How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer (2013) | Hacker News Reader

How We Realized Putting Radium in Everything Was Not the Answer (2013)

theatlantic.com

76 pointsHooke59 comments

Make one wonder if some things we use are the 'radium' of the future, and we don't think of it as harmful now. Recalled products and bans are just the tip of the icebergs: what if something harms us in non-"cancer in 4 years if you drink radium" way, but alters the genes or reduce our health in other ways(think xenoestrogens)? What if the harm isn't realized in everyone(e.g. only 4% of people)?

Its not profitable for radiumCo to be preemptively pro-consumer, their only consumer-centric concern is PR/reputation after the fact, so until they get publicly shamed they won't stop selling their radium. If they have no competition eager to take them down, they have even less concern of what consumers think since radiumCo has stable market.

Not really a mystery. The anti-dietary-fat trend resulted in lots of "low fat" high carb foods that were, and still are, much less healthy for people. We're still slowly crawling out of that hole.

I think all of the nano stuff will be in this bubble. Just thinking about disposing of stuff that has graphene and carbon nano tubes in it. There's no regulation at the current time, and this is definitely something that we can ingest, how will our body(or any animal body) deal with it? Could be fine, but do we really know?

If you look up how asbestos damages the lungs, perhaps carbon nanotubes are something we wouldn't want to ingest.

I can't say the effects would be remotely similar but:

- asbestos was considered safe (or some type of it). Used in pretty much everything.

- broken / agitated asbestos releases microscopic fibres into the air

- those fibres pierce the lining of the lungs leading to asbestosis and eventually a mesothelioma, a cancer with 0% chance of survival. This takes some time to present.

- took decades to realise what was going on and decades more to eliminate the problem, with many lives lost in the process.

I wonder if carbon nanotubes could damage in a similar damage over such a long timespan such that it takes decades to fully realise, regulate and eventually fix. After all, my garage roof is asbestos. Coincidentally, my grandfather died before I was born due to long term asbestos exposure.

The occupational hazards of working with carbon composites are already known to closely resemble those of asbestos.

This is especially true for smaller scale operations utilizing hand layup and generally requiring more raw material handling and abrasive finishing steps.

I think that's a great parallel. I didn't even think about inhaling them. I was thinking more about just the breakdown of the product they're in, and it eventually ending up in the water system.

Aspartame?

> Make one wonder if some things we use are the 'radium' of the future

Microchips which want to connect to the internet.

Yep, probably environmental xenoestrogens, sugar in food (at current levels), and probably office chair/desk setups.

That's why I like the EU model more (but it also has it's downsides): you have to proof it's not harmful.

Wow. Now we have both in Science. Proof and Proof of a negative. Impressive.

I not understand what you mean by this. We always had those. Do you believe in the existence of:

- computers solving the generic halting problem

- perpetual motion devices

- faster than light communication

I guess no, because based upon our current knowledge of physical/logical laws these are nonexistent (impossible) things. And there are many existence proof with the same confidence level. So science have both positive and negative proofs (actually verification is a better term) with similar confidence.

I have a feeling cellphones, smartwatches and other radiating devices will come back and bite us in the not too distant future

If your smart watch bites you, you need to take it off immediately.

> and other radiating devices

what radiating devices?

We all laugh at this nowadays, but 100 years later, Radium (or rather Radon, a radioactive gas) is still being used nowadays.

I once stumbled on homoeopathic advice to visit a radon cave. While I don't have the original site or link at hand, googling will lead you to sites like this:

http://www.gastein.com/en/radon-therapy-austria

I have no words for this.

Well, if they give you radon in homeopathic doses, you should be fine.

> homeopathic doses

there is no such thing

Some time ago I read that no radiation exposure might actually be worse for organisms than low radiation exposure like background radiation. We know the effects of high doses and everyone just assumed that the negative effects go to zero as the dose goes to zero and extrapolated it this way from high doses to zero while in reality there might be a very different relation at low doses. I will try to find some sources, I am no longer sure how convincing the argument was.

This does not really change the fact that there seems to be no good evidence that walking around in a cave with elevated Radon levels does any good, but it would be less obviously a bad idea if what I mentioned above has any merits.

EDIT: Found it, it is called radiation hormesis [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hormesis

I think what you're getting at is the old adage of doing things in moderation. Little bit of alcohol seems to have more positive effects than none at all, severely negative effects when overdone. Same with many drugs, foods and types of exercises.

The one that really comes to mind for me is bacteria. The idea of probiotics is still pretty new to the public. Probably not a great idea to ingest a ton of bacteria all the time, but a little bit can be super beneficial, and much more beneficial than none.

I found a scan of the famous Wall Street Journal article about the unfortunate fellow whose jaw fell off: https://www.scribd.com/document/188172930/The-Radium-Water-W...

That was a great read, thanks for providing it! It's interesting that they mention studies in mice about using radiation to cure cancer. Sounds like the beginnings of the discovery of chemotherapy.

That was worth the time, thank you! My favorite: "The Federal Trade Commission, for Instance, took action against makers of potions that lacked advertised levels of radioactivity."

The jaw fell off?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m5qxZm_JqM

Goodbye Mr Clarke, you will be missed.

Any idea the year this was published? I don't see a date, and I googled the title and found several references (even on wikipedia) without a date mentioned.

1 August 1990

I'm always curious what the voices of caution were at times like this. Was there anyone demanding more study before we put radium in everything?

Yes, there was skepticism, but there wasn't much, legally, that skeptics could do to prevent these products from being sold. If you're interested in this stuff, you should check out a book called "The Poisoner's Handbook", written by a journalist named Deborah Blum. It covers the development of forensic toxicology, which eventually lead to a lot of consumer protection laws. There's even a chapter on radium, Radithor, and the women who worked with radium in the watch dial factory.

