Word: strontium
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...philosophy succinctly: "The scientist has been put into the laboratory by the elaborate labor of society and has the responsibility to do something of value. Isolation is a method of solving a problem, not a way of life." What brought him out of the laboratory in 1953 was strontium 90, a product of atmospheric nuclear-bomb tests then considered harmless. Commoner's restless intellectual curiosity was aroused; he studied all available research on radioactive fallout. What he found frightened him -and he set out to share his concern with others...
...made salts (alginates) with a wide variety of medicinal properties. Some help tablets to disintegrate more rapidly in the stomach. Others form the basis of anti-clotting drugs and of preparations to control surface bleeding. Sodium alginate has the exciting ability to reduce man's absorption of radioactive strontium by about...
...full program of detonations is carried out. They fear that the problem of disposing of the radioactive gas created by these explosions has not been sufficiently studied. Even more dangerous, in their view, is the possibility that underground water supplies might be contaminated by accumulations of long-lived strontium 90 and cesium...
...precisely the Government's wisdom that the Colorado scientists question. "It took the AEC three years to acknowledge that strontium 90 appeared in milk and was a hazard to human health," says Biochemist H. Peter Metzger. "The last time they supervised anything in Colorado, they allowed uranium miners to leave radioactive tailings lying around that could be blown over homes, farms and grazing lands and carried hundreds of miles downstream by rivers. The AEC is always saying things are 95% safe. We worry about the other...
...Barry Commoner, 52, chairman of the botany department at Washington University in St. Louis, is a prolific lecturer and writer (Science and Survival) who brings an ecologist's insight and a polemicist's passion to the dangers of environmental pollution. "The new technological man," says Commoner, "carries strontium 90 in his bones, iodine 131 in his thyroid, DDT in his fat and asbestos in his lungs. There is now simply not enough air, water and soil on earth to absorb man-made poisons without effect. If we continue in our reckless way, this planet before long will become...