily, and you have to keep them together.

1:03:53

And so in order to keep that brush

1:03:55

point super sharp to paint accurate

1:03:58

numbers, you would put the tip

1:04:00

of that paint brush in your mouth and twist

1:04:02

it.

1:04:03

Oh no.

1:04:06

If you did this, which by the way, was a

1:04:08

technique taut at the factories, Oh

1:04:11

like, this is what you should do, you

1:04:13

would end up consuming about a coffee

1:04:15

cup worth of radium containing paint

1:04:18

over the course of a year. You

1:04:20

would literally sometimes come home and

1:04:23

your clothes and your body

1:04:25

you would glow in the dark because of the radium

1:04:27

dust. Oh

1:04:30

my god, the fluorescent

1:04:32

dust. And

1:04:35

while a lot of this radium would end up

1:04:37

being passed through the gut, about

1:04:39

twenty percent of it would be absorbed in the bones,

1:04:42

essentially leading to a radioactive skeleton.

1:04:46

And the jaw was one of the places,

1:04:48

of course first, because you're

1:04:50

putting pregar in your mouth.

1:04:52

Yeah, and the blood supply too, is just going to go

1:04:54

straight into those bones right there from your

1:04:57

oh no.

1:05:00

And so this led

1:05:02

to an unbelievable amount of

1:05:05

these radium girls becoming sick

1:05:08

and dying or permanently disabled

1:05:10

or injured by these by

1:05:13

this radiation exposure, and

1:05:15

the companies fought and fought

1:05:18

and fought to acknowledge that

1:05:20

they did any wrong, to enact

1:05:22

safety measures, and to give

1:05:25

any sort of compensation to

1:05:28

the girls or the families of the.

1:05:29

Girls surprises

1:05:33

me not at all. Erin Oh, I know, I

1:05:35

know, but yeah.

1:05:38

Eventually a handful

1:05:40

of the women got some compensation,

1:05:44

but at any amount of time, about two thousand

1:05:47

women were working at these factories, with

1:05:49

a substantial portion of those getting sick.

1:05:53

So the Radium Girl's story is

1:05:55

this horribly sad reminder of how a company

1:05:57

can value greed and the bottom line over

1:05:59

the health than safety of their employees because

1:06:02

they viewed them as dispensable. But

1:06:06

I think it's also inspiring in a way

1:06:09

because despite being ignored and told

1:06:11

they were faking it and being

1:06:13

told no, you have no right to

1:06:16

argue this, despite literally

1:06:18

nearly dying of radiation sickness

1:06:20

while giving their testimonies in the

1:06:22

courtroom, these women fought and

1:06:24

fought and fought and eventually won the

1:06:26

battle that they should never have had to be a part

1:06:28

of. It's a really

1:06:31

great book. So while the biggest

1:06:33

obstacle in the way of the Radium Girls was

1:06:35

the I think evil is a fair

1:06:38

word company, evil company that

1:06:40

refused to acknowledge their wrongdoing. Another

1:06:42

challenge was fighting against the popular

1:06:45

opinion that radiation was this miracle

1:06:47

cure, because that

1:06:49

was just sort of how it had been advertised.

1:06:52

Yeah, like, name any household product

1:06:55

and you could probably get a radioactive version

1:06:57

of it. In the nineteen tens, the nineteen twenties into

1:06:59

the nineteen thirties, weird low

1:07:02

levels were thought to be beneficial for overall.

1:07:05

Health okay, cool.

1:07:07

Yeah, and any negative

1:07:09

outcomes from larger exposures were thought

1:07:11

to be relatively short lived.

1:07:13

Okay, I just don't yeah yep.

1:07:19

One medication medication

1:07:21

is in quotes called ratathor,

1:07:24

was simply radium dissolved

1:07:26

in water.

1:07:27

Oh no, that's it.

1:07:30

It was prescribed to people to

1:07:32

help them heal after a broken

1:07:34

bone.

1:07:38

Okay, uh huh uh

1:07:41

huh. Yep.

1:07:42

So one of the people who had been prescribed ratathor

1:07:45

was a golfer named Eben Byers who

1:07:47

drank over fourteen hundred bottles

1:07:49

of ratathor and he eventually

1:07:52

developed holes in his skull and he lost

1:07:54

his jaw and his body is now in a

1:07:56

lead lined coffin to protect people

1:07:58

who visit the seminary from getting

1:08:01

radiation from home my unfortunately.

1:08:07

I think the other thing to point out is that radium containing

1:08:09

medications didn't cause an epidemic

1:08:12

of radiation poisoning necessarily, mostly

1:08:15

because the vast majority of these

1:08:17

treatments contain no radium at all.

1:08:19

They were snake oil.

1:08:21

Yeah, because the ones that

1:08:23

actually did were too expensive for most

1:08:25

people to use regularly.

1:08:27

Oh gosh.

1:08:28

But radiation was also used to like irradiate

1:08:30

hair, like, oh, you want hair removal,

1:08:32

Let's irradiate your you know, upper

1:08:34

lip, and then your upper lip falls

1:08:37

off.

1:08:37

Uh huh, Like the hair will be gone

1:08:39

too.

1:08:40

But yeah,

1:08:43

they wasn't false advertising necessarily.

1:08:45

Right, oh effective,

1:08:49

But.