My wife actually wrote a (published) poem about the "Radium Girls" who worked in those factories: http://hawaiireview.org/poetry/2016/7/15/meg-eden-radium-gir...

Don't know if anyone here will find it interesting, but it felt topical. She actually did a good amount of research into the conditions surrounding their working environment and what would happen to them as they worked in those factories to get the gruesome details correct.

Neat!

My teenage daughter put together a one-person show for the National History Day Competition a few years ago on the Radium Girls. (Shameless dad bragging: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTmBhQCI0as)

I "recently" (several years ago) read the original Conan stories and the Wizard of Oz books (there are many).

One thing that leapt out at me was how they both talked about radium. The cultural view of it at the time was radically different. Radium was a source of health and magic, capable of solving any problem. There was a passage in which the protagonists encountered a mysterious phenomenon, and "logically" concluded "this must be done with radium".

These are fantasy stories, but their similar ideas about what radium was ("magic") and what it was good for ("everything") had to come from somewhere, and had to be acceptable to their anticipated audience.

To me in the 21st century, it was obviously insane, since radioactivity is best known for ruthlessly murdering anyone in proximity. There's culture shock for you. :/

Sounds like how many people talk about Marijuana today.

Truly worth watching: Radium City the story of the mentioned Radium Girls of Ottawa, Ill

http://articles.latimes.com/1988-01-09/entertainment/ca-8748...

https://vimeo.com/ondemand/radiumcity/166116025

Another interesting thing to look into is the Shoe-Fitting Fluoroscope (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoe-fitting_fluoroscope). Basically a box you put your feet in, with an x-ray gun at the bottom and a hole to put your face over at the top.

Spoiler alert, it didn't end well for anyone.

I see a pattern here - something is discovered, then it's seen as a magic solution to many many problems until devastating health issues are discovered.

Rontgen, radium, asbestos. PVC, carbon fiber, nanotubes are promising candidates for the list. Non-ionising radiation (phones, wifi, radio communication) is omnipresent and I really hope it will not follow the pattern.

Can anyone 'in the know' explain to a layman why the parent comment is no reason for concern (especially when it comes to 'non-ionising radiation'?)

Yeah, I've run into a lot of performance bottlenecks using Radium in all of the React components in a large, complex web app.

Flash forward to 2100: How We Realized Filling Our Bodies with Millions of Nanobots Was Not The Answer

Wow, this is interesting history!

How We Realized Putting Blockchain in Everything Was Not the Answer (2020)

Well, it doesn't kill you, just makes you look stupid.

I'm thinking in a hundred years it will be "How We Realized Putting Microprocessors in Everything Was Not the Answer"

Let me guess, security vulnerabilities in literally every object.

Can't recall if I read it here or on twitter but there was a great quote along that line : "The 'S' in IoT stands for 'Security'"

Internet of Hackable, Completely Unpatchable Things Capable of Destroying the Internet.

Pardon my curiosity, but what would be a case of blockchain making something worse?

Most places where you already have a trusted 3rd party in place, or you do not need to trust anyone but yourself?

Especially if you have a limited time to clear transactions.

Bitcoin makes moving money around slower, public, more expensive and monolithic. Its single advantage is that you don't have to trust anyone. That's a big thing, obviously, but it's hard to say it made the payment functionaliy better.

That's not right at all. Intra-bank systems for transferring money are not only quite complex, but in many cases they are open to analysis by government middlemen, which is a sort of warped public reveal. This is the basis of "sanctions", using intra-bank mechanisms to effect public policy on an international stage.

Bitcoin's main problem is that you have to transfer value into and out of it somehow. In most other ways it is far superior to existing currency movement mechanisms.

>That's not right at all.

You say this, yet what you described doesn't contradict my description at all. It is true that banks will do things governments ask them to do. It is also true that bank transfers are not perfectly private. All the drawbacks of bitcoin are also true. If you're going to defend it as, "far superior to existing currency movement mechanisms," then you should say why you think it is. I think it isn't - for the reasons stated.

I would argue that lawful interception is a feature, not a problem.

In those cases it is a problem with government insight, the actual problem is the government itself, and there are more pressing problems to deal with, rather than worrying about the money transfer systems.

Blockchain Brand Creamery Butter

How we realized putting WiFi in everything was not the answer (2018)

How we realised putting machine learning in everything was not the answer (2117)

Did anyone ever believe such a thing?

RTFA:

> The glowing element was hailed as a panacea for everything from blindness to hysteria.

Literally the second paragraph.

Hailed by whom?

That sentence is immediately followed by:

> "No medicine, no drugs," raves one ad

Note the word ad.

So most of the hailing, possibly all, was in advertising copy.

The article mentions advertising and marketing several times but makes no convincing case that those without a financial interest in selling the goods believed the claims.

And quite likely most of those selling the products didn't believe them either; many were just the latest in a long line of quacks selling snake oil and neither knew nor cared if it worked or not, it was just a cool name to attach to product.

Your comment was, "Did anyone ever believe such a thing?"

Again, from the article:

> One particularly disturbing medical innovation was the "Radiendocrinator," a device the size of a thick stack of credit cards to be worn with an adaptor "like any 'athletic strap.'" Its inventor, who fervently claimed to use the product, later died of bladder cancer.

The inventor used the product, and presumably so did the poor people consuming the quack products. Prevarication doesn't change the logic here.

from 1924

http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/16179923

"Radium treatment for blindness is limited in its usefulness principally to two types of eye disease, Dr. Francis H. Williams, of Boston, the discoverer, said on September 5"

Absolutely. Ever heard the saying "the past is a foreign country"?

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