Radium and the Secret of Life by Luis A. Campos (review)

Radium and the Secret of Life, by Luis Campos, examines the profound impact of the radioactive element on twentieth century biology, and especially on the early study of genetics and mutation. Despite the title, radium is not the subject of this book. Rather, radium is the catalyst that facilitates the four narrative case-studies explored by Campos: John Butler Burke’s claim to have discovered a sort of life-precursor form, the “radiobe,” in a beef bouillon mixture exposed to radium, Daniel Trembly MacDougal and Charles Stuart Gager’s experiments with exposing plants to radium, T. H. Morgan’s and Albert F. Blakeslee’s experiments with using radium to produce phenotypic mutants in both flies (Drosophila) and plants (Datura stramonium), and Hermann J. Muller’s famous studies of induced mutation, in which he initially used radium as a mutagen before shifting to x-rays.

Campos demonstrates that radium influenced scientific inquiry at two simultaneous levels. At the level of experimental design, each of the investigators chronicled in the book used radium to produce an interesting result, although Burke’s discovery of the “radiobe” was later falsified. As Campos shows, however, radium was more than just a tool; radium, and the discourse around it, stimulated novel kinds of thinking, leading investigators to think about biological systems in new ways and to ask new questions about the origins of life and the mechanisms of inheritance. Ultimately, as Campos argues, the decline of radium as an experimental tool led to a kind of collective forgetting of radium’s importance in both respects. The case study that ends the book is instructive in this respect; Hermann Muller is generally remembered for winning the Nobel prize based on his work with x-rays, rather than with radium.

Radium and the Secret of Life is as much a history of ideas as it is a history of particular investigators and their work, and Campos weaves together these two threads in a way that is both convincing and engaging. This approach situates Radium and the Secret of Life amid a larger discussion of ionizing radiation that has recently flourished in the history of science, technology, and medicine, including Angela Creager’s Life Atomic, Matthew Lavine’s The First Atomic Age, and Martin V. Melosi’s Atomic Age America. A common challenge faced by all of these historians, and well-handled by Campos in the first chapter of Radium and the Secret of Life, is to help readers understand how people in the past thought about a force that is powerful, yet largely imperceptible. As the book’s title would suggest, Campos focuses on the metaphorical connections that many drew between radium and biological systems—a mental connection that, as he points out, became enshrined in the very language of the subject, as physicists and chemists began to speak of “half-lives” and “decay.”

Occasionally, it felt like the author’s interest in language betrayed the premise of the book. In his introduction, Campos declares his desire to use radium not only as a focus for inquiry, but as a literary device for building the narrative. At times, this approach works very well; the concept of half-life, for example, made for a very satisfying metaphor to describe the slow fade of radium from the public memory of early work in genetics. At other points, however, the approach wore out its welcome. This was particularly the case with words, like “radioactive,” that do double duty as both adjectives and technical descriptors. It sometimes felt like they had been piled a bit too high.

The occasional groan, however, did not detract from the overall pleasure of this book. Campos has a particularly deft touch for walking the reader through scientific debates. He manages to communicate not just the substance of the claims, but a sense of the individuals involved, their feelings and foibles, and he manages to build a narrative arc...