1:08:52

So early in the twentieth century, those

1:08:54

that worked with radiation were well aware

1:08:56

of these hazards. But what

1:08:59

was more difficult to determine was what levels

1:09:01

of radiation were necessary to cause

1:09:04

harm. Right, And a big,

1:09:06

you know, a big challenge or a

1:09:08

big hurdle was not having a standardized

1:09:11

way to measure radiation exposure. But

1:09:13

that sort of is a whole separate story.

1:09:15

But eventually standards were put into place

1:09:17

for the safe level of exposure to radium

1:09:20

and X rays and gamma rays, but

1:09:23

debates over whether these standards were accurate

1:09:25

continued, and

1:09:28

when the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic

1:09:30

bomb began, it was clear

1:09:32

that more fine scale information on the

1:09:34

dangers of radiation exposure was

1:09:37

necessary for the researchers to understand

1:09:39

their level of risk. After all,

1:09:41

two researchers died in two

1:09:43

separate instances in the Manhattan Project

1:09:46

after experiencing a massive dose

1:09:48

of radiation when an experiment went

1:09:50

wrong. But where would

1:09:53

they get this information on radiation

1:09:55

exposure. Well, for

1:09:57

one, the atomic bombs themselves.

1:10:01

Okay, the catastrophic

1:10:04

impact of the atomic bombs

1:10:06

dropped by the US on Hiroshima

1:10:08

and Nagasaki without any warning

1:10:11

in World War Two was not

1:10:13

just the enormous loss of life from the direct

1:10:16

impact of the bomb, but also in

1:10:18

the lingering effects of radiation sickness

1:10:21

that would only be felt weeks,

1:10:23

months, and years after the bombs.

1:10:26

I mean, the trauma is immeasurable

1:10:29

yep. And

1:10:31

a lot of what we know today about

1:10:34

the harmful effects of radiation on

1:10:36

the body, both acute and chronic, come

1:10:38

not from early occupational

1:10:41

exposure to X rays or radium.

1:10:44

But from these bombings

1:10:47

in the Red Cross Hospital in Hiroshima,

1:10:49

only six out of the

1:10:51

thirty doctors and ten out of the

1:10:53

two hundred nurses were able

1:10:55

to function after the bomb was dropped,

1:10:59

and estimated ninety percent of Hiroshima's

1:11:01

doctors and nurses had been killed or

1:11:03

injured by the bomb. The six

1:11:06

hundred bed hospital was completely

1:11:08

unprepared for the ten thousand bomb victims

1:11:11

that would head there that day alone.

1:11:14

Many of these people would die vomiting

1:11:17

and with burns all over their bodies, and

1:11:20

many others would be left with this insidious

1:11:22

internal radiation injuries whose

1:11:25

effects would only manifest later

1:11:27

on in their life. And

1:11:30

the world had never seen

1:11:32

radiation illness on this scale before,

1:11:36

and the doctors at the hospitals

1:11:38

in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were

1:11:41

unprepared to deal not only

1:11:43

with the sheer number of people needing help, but they

1:11:45

also didn't even know how to help them because

1:11:47

no one had told them anything

1:11:50

about radiation. No one had ever experienced

1:11:52

anything like this before. And

1:11:55

like you said, there were no treatments.

1:11:57

There's no treatments. Yeah, yeah, there's

1:11:59

nothing you can do. Yep.

1:12:02

The number of people killed in Hiroshima is not

1:12:04

quite certain, like how many were

1:12:06

actually just vaporized by the bomb

1:12:09

and didn't survive the initial blast,

1:12:11

but estimates range from ninety to

1:12:13

one hundred and sixty five thousand deaths. About

1:12:17

seventy five percent of those died from

1:12:19

fire and trauma, and the other twenty five

1:12:21

percent died from the direct

1:12:23

effects of radiation. And that's like the immediate

1:12:25

death immediately ye And

1:12:29

then once those three waves of death had ended,

1:12:31

it was just a waiting game to see how radiation

1:12:33

poisoning would continue to manifest

1:12:36

in those who had been exposed in

1:12:38

both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One

1:12:41

of the health outcomes of these bombs wouldn't

1:12:43

be seen for several years after

1:12:46

the bomb had been dropped leukemia, and

1:12:48

it turned out that the rates of leukemia

1:12:51

among atomic bomb survivors

1:12:53

were skyrocketing, and soon

1:12:55

it became apparent that other types of cancers

1:12:57

were also on the rise, and the effects

1:12:59

of the bomb would continue to be felt for decades

1:13:02

and decades. To

1:13:04

some of the people in power in the US,

1:13:07

a lot of the people, one might say,

1:13:09

these bombings were viewed as an absolute

1:13:11

win. Not only did they result

1:13:13

in the absolute surrender of Japan

1:13:16

and the end of World War two. But they

1:13:18

also provided this fantastic opportunity

1:13:21

to see how different doses and types of radiation

1:13:23

impacted people. It's

1:13:27

horrible. So

1:13:29

the US immediately sent physicians

1:13:31

to Japan to study the effects of the bomb

1:13:34

and write down what they witnessed, and

1:13:36

what they witnessed obviously horrified them.

1:13:39

They had expected to see acute radiation

1:13:41

poisoning, they had seen that before, but

1:13:44

the increase in cancers later on,

1:13:46

and the huge geographic radius

1:13:48

of fallout, like so much larger than they

1:13:50

anticipated, was new.

