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ANGELA CREAGER: When both ordinary people and scholars
have thought about the legacy of the Manhattan Project,
we thought about the way in which physics and engineering
were put to military use.
We thought about a destructive legacy, the arms race, the Cold
War.
Part of what I discovered was that atomic energy
had just as much of a legacy in some of the fields that we
think of as peaceable as it did in military uses.
And specifically here, a lot of the advances in postwar biology
and medicine that have been really taken for granted
owe a lot to the materials and the policies
that were part of the Cold War US.
When the Manhattan Project resulted
in the invention of nuclear reactors,
many scientists working for the Manhattan Project
understood that this would be a tremendous source, especially
for the production of radioactive isotopes.
NARRATOR: What are radioisotopes?
They are merely unstable forms of elements giving off
unseen particles, or rays, from the nuclei
during the process of changing to stable form.
ANGELA CREAGER: Initially, the hope
was that radioisotopes could be used to cure cancer.
So there was a great hope that perhaps cancer
could be treated by finding a magic bullet for every kind
of cancer, a different kind of radioisotope that
might localize to a tissue and kill
a tumor from within the body.
And there are some cancers that are susceptible to radioisotope
treatment, although, in the end, it was more a replacement
for radium as an external radiation
source than a completely revolutionary, new kind
of treatment.
So those uses were already known.
In addition, the discovery of stable isotopes
had already led to trace reuses of isotopes.
Trace reuses are when you replace
one atom of a compound with a particular radiolabeled atom
so that you can follow that label
through the ordinary chemical or biological processes
that that compound goes through.
And so radiotracing was very widely
applicable to study biochemistry,
physiology, endocrinology, eventually ecology.
Basically anything where a chemical compound is in motion,
radiotracing is a way to look at change over time
and look at chemical transformations.
There was still this great hope that radioisotopes
were going to do great things for humankind.
There was a story about the medical dividends
of atomic energy that features a very striking color image.
It shows a man, who's in his pajamas,
having stood up from a wheelchair, who
is encircled in this halo of a mushroom cloud.
And the suggestion is that he has
been healed of whatever ailment had him in that wheelchair
by the power of the atom.
I think it captures better than any other single image
the hopeful side.
Certainly people understood that at high levels
radiation was very dangerous.
But it was over the course of the 1950s and 1960s
that the hazards of low-level radiation
came into clearer view.
And that complicated the hope that radiation
and radioisotopes could be beneficial for civilians,
because certainly their use would expose
some people to low levels of radioactivity.
So then it became more of a calculation
of when the risk was worth taking.
And in most cases today, people feel
like low-level risks associated with dental X-rays or tests
in hospitals are worth it to get the benefits of radiation
and radioisotopes.
But people are more leery about the risks of radiation
from nuclear power and other kinds
of environmental contamination.