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Half Lives - Lucy Jane Santos ****

The story of radium's rise and fall as a glamorous substance for everything from health and beauty to glow-in-the-dark watch dials is a fascinating one, and Lucy Jane Santos explores it with clear enthusiasm for the topic.

 Although radium is the main theme, there are a number of X-ray based stories woven in through the book, plus a relatively small amount of non-radium radioactivity coverage, including a rapid run through the development of nuclear weapons. But it is radium that is the star. Inevitably Marie Curie (or Marie Sklodowska Curie as Santos usually refers to her), plays a significant part, although we don't get a huge amount of detail of Curie's biography (though this has been covered in many other books), primarily focusing on her work on radium and X-rays.

 We then see radium being taken up by both the medical profession and by quack producers of patent medicines with equal verve as a near-magic cure-all for everything from arthritis to cancer. What comes through very strongly here is the lack of scientific basis for medicine in the early decades of the 20th century - the use of radium medically seemed almost as haphazard and random as in the quack products, and while the dangers of radioactive materials was realised relatively early on, there seems to have been a disconnect in the minds of the medical profession (and the public) that made it difficult for the risks to shine through until things became quite dire.

 We also see the association of radioactivity and radium with spas - I hadn't realised that many of the old spas, including Bath and Buxton in the UK, have mildly radioactive water and where these days they are more likely to keep quiet about it, back in the radium heyday they made a big thing of their radioactive water. Similarly, now we're to radon gas being considered a hazard in homes built in granite-based areas such as Cornwall - back then, inhaling radon was also a big thing in the spas.

 When we get onto the commercial exploitation of radium, which Santos covers in depth, there was an impressive range of products, some just picking up on the trendy aspect of the word without having any radium present (presumably in the same way we can now buy a dishwasher tablet called Quantum). Others, though, did incorporate radium salts. One of the more amazing revelations was that the UK high street chemist Boots sold large quantities of Sparklets soda syphon cartridges branded as 'Spa Radium' which were intended to irradiate the water in the syphon. The stories of the radium girls who suffered because they licked their radium paint brushes to make points to paint the hands of watches, developing devastating radiation damage as a result, is relatively well known, but many of the other commercial uses have now been forgotten: Santos brings them vividly to life. Although it's not actually radium, I was still shocked to discover that the glow-in-the-dark dial of the 1960s trimphone I had by my teenage bedside was powered by radioactive tritium.

 Sometimes the enthusiasm Santos has for the subject can be a slight problem as we simply get too much detail of specific products or companies whose business was driven by radium and their rise and fall. And I wasn't entirely sure about the claim in the blurb that this 'complex area of science history is so often mistold' - apart from being able to dismiss the widely-held belief that Marie Curie died as a result of her handling of radium (it was apparently over-exposure to X-rays), there didn't seem too much here that differed from the usual telling. But this remains an engaging and definitive history of the medical and commercial deployment of this dangerous but beguiling element.
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Review by Brian Clegg

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