Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine by Angela N. H. Creager (review)

For scientists in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, radioisotopes were highly prized research instruments. When introduced in miniscule quantities to biological systems, these unstable variants of common atomic elements could be traced according to their distinctive radioactive signatures as they moved through microscopic organisms and macroscopic ecosystems alike, revealing the scalar processes of life on a molecular level. As the United States Atomic Energy Commission (aec) report put it in 1948, radioisotopes enabled “‘a new mode of perception’” (2).

In Creager’s Life Atomic, radioisotopes prove similarly revelatory—though not of cell metabolism or ecological respiration but of the fissures and contradictions in “the politics and epistemology of postwar biology and medicine” (5). Instead of radioassays and scintillation scanners, Creager uses published and archival documents of aec scientists and administrators to trace the circulation of radioisotopes from weapons research facilities, such as the Oak Ridge reactor in Tennessee, to more than 2,200 scientists and physicians around the world (5).

A series of interlinked paradoxes lies at the heart of Creager’s analysis. The aec held out radioisotopes as examples par excellence of the peaceful use of atomic energy, but their production and distribution was inextricably tied to the grim, Cold War struggle for global influence between the United States and the Soviet Union. Isotope distribution was supposed to be a shining example of American “free enterprise,” but it was (initially) tightly controlled by the U.S. government. While broadening scientists’ views of fundamental biological processes, the ubiquity and versatility of radioisotopes limited lines of scientific inquiry that did not employ radioisotopes to yield answers. Moreover, the experimental and medical use of radioisotopes turned out to be more dangerous than expected, carrying an enormous risk of serious harm to anyone exposed to radiation from tracers and radioisotope-based therapies.

In moving through these contradictions, Life Atomic spans roughly a half-century in ten chapters, covering the early period of radioisotopes before their industrial-scale production in the nuclear reactors of the Manhattan project; through their halcyon days as model, though politically unstable, research technologies; to the late 1960s when the danger that even small doses of radiation posed for all living things became impossible to ignore. For Creager, radioisotopes are not simply a byproduct of military research. Rather, their circulation through labs, environments, and people reveals fundamentally entwined problems of scientific knowledge, risk, modern technology, and the politics of life itself in modern America.

As its title suggests, a central conceit of Life Atomic is that radioisotope research not only described but also helped to create citizens of a modern world whose very subjectivity has been, since the early years of the Cold War, increasingly mediated by practices of molecular biology. In Creager’s words, “Once you raise the historical Geiger counter . . . you find the chatter of radioactivity everywhere” (22). The strength of Life Atomic lies in showing that this “activity” was not just a matter of unstable isotopes; it was also the result of instabilities in the program of postwar American science itself.