Laura: Here’s a thought: the thing you’re most afraid of is rarely the thing most likely to kill you. We panic about shark attacks, not falling coconuts. We fear plane crashes, not the drive to the airport. And that exact psychological glitch is the key to understanding our entire, fraught relationship with radiation. Sophia: That is so true. I am terrified of spiders, but I’ll swat a mosquito without a second thought. Yet, mosquitoes are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths a year, and spiders… well, not so much. It’s this gap between our fear and the actual data that’s at the heart of the book we’re diving into today. Laura: It absolutely is. We are talking about Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation by Timothy J. Jorgensen. And it’s a book that tackles one of the most misunderstood and feared topics in modern science. Sophia: Right, and the author, Timothy Jorgensen, is a professor of radiation medicine and public health. His whole mission with this book, which was highly acclaimed by the way, was to use storytelling to help us fear less and understand more. He's not just a physicist; he's a storyteller of invisible forces. Laura: A perfect description. And that story of our psychological glitches starts way back, even before the discovery of radiation, with something we now take completely for granted: electricity.

Sophia: Ah, the good old days when a light switch was basically a magic trick. It’s hard to imagine being afraid of electricity now. Laura: Well, in the late 19th century, people were terrified. And the book uses the "War of Currents" to show how that fear could be weaponized. You had Thomas Edison, a national hero, championing his Direct Current, or DC. And then you had George Westinghouse, with Nikola Tesla’s more efficient Alternating Current, or AC. Sophia: A classic tech rivalry. The Betamax vs. VHS of the Gilded Age. Laura: Exactly. But with a much darker marketing strategy. Edison, fearing he would lose the market, launched a vicious smear campaign to convince the public that Westinghouse's AC was a deadly menace. He didn't just write op-eds; he staged public demonstrations. He and his associates would take stray dogs and cats, even horses, and electrocute them with AC in front of horrified crowds to prove how dangerous it was. Sophia: Wait, hold on. Thomas Edison, the guy from our history textbooks, was publicly electrocuting animals to win a business deal? That is monstrous. Laura: It gets worse. The climax of this campaign was the public execution of Topsy, a circus elephant at Coney Island who had killed a few handlers. Edison’s team hooked her up to an AC generator and, in front of a paying crowd, jolted her with over 6,000 volts. Sophia: That's insane! It's like a corporate smear campaign mixed with a horror movie. Edison, the great inventor, was basically running a public snuff film to win a contract. Laura: And it perfectly illustrates the book's point: fear of the new and unseen is a powerful, primal force. Edison was selling fear. Ironically, as the book points out, his tactics backfired. The public was so repulsed by the cruelty, especially a botched human execution using an AC-powered electric chair he’d promoted, that public opinion began to shift towards Westinghouse. AC’s technical superiority eventually won out. Sophia: Okay, so if that's how people reacted to visible wires and the tangible threat of electrocution, what happened when someone discovered something that was completely invisible? Something that could pass right through your hand? Laura: That’s the perfect question, because it leads us directly to Wilhelm Roentgen in 1895. He's in his lab, experimenting with a cathode ray tube, and he notices a screen across the room is glowing faintly. He puts his hand in front of the tube, and on the screen, he sees the dark silhouette of his bones. Sophia: Whoa. I can't even imagine what that must have felt like. To see inside your own body for the first time. Laura: The book captures the reaction perfectly. He brings his wife, Anna, into the lab and takes an X-ray of her hand. When she sees the image—her flesh rendered ghostly and transparent around the stark, dark bones of her hand, her wedding ring floating around her finger bone—she exclaims, "I have seen my own death!" Sophia: Chilling. That’s the duality right there, isn't it? The scientific marvel and the deep, mortal terror. Laura: Precisely. The discovery was an overnight sensation. On one hand, it was a medical miracle. Within weeks, a doctor in Montreal used X-rays to find a bullet in a man's leg, saving him from amputation. But on the other hand, no one understood the danger. People were holding X-ray parties, getting souvenir images of their skeletons. Shoe stores had X-ray machines to check if shoes fit. Sophia: Oh, that sounds like a terrible idea. Laura: It was. And the book tells the tragic story of Clarence Dally, who was Thomas Edison's lead glassblower and X-ray researcher. Edison, having lost the current war, jumped into X-ray technology. Dally was his main test subject, constantly putting his hands under the beam to test new fluoroscope designs. His hands became red, then ulcerated. He developed aggressive cancers. He had to have his left arm amputated at the shoulder, then his right. He died a horrible death in 1904, becoming one of the first documented American fatalities from radiation. Sophia: And Edison? Laura: Edison was so horrified by what happened to Dally that he completely abandoned all his research on X-rays. He famously said, "Don’t talk to me about X-rays, I’m afraid of them!" The man who once weaponized fear had become its victim.