1:13:54

And so the word fallout, just to define it

1:13:56

is radioactivity that settles to Earth's

1:13:59

surface from the sky. So

1:14:01

like if you drop the atomic bomb, all

1:14:03

of that dust and dirt and debris that

1:14:06

goes up into the air and then settles down

1:14:08

is radioactive, and that can cover

1:14:11

a much larger radius than like the direct

1:14:13

impact of the bomb itself.

1:14:15

If that makes sense, yeah, absolutely.

1:14:17

But these doctors who went to Japan, they

1:14:20

couldn't make these horrible observations known

1:14:22

because maintaining trust in the government and a positive

1:14:25

image in radiation and

1:14:27

nuclear weapons was cited

1:14:29

as a reason to not be forthcoming about

1:14:31

the risks involved in nuclear weapons

1:14:34

testing and the horrors

1:14:36

involved in nuclear weapons deployment, and

1:14:39

other people viewed widespread

1:14:42

fallout from nuclear weapons testing a

1:14:44

small price to pay for advancement of

1:14:46

technology and global superiority

1:14:49

of the United States. Here

1:14:53

in this is

1:14:56

not it's awful.

1:15:00

It's worse.

1:15:00

Yeah, of course it does. This podcast

1:15:02

will kill you.

1:15:04

Yeah. After

1:15:06

the atomic bomb was developed, the US continued

1:15:08

working on making a bigger and better bomb.

1:15:12

The US decided to use Bikini,

1:15:14

a toll which they took control

1:15:17

over from Japan after the end of the war,

1:15:19

to use as a nuclear weapons testing grounds.

1:15:23

One day, as the entire community of Bikini

1:15:26

Islanders were leaving church, so around

1:15:28

one hundred and sixty one hundred and seventy

1:15:30

people, the US military governor

1:15:33

said, Hey, the US needs your island

1:15:35

for important research, so you're

1:15:37

going to need to move to another island,

1:15:40

and so they moved them, even

1:15:44

though archaeological evidence showed that this island

1:15:46

had been inhabited since two thousand BCE.

1:15:49

Conism doesn't care, does

1:15:52

not care.

1:15:53

There's a documentary called Atomic

1:15:55

Cafe which shows

1:15:57

some footage. It's such a fascinating

1:16:00

documentary holy cow. It's from the early

1:16:02

eighties, and they show footage

1:16:05

of like propaganda footage of

1:16:07

the US military. You know, this

1:16:10

very paternalistic white savior colonialism,

1:16:12

like, you know, we're doing what's best

1:16:14

for you, and don't you want the world to

1:16:17

be protected from nuclear

1:16:19

weapons?

1:16:19

It's so great voice they're using

1:16:22

too where doing

1:16:24

what's best for you exactly,

1:16:27

we know exactly what's right for you. So

1:16:30

give us your island and will make the

1:16:32

world up better place.

1:16:34

That's I mean, honestly, I think you just

1:16:36

watched the documentary. You just quoted directly

1:16:38

from it. So

1:16:41

anyway, with these with now

1:16:44

the island empty for their own use.

1:16:46

The US was able to test the hydrogen

1:16:48

bomb on March first, nineteen

1:16:50

fifty four. This

1:16:52

bomb produced a fireball four

1:16:55

and a half miles in diameter.

1:16:58

That's just the fireball.

1:17:00

Size of the town that I live in.

1:17:03

It was visible over two hundred and fifty

1:17:06

miles away, and

1:17:08

it produced a crater over a mile

1:17:10

wide and two hundred and fifty feet deep.

1:17:14

The mushroom cloud was

1:17:16

twenty five miles high and

1:17:18

sixty two miles in diameter.

1:17:20

It's huge, it's huge.

1:17:23

Oh yeah, my.

1:17:25

Nearly seven thousand square

1:17:28

miles of the Pacific Ocean were

1:17:30

contaminated, which

1:17:32

was far beyond, far beyond what

1:17:34

the US calculated it might.

1:17:36

Be shock of all shocks.

1:17:40

It was probably like, oh, well, it'll be fine,

1:17:42

everything's fine. Everywhere,

1:17:46

everywhere. The ground was contaminated, marine

1:17:48

life was contaminated, reefs, fish,

1:17:51

people died, and

1:17:53

unfortunately the US missed in their

1:17:55

scans a Japanese fishing vessel who

1:17:58

happened to be in the direct proximity

1:18:00

of this. The fishermen were close

1:18:02

enough to see this blinding light and hear

1:18:05

the blast, and they started showing

1:18:07

signs of radiation poisoning. Shortly after

1:18:09

returning to shore, all the fish that they

1:18:11

had caught with them and sold at the markets

1:18:14

was full of radiation. People started experiencing

1:18:17

radiation symptoms who had

1:18:19

purchased the fish and ingested it, et cetera.

1:18:22

Oh my god.

1:18:22

And the US soldiers who were present also

1:18:25

experienced both short and long term

1:18:27

health consequences from this and

1:18:30

other weapons testing. And they weren't told

1:18:32

about the risks. They were just

1:18:34

said stand in place.

1:18:36

They're soldiers. They're just supposed to stand there

1:18:38

and do what they're told.

1:18:39

M hm.

1:18:40

And you know, but ultimately the

1:18:42

US, the people in charge, viewed

1:18:44

these as unfortunate consequences

1:18:47

and a small price to pay for the advancement

1:18:49

of technology.

1:18:50

A small price to pay human lives ANDBD

1:18:53

lives.

