The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments

in radium baths.  For the early part of the 20th century, radium enjoyed a tremen-

dous, albeit curious, popularity.

But that popularity gradually turned to disdain.  In 1925, a man fraudulently titled

“Dr.” William Bailey patented and promoted a nostrum of radium-laced water

called Radithor.  Bailey seems to have been motivated by a desire for easy money

as well as a personal obses-

sion with radioactivity.  His

oral medication, a solution

containing the two radium iso-

topes radium-226 and radium-

228 (the latter called mesotho-

rium), was touted as a cure

for “dyspepsia, high blood

pressure, impotence, and more

than 150 other ‘endocrinolog-

ic’ maladies.”  Whatever truth

lay in those claims, Radithor

in large quantities proved

lethal.  In 1927, Eben Byers, a

millionaire socialite and ama-

teur golf champion, began to take Radithor on the recommendation of a physician

to treat the chronic pain in his arm.  Byers reported feeling rejuvenated and invig-

orated by the nostrum.  However, in 1932, four years and about 1000 to 1500 bot-

tles of Radithor later, Eben Byers died, having suffered severe anemia and weight

loss, massive destruction of the bone in his jaw, skull, and entire skeleton, and fi-

nally kidney and bone-marrow failure.

National press coverage of Eben Byers’ horrible death brought the danger of inter-

nal deposits of radium to the attention of the general public.  It also inspired the

Food and Drug Administration to campaign for broader jurisdiction over the uses

of radium.  Although that outcome was a very positive result from Byers' death, it

is painful to realize that his death was avoidable.  Two years prior to Byers' inges-

tion of his first bottle of Radithor, the health risks associated with radium had been

identified within a select group of radium workers, and “radium poisoning” had

been recognized as a deadly occupational hazard.  The story of the radium dial

painters is a tragic, yet crucial episode, in the development of radioactive risk 

assessment.

During World War I paint containing radium was widely used to make self-lumi-

nous dials for watches, clocks, and military instruments.  The “glow-in-the dark”

paint was first developed in Germany around 1908 and began to be made in the

United States by about 1913.  This “self-luminous compound,” as it was frequent-

ly called, contained fine crystals of zinc sulfide mixed with radium salts.  When

alpha particles from radium collided with molecules of zinc sulfide, the latter

would “scintillate,” or emit light.

When the United States entered the war in 1917, a factory in Orange, New Jersey,

became a major supplier of radium-dial instruments to the military.  The factory

employed hundred of workers, most of whom were very young women.  Those

women were in the practice of “tipping” their brushes, that is, using their lips to

shape the brush into a sharp point, which enabled them to paint fine lines and nu-

merals.  As a result, many women inadvertently ingested small but significant

quantities of radium.  From 1922 to 1924, nine young dial painters, most of whom

The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments

226

Los Alamos Science Number 23  1995

Figure 1.  A Miracle Cure 

Brought about through Radium

Treatments

These three photographs show the

miraculous results that were obtained

using radium applicators.  The first

image is a baby girl  immediately be-

fore radium treatment in December

1923.  The next two photographs show

the young girl in April 1926 and then at

10 years old.  She was treated at the In-

stitut-Curie, Paris.  (Reprinted wih per-

mission from the Institut-Curie, Paris.)

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226

Mass number

222

218

214

210

206

Radium

1620 years

238

Uranium

4.5 x 10

9

 years

Radon

3.82 days

Lead 

22 years

Indicates short-lived

radon daughters

Bismuth

5 days

Polonium

138 days

Lead

stable

α

α

α

α

β, γ

β, γ

β

α

β

Polonium

3.05 minutes

Lead

26.8 minutes

Bismuth

19.7 minutes

Polonium

0.000164

seconds

(Five daughters)

232

Mass number

228

224

220

216

212

208

Thorium

1.41 x 10

10

 years

Mesothorium

(radium)

5.75 years

Actinium

6.13 hours

Thorium

1.91 years

α

α

α

α

α

β

β

Radium

3.62 days

Thoron

(radon)

55.6 seconds

α

α

Polonium

0.15 seconds

Lead

10.6 hours

Bismuth

60.6 minutes

Polonium

0.3 

microseconds

Thallium

3.1 minutes

Lead

stable

β

β

β

The radioactive water sold by William

Bailey, Radithor, contained a mixture of

two radium isotopes, the common,

long-lived isotope radium-226 (half-life

of 1600 years), but also the short-lived,

and therefore highly active, radium-228

(half-life of 6.7 years).  At that time, ra-

dium-226 was called radium, and radi-

um-228 was called mesothorium.  Al-

though radium and mesothorium were

isotopic, and therefore had identical

Number 23  1995  Los Alamos Science  

227

chemical properties, they belonged to

different radioactive decay chains and

had distinct radioactive characteris-

tics.  Unlike radium, which was the

sixth daughter in the uranium-238

decay chain with a 1600 year half-

life, mesothorium was the first daugh-

ter of thorium-232 and decayed with

a 6.7 year half-life.  

Mesothorium became commercially

available in about 1916 as a by-prod-

uct of the thorium “gas mantle” indus-

try.  By 1917, both radium and

mesothorium were primary ingredi-

ents of a self-luminous paint that the

military used to produce glow-in-the-

dark instrument faces.  Mesothorium

was preferred to radium because it

was cheaper, but the supply of

mesothorium was erratic.  Some

batches of paint contained only radi-

um whereas others had a high pro-

portion of mesothorium.  This variabil-

ity in the isotopic composition of the

paint became an issue when it was

discovered that the paint was a se-

vere health hazard and attempts

were made to correlate a person's

physiological harm with the amount of

radium retained in that person's body.

Mesothorium activity decreased more

rapidly than that of radium due to its

much shorter half-life.  Consequently,

when body-burden measurements

were made years after intake, the

mesothorium activity was very low

and couldn’t be distinguished from

the radium activity.  Not until the late

1950s, when high-resolution gamma-

ray detectors became available, could

the residual mesothorium be mea-

sured and accurate doses be deter-

mined.  Those doses were within the

same range as the radium-226

doses, and thus they did not alter the

radium standard, which had been set

in 1941 with a large margin of safety

relative to the radium-226 doses that

were known at that time.

Radium and Mesothorium

The Human Plutonium Injection Experiments

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