Laura: And this is where the story takes a truly paradoxical turn. The same force that was causing these horrific injuries was also, almost simultaneously, being hailed as a miracle cure. It's the ultimate double-edged sword. Sophia: That’s the part that’s hardest to wrap my head around. How can the same thing be both the poison and the antidote? Laura: To understand that, we have to look at one of the most haunting stories in the book: the Radium Girls. In the 1920s, hundreds of young women were hired in factories in New Jersey, Illinois, and Connecticut to paint watch dials with glow-in-the-dark paint. The secret ingredient was radium, discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie. Sophia: I’ve heard of this. It's just devastating. Laura: It is. The women were told the paint was harmless. In fact, radium was being marketed as a health tonic at the time—you could buy radium-infused water. To get a fine point on their brushes for the tiny numbers on the watch faces, the factory foremen taught the women to "lip-point"—to put the brush between their lips to shape it. Sophia: Oh no. So they were ingesting it. Laura: Every single time. A tiny dose of radium with every stroke. They would even paint their teeth and nails with it for fun when they went out at night, because it made them glow. They were called the "ghost girls." But then, they started getting sick. Horribly sick. Their teeth fell out. Their jaws developed agonizing abscesses and tumors. The book describes it as "radium jaw," a gruesome bone necrosis. Radium is chemically similar to calcium, so the body deposits it directly into the bones, where it sits and emits radiation for years, decaying the skeleton from the inside out. Sophia: That is one of the most horrifying things I've ever heard. They were literally ingesting poison for a paycheck, and being told it was safe, even glamorous. Laura: Exactly. And their fight for justice against the U.S. Radium Corporation was a landmark case for labor rights and occupational disease. But their tragedy provided invaluable, if brutal, data on the long-term effects of internalized radiation. Sophia: So that's the "kill" side of the sword. Where does the "cure" come in? Laura: Almost at the exact same time. The book introduces us to a Chicago physician named Emil Grubbe. In 1896, just months after Roentgen's discovery, Grubbe, who had been making light bulbs and suffered from a strange dermatitis on his hand, realized his condition was caused by the X-rays from the vacuum tubes he worked with. He went to a professor, and the professor had a flash of insight. He said, if X-rays are so damaging to normal tissue, what could they do to a cancerous tumor? Sophia: Wow. That’s a leap of logic. A brilliant one. Laura: It was. That very week, Grubbe treated his first patient, a woman with inoperable breast cancer. He shielded her body with lead foil, cut a hole over the tumor, and blasted it with X-rays for an hour every day. The tumor shrank. The pain subsided. The woman eventually died, her cancer was too advanced, but it was the first proof of concept. Radiation could destroy cancer. Sophia: So on one hand, you have young women dying from painting radium onto watch dials, and on the other, doctors are using that same family of radioactive forces to save lives. How can both be true? Laura: It all comes down to what the book calls the three most important words in real estate and radiation safety: location, location, location. And also dose and delivery. The Radium Girls were getting a continuous, internal dose to their bones. Cancer therapy is about delivering a targeted, external, high-energy dose to a specific location—the tumor—while trying to spare the surrounding healthy tissue. It’s the difference between a flood and a firehose.

