My Radioactive Life, part I

[Listen to this post read by its author.]

When I was a kid, one thing I had to have was something radioactive. My friends had things I coveted but could never possess: parents with even a passing interest in science, for instance, or a Johnny Unitas football card. So it seemed just that I should have something they'd never have: radioactive atoms decaying and disintegrating in a glowing spew of alpha or beta particles.

Configure the right radioactivity in the right way, and you have a nuclear bomb. Screw it up -- simply spill the stuff all over yourself -- and you die a horrible death of radiation sickness, your corpse interred in a lead-lined coffin. Not that that scared me. After all, wasn't Peter Parker bitten by a radioactive spider? And look what happened to him: he became Spider Man! This was the late 1960s. I was nine. When the TV set was free, I'd watch The Man from Uncle and Mission: Impossible, Cold War dramas frequently featuring spies from Red China and Communist Russia. Like me, those bad guys were scheming to get the radioactive stuff; their adversaries in contrast were trying to poison them with it. Radioactivity radiated cachet. 

I knew precisely what I wanted, and it wasn't illegal, just unsafe. It was a few micrograms of radium suspended in a solution of zinc sulfide. I knew I'd find it painted on the hands of old wristwatches. Decaying radium's radioactive rain of alpha particles made those watch hands glow in the dark. Quite likely, it also caused the cancer deaths of the women employed in painting those watch hands [1].   

Radium alone was not enough. Other things safely glowed in the dark. Who would believe me when I claimed that radioactivity was the reason? Consequently, I needed a Geiger counter to prove my claim. I'd remove the glass cover of the watch, exposing the watch face. "Go ahead, slowly move the wand toward the watch", I'd tell my skeptical friend Todd, the one with the Unitas card, handing him the cylindrical probe of the Geiger counter. Slowly, steadily the rate of the counter's clicking would accelerate, from a few lackadaisical clicks per minute at a foot away to a frenetic clatter and chatter at less than an inch away. Or so I imagined. "This is the real stuff", I'd say, grinning. "Bombs are made of it. Spies want it. And I've got it!" 

I never got it. At age nine, getting radium meant asking the parents. To them nothing, I suspect, could be more preposterous than a request for something radioactive. Whatever they thought radioactivity was, it surely wasn't something for their child. My asking, I reasoned, would be interpreted in either of two possible ways. Either I was a wise guy, purposely asking for something I could never possess. Punishment was the due response. Or, worse, I was yet again a "scatterbrains" and a "retard", my brain warped by too much television, deserving not just punishment but also medication by some elementary school Nurse Ratched [2] as well as demotion to the Special Ed program. Knowing better, I kept my head down and my goddamned mouth shut. "Children are not to speak unless spoken to".  

I never needed to get it. I already had it, had it all along without knowing. Well, not radium, but something else radioactive: potassium-40. You might say it was under my nose the whole time, except that it was my nose, and all the rest of my body. Our bodies are radioactive with naturally-occurring potassium-40, some 4000 atoms decaying each second, showering the cells of my body with high-energy beta particles and gamma rays. And yet we have evolved an ability to live and thrive in the face of such abuse. How?

I remain the skeptical kid I was half a century ago. Then I needed a Geiger counter to convince myself and my friends of radium's radioactivity. Now I need mathematical proof that the value of 4000 is real. I'll believe the number when I can derive it myself. And so I have. It is here: Rate of Potassium-40 Decay in the Human Body 

Footnotes

1. As lurid as my childhood imagination was, reality, sadly, has not been far behind. For horrible deaths of radiation sickness, one need only review the cancer deaths of those employed painting the watches I so desired, as well as accidents suffered by Los Alamos weapons scientists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin. Worse was the 2006 murder of Russian dissident and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London. He was poisoned with a lethal dose of Polonium-210.

2. My eternal nemesis, embodiment of childhood's threats and evil, Nurse Ratched.

posted: 2019-11-22, last edited: 2019-11-30