1:18:54

And the sad story doesn't end there. The

1:18:57

Bikini Islanders ended up suffering malnutrition

1:18:59

on the smaller island that they had been relocated

1:19:02

to, and later tests showed

1:19:04

dangerously high levels of radioactive elements

1:19:06

in their bodies and in the food that they consumed,

1:19:09

and so in nineteen eighty the atoll was

1:19:11

entirely evacuated, which.

1:19:14

Is like,

1:19:16

there are so many levels of horrificness

1:19:20

to that, you know what I mean, Like it's forcibly

1:19:24

removing people from an island they've inhabited

1:19:26

for thousands of years, absolutely

1:19:29

decimating their culture. Now you

1:19:31

can't eat the food that you've been eating because

1:19:34

it's all radioactive. Now

1:19:36

you can't even live anywhere on any of these

1:19:38

islands. Like oh,

1:19:40

and by the way, you're all going to die from radioactivity

1:19:43

poisoning and developed cancers

1:19:45

down the line.

1:19:47

Mm hmm.

1:19:48

I hope that you have it in you to hear a

1:19:50

little bit more of the dark

1:19:53

side of this, I mean, and The thing is,

1:19:55

like, I think it's really important to tell

1:19:57

these stories because one

1:19:59

of the things that I wrote

1:20:01

down in my notes was, like, any

1:20:04

one of us who is doing

1:20:06

any sort of job, particularly

1:20:08

in research, where does our

1:20:11

information come from?

1:20:13

Where did we get this knowledge when it comes

1:20:15

to medicine, when it comes to ecology, when it comes

1:20:17

to chemistry, when it comes to physics. What

1:20:20

lives were sacrificed, unknowingly,

1:20:23

unwillingly, at what

1:20:25

cost?

1:20:25

At what cost to make sure that we don't

1:20:28

do it again? Yeah, I agree entirely.

1:20:30

I think it's so important to know where we got

1:20:32

this information because you can talk

1:20:34

about what we know about the symptoms

1:20:37

of radiation poisoning, but if you don't understand

1:20:39

how we got that information, then then

1:20:42

you're missing such an important part of

1:20:44

the story.

1:20:45

The humanity part of it, which is the

1:20:47

only thing that keeps you know, like we need

1:20:49

to keep that sense of humanity so

1:20:51

that this doesn't happen again.

1:20:56

Yeah. So, the

1:20:58

atomic bomb victims in Japan and the Marshall

1:21:00

Islanders, the American soldiers ordered

1:21:02

to stand at varying distances from

1:21:04

test bomb sites, the people

1:21:07

in fallout regions, these were

1:21:09

all unwilling and unknowing participants

1:21:11

in the search for information on how radiation

1:21:14

affected the human body. But

1:21:16

they weren't the only ones. Earlier,

1:21:20

when I asked how researchers would get

1:21:22

information on radiation exposure,

1:21:24

if you had guessed human experimentation

1:21:27

in addition to nuclear weapons, you would

1:21:30

be correct. Yes, by US

1:21:32

scientists, Yes, often without

1:21:34

the people's knowledge or consent.

1:21:38

I highly recommend the book

1:21:40

The Plutonium Files for more information

1:21:42

on these horrific examples of medicalized

1:21:45

torture. Which so

1:21:47

someone pointed out on Insta that

1:21:49

that's what people are using in place of

1:21:51

the words experiment or study for these types

1:21:53

of things, since those words

1:21:55

experiment or study can give them this air of legitimacy.

1:21:58

Oh, totally, that makes sense. That's so

1:22:00

important to a good point.

1:22:01

Yeah.

1:22:03

So, during the last couple of years of World

1:22:05

War two and throughout the Cold War, the

1:22:07

US was involved in a multitude

1:22:10

of different medicalized tortures

1:22:13

or I don't know how the plural of that

1:22:15

is, but to examine

1:22:17

the effects of radiation, for

1:22:20

instance, plutonium was

1:22:22

injected into people without their

1:22:25

knowledge or consent.

1:22:26

Yep.

1:22:27

These people were followed for years

1:22:30

and years surreptitiously by the

1:22:32

researchers, and when they died,

1:22:34

samples from their bodies were taken, often

1:22:37

without consent from the family. This

1:22:40

was in what year this

1:22:42

was, I don't know when.

1:22:44

I don't know when the first injections were. It might have been

1:22:46

in the late nineteen forties, but throughout

1:22:49

the fifties and sixties, like into

1:22:51

the early nineties. The last

1:22:53

person died in the early nineties.

1:22:55

When we knew the effects

1:22:58

of radioactivity.

1:23:00

Right, but what about plutonium compared

1:23:02

to uranium.

1:23:03

Yeah, I guess what these people

1:23:06

looked like?

1:23:07

Oh yeah, yeah. It was always

1:23:10

disproportionately minorities, people

1:23:12

who were below the poverty line, children

1:23:16

who were disabled, orphans,

1:23:18

Oh yeah, Oh my god. Like

1:23:21

I mentioned these, some of the children who lived at orphanages

1:23:23

or children who were disabled were fed radioactive

1:23:26

milk to see how that affected their growth.

1:23:29

Since, according to at least one scientist,

1:23:32

samples from children were far

1:23:34

too few and far between. So

1:23:37

Willard Libby, who was the

1:23:40

head of the Atomic Energy

1:23:42

Commission during the time this was in the

1:23:44

fifties, I think he said this quote,

1:23:48

I don't know how to get them, but I do say

1:23:50

that it is a matter of prime importance

1:23:53

to get them referring to samples,

1:23:55

and particularly in the young age group.