Laura: This paradox of risk and benefit is something we still grapple with today, but on a much larger scale. It moved from the factory floor to global anxiety with the dawn of the atomic age and the threat of nuclear fallout. Sophia: Right, a word we all know but I’m not sure I could actually define. Laura: The book gives a perfect, dramatic story to explain it: the Lucky Dragon No. 5. In 1954, this was a small Japanese tuna fishing boat, out in the Pacific. One morning, the crew saw a flash on the horizon that was "like a piece of the sun" had appeared on Earth. It was the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, a blast a thousand times more powerful than Hiroshima. Sophia: And they were way outside the declared exclusion zone, right? Laura: They were. But the bomb was more powerful than the scientists predicted, and the winds shifted. A few hours later, a fine, white, gritty ash began to fall on the boat like snow. The fishermen had no idea what it was. They tasted it. It was gritty and tasteless. They collected it in bags. But soon, they started feeling sick. Nausea, headaches, their skin burning. Sophia: What exactly is fallout? Is it the radiation itself, or radioactive stuff? Laura: It's radioactive stuff. Think of it as the pulverized, vaporized debris from the bomb—coral, sand, bomb parts—all made intensely radioactive by the blast. This "hot" dust gets thrown into the stratosphere and then falls back to Earth, carried by the wind. It's not a wave of energy; it's a physical substance that is emitting radiation. The crew of the Lucky Dragon was being showered in tiny, radioactive particles. Sophia: So the danger doesn't just pass. It settles on you, in you, around you. Laura: Precisely. When they got back to port two weeks later, they were suffering from acute radiation sickness. Their story caused an international incident and a global panic about contaminated fish. It was the world's first real lesson in the far-reaching, invisible danger of nuclear fallout. Sophia: That's a massive, terrifying scale. But most of us worry about smaller things. The book talks about cell phones. What's the verdict? Is my phone giving me cancer? Laura: This is one of the most contentious modern radiation questions, and the book navigates it really well. The short answer is: probably not, but it's complicated. In 2011, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, or IARC, classified the radiofrequency waves from cell phones as "Group 2B: Possibly carcinogenic to humans." Sophia: "Possibly" doesn't sound very reassuring. What does that even mean? Laura: It's the same category as coffee and pickled vegetables. It means there's some evidence, but it's limited and not conclusive. The book breaks down the big studies. A huge Danish study of over 400,000 people found no link between cell phone use and brain cancer. But a different type of study, the international INTERPHONE study, found a slight, 40% increased risk for one specific type of brain tumor, glioma, but only in the top 10% of users—people with over 1,640 hours of lifetime use. Sophia: Okay, but an increase is an increase. That sounds scary. Laura: It does, but here's the catch, and it's a big one. The same study found that for moderate users, cell phones seemed to have a protective effect, which makes no scientific sense. There was no clear dose-response relationship—meaning, more use didn't consistently lead to more risk. That's a huge red flag for causation. Sophia: And what about the real-world numbers? Laura: That's the most compelling point in the book. Since the 1980s, cell phone use has gone from virtually zero to ubiquitous. If they were a significant carcinogen, we should see a corresponding spike in brain cancer rates. We don't. The rates have remained remarkably flat for 40 years. Sophia: So the big picture data doesn't support the theory. Laura: Exactly. The book concludes that while you can't prove a negative, the evidence for a link is extremely weak. But if you are worried, the solution is simple: use a headset or speakerphone. The intensity of radio waves drops off dramatically with distance. Just an inch or two away from your head virtually eliminates the exposure.

Sophia: So the thread through all of this—from Edison's electrocuted elephants to the glowing Radium Girls to our cell phones—is our struggle to correctly perceive risk from something we can't see. Laura: Exactly. Timothy Jorgensen's ultimate argument is that knowledge is the antidote to fear. Strange Glow isn't about memorizing physics; it's about understanding the story of radiation. We've learned, often through tragic human experience, that the dose makes the poison, that location and delivery are everything, and that we have to constantly weigh the benefits against real, not imagined, risks. Sophia: It’s about replacing blind fear with informed respect. The X-ray that can show a surgeon a bullet is the same force that, misused, can cause cancer. The radium that can shrink a tumor is the same element that, ingested, can destroy a person's bones. Laura: The power is the same, but our understanding and application of it makes all the difference. The book leaves you with this profound sense that we are surrounded by powerful, invisible forces, and our primary tool for navigating them safely isn't a lead shield, but critical thinking. Sophia: It’s a call to be more curious and less certain. To ask questions, to look at the data, and to understand the story behind the science. Laura: It makes you wonder, what are the 'invisible forces' we're misjudging today? Sophia: That's a great question for our listeners. What's something you fear irrationally, and what's a real risk you probably ignore? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. We’d love to hear your modern-day "spiders vs. mosquitoes." Laura: This is Aibrary, signing off.