Radium has a half-life of 1,600 years, so Byers’ bones would have had virtually the same amount of radium in them as they did on the day he died.Įvans was an expert at measuring and mathematically modeling the human body’s uptake and excretion of radioactivity. Thirty-three years later, in 1965, an MIT scientist, Robley Evans, exhumed Byers’ skeleton to measure the amount of radium in his bones. When Byers died, he was put to rest in a lead-lined coffin, to block the radiation being released from the bones in his body. Unfortunately, the early red flags went unnoticed, and RadiThor sales remained strong through the 1920s. And in 1914, Ernst Zueblin, a medical professor at the University of Maryland, published a review of 700 medical reports, many of which showed that bone necrosis and ulcerations were a frequent side effect from ingesting radium. British scientist Walter Lazarus-Barlow had published as early as 1913 that ingested radium goes into bone. As I describe in my book, “Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation,” the medical community had been studying the health effects of radium since its discovery by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. The shame of this was that the dangers of ingested radium were already known, even before Byers started taking RadiThor.
AP file photo Relearning radioactivity lesson Marie and Pierre Curie, the discoverers of radium, understood the dangers inherent in eating it, and never condoned its use in food or drinks.
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