1:23:58

So human samples are often of prime

1:24:00

importance. And if anybody knows how to

1:24:02

do a good job of body snatching, they

1:24:05

will really be serving their country.

1:24:08

That's a quote from who was the head

1:24:11

of the Atomic Energy Commission at

1:24:13

the time. Prisoners

1:24:18

had their testicles irradiated, often

1:24:21

without their consent, or without at

1:24:23

least informed consent, rendering

1:24:26

them sterile and often resulting in cancer.

1:24:28

And then you know what does consent really mean if

1:24:30

you're imprisoned ys Pregnant

1:24:34

people were given injections

1:24:36

of caesium to see whether radioactive

1:24:38

elements could pass through the placenta

1:24:40

to the fetus. And

1:24:44

as we talked about, the people who were sought

1:24:46

out to perform this medicalized

1:24:49

torture on were those who didn't have

1:24:51

the power, the voice, the ability

1:24:54

to stop what was happening. They

1:24:56

weren't deemed to be worthy of being protected

1:24:58

by the scientists and project heads, the

1:25:01

perpetrators of these crimes. And

1:25:04

of course there were disproportionately high numbers

1:25:06

of black people and poor people unknowingly

1:25:08

and unwillingly enrolled in this medicalized

1:25:11

torture throughout the

1:25:13

Cold War. Body parts from an

1:25:15

estimated fifteen thousand humans

1:25:17

were used in this quote unquote

1:25:19

research, according to a nineteen

1:25:22

ninety five General Accounting Office study,

1:25:24

so bodies or organs or

1:25:26

tissue samples were taken from people without

1:25:29

any consent from their families and

1:25:31

much less. You know, they didn't inform them of course,

1:25:34

of course, not in the US.

1:25:36

All over the world they would do this. They would ship

1:25:38

internationally specimens,

1:25:41

especially from the poorest regions of the world.

1:25:45

Read up on Project Sunshine,

1:25:48

which was the largest of these projects.

1:25:51

That's a disgusting name, because

1:25:53

sunshine is something beautiful.

1:25:55

Isn't that horrible? So one of the theories

1:25:57

as to why it was named Project Sunshine is because,

1:26:00

like sunshine, fallout from radiation

1:26:03

impacts the entire world.

1:26:05

Well, it's also sunshine, like

1:26:07

it sounds like beautiful and happy,

1:26:09

but it also has UV radiation which

1:26:12

can cause cancer get break

1:26:14

out. It's insidious. Wow.

1:26:17

And I think it is important to consider the historical

1:26:20

context of this time, and this

1:26:22

is in the opposite of excusing it. So

1:26:24

at the height of these studies, the world

1:26:27

was barely ten years out from World War Two

1:26:29

and Nazi Germany and the horrible

1:26:31

human experimentation and medicalized

1:26:33

torture that went on, and

1:26:36

the Nuremberg trials during which many

1:26:38

of these Nazi doctors were put on the stand

1:26:40

and made to account for their crimes. And

1:26:43

yet when conducting this medicalized

1:26:45

torture on people, these

1:26:48

American researchers and doctors

1:26:50

involved in Project Sunshine and other

1:26:53

radiation projects didn't for once think

1:26:55

that they were in the wrong. To a great

1:26:58

many of them, the Nuremberg Code was

1:27:00

written for barbarians, not for them.

1:27:03

They were doing this research for a higher purpose,

1:27:06

for the technological superiority

1:27:09

and might of the United States. And

1:27:13

upon reflection of this time, one

1:27:15

doctor involved in the projects said,

1:27:18

quote, the connection between

1:27:20

these horrendous acts and our everyday investigation

1:27:23

was not made for reasons of self interest.

1:27:25

To be perfectly frank as I see

1:27:27

it now, I am saddened that we didn't

1:27:29

see the connection, but that was what was done.

1:27:32

We wrapped ourselves in the flag, which

1:27:34

is such such

1:27:37

saddened.

1:27:38

That's it. I'm just saddened.

1:27:40

How regretful.

1:27:41

Yeah, whoops, might be might

1:27:44

be Wow.

1:27:47

Okay, so yeah, I mean

1:27:50

there's a lot more where that comes from. Please

1:27:52

go read the plutonium files. It is an

1:27:54

incredible book.

1:27:58

Anyway, Okay, gosh,

1:28:00

Aaron.

1:28:01

So yeah, a lot of what we know about

1:28:03

the effects of radiation on the human body come

1:28:06

from atomic weapons

1:28:09

or come from this medicalized torture.

1:28:12

And while a great deal of

1:28:14

this medicalized torture was not

1:28:16

at all therapeutic, as

1:28:18

in the doctors weren't trying to improve the

1:28:21

health or treat the disease of

1:28:23

someone. It was just to see what happened.

1:28:26

But some were actually intended to

1:28:28

help people. And

1:28:30

so I'm going to end on what I

1:28:33

hope is a little bit of a happier note by talking

1:28:35

about the development of radiation therapy.

1:28:37

Okay, we'll see

1:28:39

if we can get there.

1:28:41

I know. So in the early

1:28:43

years of radiation therapies, most

1:28:46

were actually snake oil, as

1:28:48

we pointed out, just designed to make money.

