Photo by Brianna Rego   


Home History Paleobiology CV Photography

Polonium-210 in Tobacco

The Polonium Brief: A Hidden History of Cancer, Radiation, and the Tobacco Industry (Isis, 2009 100:453-484 PDF)

On November 23, 2006, former KGB operative Alexander Litvinenko died in London of radioactive poisoning from the rare isotope polonium-210. As concern grew that others had been exposed, the British Health Protection Agency reassured that there was "no radiation risk" to the general public. This statement, however, is misleading, as more than one billion people worldwide expose themselves daily (and most often unknowingly) to polonium. The vector of this mass irradiation is not a vengeful government, nor an adversary in the style of Cold War espionage, but rather something far more common and ordinary: cigarettes. The first scientific paper on polonium-210 in tobacco was published in 1964 and in the following decades there would be more research linking radioisotopes in cigarettes with lung cancer in smokers. While external scientists worked to determine if polonium could be a cause of lung cancer, industry scientists silently pursued similar work with the goal of protecting business interests should the polonium problem ever become public. Despite the companies' interest in the matter and increasingly sophisticated radiochemical programs, the industry did not publicize its internal research and no industry results were published. During the late-1970s and early-1980s, in response to papers in leading scientific journals and increased attention on polonium in the biomedical and radiochemical fields, the issue of whether or not the industry should publish its own research was raised and discussed by tobacco scientists and executives. Publishing would draw attention to the fact that the industry had been working on the problem since the 1960s, perhaps lending them some legitimacy. However, it could also backfire, as it would leave the manufacturers vulnerable to criticism that in spite of more than twenty years of unpublished research, there were not as yet any concrete advances in reducing the polonium in cigarettes. The polonium story therefore presents yet another chapter in the long tradition of industry use of science and scientific authority in an effort to thwart disease prevention. The impressive extent to which tobacco manufacturers understood the hazards of polonium and the high executive level on which the problem - and potential solutions - were discussed within the industry are revealed through internal documents available through litigation.


Arsenic Contamination of Groundwater

Arsenic and Old Mines: Idaho, Superfund, and those "Damn Environmentalists"

Hidden in the mountains of central Idaho, the long-defunct Triumph Parker mine is a remnant of the ore-mining days of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Following local water tests in 1990 that showed elevated levels of dangerous elements, including arsenic, the mine and local community found themselves the center of an environmental contamination that ultimately embroiled Triumph in a remediation battle with the Environmental Protection Agency. Initial concern, however, soon turned to frustration at the EPA and the bureaucratic process in which residents felt they had become trapped, frustration that grew over the following years to outright anger and antagonism. The Triumph Saga, as it became known, offers an excellent case study of the local challenges of remediation efforts in the mining regions of the American West. But beyond Triumph, the story of arsenic in groundwater offers an exciting opportunity to study a global issue in the history of science. Just as the Triumph Saga was heating up in central Idaho another arsenic problem was beginning to gain global attention, a problem that would dramatically increase arsenic's prominence in the scientific and public health communities and highlight the truly global nature of arsenic contamination of soil and groundwater. The discovery of arsenic poisoning in the West Bengal Delta in the 1980s and its increasing global awareness through the early and mid-1990s would force the reimagination and redefinition of arsenic as a health and environmental hazard as well as a new geological understanding of it as a groundwater contaminant. It is the aim of this paper to trace both the history of arsenic contamination in Bangladesh and the American West, and the history of geological research on arsenic during the late twentieth century.


History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at Stanford


Home History Paleobiology CV Photography