1:28:50

Snake oil still exists today a

1:28:53

goop. But some physicians

1:28:56

began to recognize that while radiation

1:28:59

can cause cancer, it may also

1:29:01

be able to treat it as well. And this

1:29:03

is super early on too. This is a great story.

1:29:06

Okay, So a man named Emil Grub

1:29:09

was simultaneously the owner of a light

1:29:11

bulb company and a med student, Like

1:29:14

you do, fuck you do. So

1:29:18

he shut up to med school one day with his hands

1:29:20

all bandaged up, and one of his professors

1:29:22

was like, are you okay? What

1:29:25

happened to you? And Grub

1:29:27

explained, Oh, yeah, I've been working on X

1:29:29

rays at this factory, just like you know, testing

1:29:32

things out. And the professor,

1:29:34

whose named John Gilman, was like, hmm, so

1:29:37

X rays are damaging to normal tissue.

1:29:39

I wonder if they would damage or destroy disease

1:29:42

tissues as well like

1:29:45

and then thus the field of radiation oncology

1:29:47

began. WOW Team ninety six.

1:29:50

It's like months after they

1:29:53

were discovered.

1:29:54

A month a month after Wow,

1:30:00

after his professor made this remark, Grub

1:30:02

decided to test it out on people with cancer.

1:30:06

And again probably you know, there wasn't

1:30:08

informed consent or consents at all. A

1:30:11

lot of the people that he initially started

1:30:13

with there was big resistance to allowing him

1:30:15

to do this to people who were

1:30:18

had cancer but maybe

1:30:20

not terminal cancer. And so the earliest,

1:30:24

the earliest people that he tested it on were people who

1:30:26

had terminal cancer.

1:30:27

Okay, and a lot of sense, it

1:30:30

makes sense, and

1:30:32

their pain did seem to be reduced,

1:30:34

but a lot of them died anyway,

1:30:36

simply because they were in such late stages

1:30:39

of cancer.

1:30:41

But Grub wasn't discouraged. Doctors

1:30:44

would send him people with late stage

1:30:46

cancer. Grub would continue to blast them

1:30:48

with X rays. Most died, but

1:30:50

some actually did seem to be improving, which

1:30:53

is amazing. Like, this was eighteen ninety six,

1:30:55

before this is before basically

1:30:58

any effective medical interventions

1:31:00

had been developed, before antibiotics

1:31:02

even.

1:31:03

Wow.

1:31:05

Yeah, at the time that radiation

1:31:07

therapy began to be developed, the biology

1:31:09

of cancer hadn't even been fully

1:31:11

clarified. Wow,

1:31:16

it's amazing. And obviously there

1:31:18

was a trial and error process to find the right

1:31:20

dose to kill cancer cells without killing the patient,

1:31:22

doing a better job of targeting the affected

1:31:24

area, and overall standardization

1:31:27

of equipment. At

1:31:29

first, radiation therapy was used primarily

1:31:31

on tumors close to the skin surface,

1:31:33

which is where it seemed to have the best effect, because

1:31:36

that way you're not trying

1:31:38

to penetrate too deeply into the body,

1:31:41

and tumors deeper in the body didn't seem

1:31:43

to decrease as much as well.

1:31:46

So we know now why that might be.

1:31:48

But Alexander Grambell said

1:31:51

he said he thought it might be because the radiation

1:31:53

had to travel through layers of healthy

1:31:55

tissue. Cancer's tissue is more susceptible

1:31:57

to radiation before it got to the tumor.

1:32:00

And he then suggested that

1:32:03

quote, there is no reason why a tiny

1:32:05

fragment of radium sealed upon a fine

1:32:08

glass ampule should not be inserted

1:32:10

into the very heart of the cancer, thus

1:32:12

acting directly on the disease material. We

1:32:15

do that, We do that brachytherapy.

1:32:19

That's like widely used today. Yeah,

1:32:21

wow, how Cooln't that amazing?

1:32:23

Yeah?

1:32:24

Anyway, so, in the early

1:32:27

history of radiation therapy, X rays took

1:32:29

a backseat to radium and rad on.

1:32:32

The X rays produced from the X ray tube couldn't

1:32:34

penetrate tissue very well, and

1:32:37

their applications seemed limited. Okay,

1:32:39

But then the physicists developed something

1:32:41

called the linear accelerator or LINAC,

1:32:44

I think that's how you say it, which could produce

1:32:46

a higher energy X rays than

1:32:48

those that came from these X ray tubes.

1:32:51

And one of the first clinical trials to use

1:32:53

the LINAC was for Hodgkin's disease,

1:32:56

a type of cancer that is very localized

1:32:58

in lymph nodes, often within

1:33:00

the chest, and the people

1:33:02

in the trial had well defined early stage

1:33:04

Hodgkin's disease, which was crucial to

1:33:06

the success rate of the treatment, since later stages

1:33:09

could mean that the cancer had

1:33:11

spread out of the target area. The

1:33:14

trial was a huge success. Fifty

1:33:16

percent of the people with Hodgkins had been

1:33:18

cured, and that rate continued

1:33:20

to increase.

1:33:21

Wow. Yeah, that's really

1:33:23

cool.

1:33:24

It's super cool. The development

1:33:26

and successful application of the LINEK was

1:33:28

also an important lesson in choosing

1:33:30

the right therapy for a person, since

1:33:33

cancer is not a catch

1:33:35

all disease. It's not a one type

1:33:37

of disease. It's super variable.

1:33:40

Even when you're talking about the same type of cancer,

1:33:43

you're gonna have different manifestations, different

1:33:45

areas, and you can't. Not all treatments

1:33:47

are created equal.

1:33:49

That's why it's so hard to treat

1:33:52

still today, still today.

1:33:54

Yeah. And it's

1:33:56

also why now today, you know, we have some

1:33:58

cancers that are treated with radiation, others

1:34:00

with chemotherapy or maybe a combination

1:34:03

or in different times or

1:34:05

surgery yep, or all three or all three.

1:34:07

Yeah. And another big step forward

1:34:09

in radiation therapy was when a researcher

1:34:12

named William Bragg discovered that there was

1:34:14

a big burst of energy released

1:34:16

just before an alpha particle reaches the end of its

1:34:19

track. This is now called the brag

1:34:21

peak. Okay, what does that mean.

1:34:23

It's important because you can use this brag

1:34:25

peak to more precisely target

1:34:28

a tumor and avoid the surrounding

1:34:30

healthy tissue. And because

1:34:32

of this super high specificity and efficiency

1:34:35

in tumor killing, proton accelerators

1:34:38

are apparently now being installed in clinics

1:34:40

all over. How cool is that.

1:34:42

That's very cool.

1:34:44

I love it. I love it. Okay, So

1:34:47

that was a quick and dirty history. I didn't talk

1:34:49

much about the whole body radiation that was performed

1:34:51

on people without their consent, all in the

1:34:53

name of oh this will help you. No,

1:34:56

sure, Yeah,

1:34:58

basically this is just read

1:35:01

more books to learn more. But anyway,

1:35:03

so intro, it's an

1:35:05

intro. Yeah, this is a not even a primer.

1:35:08

It's a very surface

1:35:10

level.

1:35:11

Yeah.

1:35:12

But I mean, it is true

1:35:14

that we have come a very long

1:35:16

way from the early days of rotkin

1:35:18

playing around with crooks tubes and from

1:35:21

injecting plutonium into people without

1:35:23

their knowledge or consent. Radiation

1:35:25

therapy is incredibly powerful

1:35:28

and so much safer than it once was. But

1:35:31

other things like three Mile Island

1:35:33

and Chernobyl and Fukushima aren't

1:35:35

so far away. And I had

1:35:37

been planning initially on talking about these

1:35:40

meltdowns a little bit, but I realized

1:35:42

I just couldn't do them justice. Don't

1:35:44

worry, I'll recommend books. And

1:35:47

I'm definitely not equipped either to

1:35:49

go into the pros and cons of nuclear

1:35:52

power plants. But I do want

1:35:54

to say that the thing that I that

1:35:56

one of the things that I've taken away from

1:35:58

all this reading about radiation is

1:36:00

that it seems to have unlimited

1:36:03

potential, potential

1:36:05

to do good and potential to do harm.

1:36:08

And like some of the poisons that we've talked

1:36:10

about in these episodes, so radiation is

1:36:12

this Janice like thing, this

1:36:15

just duality of nature. It's good

1:36:17

and bad, dose dependent, et cetera,

1:36:19

et cetera. You know, and

1:36:23

I don't really know how the scales are

1:36:25

currently tipped in terms of the good or bad.

1:36:28

Probably bad, But I think

1:36:30

we do need to fight very hard

1:36:32

and to be very vigilant to make

1:36:34

sure that the harm doesn't outweigh

1:36:37

the good or won't outweigh.

1:36:38

The good in the future.

1:36:40

And I think the story of radiation also

1:36:42

serves, like I said, before is this very

1:36:45

important reminder to think about where our

1:36:47

knowledge comes from and at what

1:36:49

cost so we don't make these same mistakes again,

1:36:51

because they're probably still being made right

1:36:54

now. I mean, we're just not going

1:36:56

to learn about it for thirty years.

1:36:57

Right anyway,

1:37:00

and then we'll be more horrified than ever.

1:37:03

Mm hmmmm. Anyway, So he

1:37:06

ever tell me some good

1:37:08

stuff question mark about the use

1:37:10

of radiation today?

1:37:13

We might end on

1:37:15

a note.

1:37:18

Right after this break.

1:37:44

I don't know if this is going

1:37:46

to be a happy or a sad note to end on, but

1:37:48

it is. It's a note, and so this.

1:37:51

Is so I've decided to end

1:37:53

this episode is basically to just

1:37:56

kind of talk about how we use

1:37:59

radiation in medicine today, like where

1:38:01

do we see it?

1:38:02

How do we use it? Because

1:38:04

I think, like you said, of course, understanding where

1:38:07

this knowledge came from is so important

1:38:10

and moving forward, understanding the risks

1:38:12

and benefits I think is super

1:38:15

important in terms of how we

1:38:17

use radiation because it does sound

1:38:19

scary, right, The word radiation sound

1:38:22

scary? Yeah, So

1:38:25

how scary is it?

1:38:27

So?

1:38:28

Where do we use radiation in medicine

1:38:30

today? A few different things

1:38:33

we use radiation for diagnostics.

1:38:36

So is your arm broken

1:38:39

or not? We use an X ray to see that.

1:38:42

Do you have diverticulitis,

1:38:44

We can use a CT scan to see that.

1:38:47

So that's diagnosing. If you come in with

1:38:49

a disease or an illness or a

1:38:52

problem, we can use radiation

1:38:54

to try and diagnose that problem. We

1:38:57

use radiation for screening,

1:39:00

which is a very interesting and

1:39:02

potentially controversial area to use radiation.

1:39:05

Yeah, all about Like, yeah,

1:39:07

okay, are you going to talk about that?

1:39:09

We can talk about it, yeah, absolutely, okay,

1:39:12

But so we use radiation in screening.

1:39:15

That's like, for example, a mammogram. Okay,

1:39:18

So a mammogram is a CT scan of

1:39:20

your breasts, So we

1:39:23

can use that to look at the tissue

1:39:25

to see to screen, which

1:39:27

means screening is essentially using

1:39:30

these tools in healthy people with no

1:39:32

evidence of disease. That's what a screening

1:39:34

tool is, right to

1:39:37

see if you have evidence for

1:39:39

concerning for breast cancer. Okay,

1:39:42

that's an example of radiation for screening.

1:39:46

And then we also use radiation

1:39:48

for therapy, right, we use radiation

1:39:51

for therapy for cancers.

1:39:55

I think those are kind of the three big areas that

1:39:57

we use radiation in medicine today.

1:40:02

So let's kind of talk about

1:40:05

what are the risks of radiation

1:40:08

overall, and then we can talk in a little more detail

1:40:10

about those three areas. Cool, because

1:40:13

the risks and benefits are, of course different in

1:40:16

all those three scenarios, whether you're talking about

1:40:18

diagnosing something where you come in

1:40:20

with something wrong versus

1:40:22

screening healthy people, versus

1:40:25

treating a potentially fatal disease.

1:40:28

Okay, So overall, the biggest

1:40:30

long term risk of radiation exposure long

1:40:33

term is cancer, which we've talked

1:40:35

about. So

1:40:37

what is that actual risk like per

1:40:39

unit exposure? Luckily, doctor

1:40:43

Jorkinson in his book told

1:40:45

me this, Okay, if

1:40:48

you calculate it per unit

1:40:50

of ionizing radiation, the

1:40:54

risk of cancer is point

1:40:56

zero zero five percent

1:41:00

per millisevert of whole

1:41:02

body radiation. That's what

1:41:05

your risk of cancer is per

1:41:08

one millisvert exposure. Okay.

1:41:10

And this is like a cumulative exposure.

1:41:13

Yeah, it's cumulative, absolutely, Okay,

1:41:15

Right, so let's put some more

1:41:17

concrete numbers on that because that's too tiny to

1:41:19

talk about. Okay. A

1:41:22

whole body spiral CT

1:41:25

scan CET stands for computed

1:41:27

tomography, I think, but

1:41:29

it's basically X rays that they

1:41:31

go in a circle around your

1:41:33

whole body and take tiny like

1:41:35

pictures of tiny layers of your whole

1:41:38

body. So it's a relatively large

1:41:40

dose of X rays compared to

1:41:42

like an extra of your arm. A

1:41:44

whole body spiral CT would expose

1:41:46

you to twenty milliseverts

1:41:50

of ionizing radiation. Okay,

1:41:53

So that would be a point one

1:41:55

percent increased

1:41:58

lifetime risk of cancer one

1:42:00

in a thousand. So are a thousand people

1:42:02

that get a spiral CT scan, one

1:42:05

of them is expected to develop cancer

1:42:08

as a result of that spiral CT

1:42:11

gotcha? Okay.

1:42:12

And so two

1:42:14

questions okay, One,

1:42:17

how does age play

1:42:19

a role in this in terms of making decisions?

1:42:21

Okay?

1:42:22

And number two, what about

1:42:24

background radiation like what we experience

1:42:27

on a daily basis.

1:42:28

Okay, listen, Aaron, your questions are great, but they're

1:42:30

totally getting ahead of the point.

1:42:32

Okay, Sorry, I'm too excited.

1:42:34

Yeah, no, there, those are the exact

1:42:36

questions that you should be asking when you think about

1:42:38

radiation, right, Because we can't look at

1:42:41

exposure to a CT scan in a

1:42:43

vacuum, because medicine

1:42:45

is not the only place that you're exposed to radiation,

1:42:47

right, We're exposed to it every day,

1:42:50

and you also have a baseline

1:42:52

risk of cancer, whether

1:42:55

from environmental radiation or

1:42:57

from genetic predisposition, or from

1:42:59

other ex exposures. Everyone

1:43:01

has an overall risk of cancer, right. Exposure

1:43:04

to CT scans is not the only

1:43:06

thing that causes risk

1:43:08

of cancer. Okay, So we can't

1:43:11

look at it in a vacuum. So

1:43:13

let's talk about kind of what the overall lifetime

1:43:15

risks of cancer are to get an understanding

1:43:18

on how this CT scan increases

1:43:20

that risk. Okay, Okay. It

1:43:23

turns out that in the US, this is

1:43:25

from Cancer dot Gov, the

1:43:29

lifetime risk of developing

1:43:32

a cancer is overall

1:43:35

about forty percent, which

1:43:37

is pretty high. About half of all males

1:43:40

and one in three females will develop

1:43:42

some type of cancer in their lifetimes.

1:43:45

Wow.

1:43:45

And that's not including, by the way, Basil

1:43:47

and squaymessell carcinoma, which is like the skin

1:43:50

cancers that aren't invasive or

1:43:52

aren't havent.

1:43:53

Yeah, holy cow.

1:43:55

And the risk of dying from cancer overall