Reviewed by: Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine by Angela N. H. Creager Luis Campos Angela N. H. Creager. Life Atomic: A History of Radioisotopes in Science and Medicine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. xvi + 489 pp. Ill. $45.00 (978-0-226-01780-8). Life Atomic is a thorough exploration how postwar biology and medicine were fundamentally transformed by the atomic age. By following the many and varied uses of radioisotopes over decades and across institutions, and by carefully examining the growth and regulation of postwar biomedicine and its complex relations with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), Creager traces both the development of a “technological system for radioisotope production and consumption” as well as “how the technology mattered” (p. 15) to various constituencies ranging from biochemists, molecular biologists, and ecologists, to clinicians, patients, and larger publics. The story is told through an array of chapters with single-word titles ranging from “Cyclotrons” and “Reactors” (detailing the early production and distribution of radioisotopes) to “Embargo,” “Dividends,” and “Sales” (tracing their further distribution and integration into biomedicine). Finding trace residues of the Manhattan Project across large swathes of postwar life sciences and biomedicine, Creager argues in later chapters on “Pathways,” “Guinea Pigs,” “Beams and Emanations,” and “Ecosystems” that the increasing availability of radioisotopes ended up transforming not only the nature of biomedical experimentation and the questions it asked, but even “the ways in which life and disease were conceptualized” (p. 16). While each chapter could stand well enough alone as a case study, historians of medicine will be particularly intrigued by the medical themes that run through the chapters on “Dividends,” “Guinea Pigs,” and “Beams and Emanations.” In “Dividends,” Creager analyzes the ways in which radioisotopes, as agents of healing, became “potent emblems of the humanitarian promise of the atom” (p. 142). Central to this project was the AEC’s creation—after years of intense focus on the physical sciences and engineering—of a biomedical research program. As “hopes and fears around cancer were recast around the power of the atom” (p. 148) Creager notes, the AEC sold radioisotopes as potentially useful tools in experimental cancer therapies. [End Page 154] As with every pharmakon, however, radiation proved to have “a double-edged relationship to cancer” (p. 147). The idea of radioisotopes as therapeutics came to be increasingly undermined during the 1950s as studies of acute and chronic exposure, of somatic, genetic, and environmental effects, and of occupational health hazards for service members and health professionals, highlighted new concerns. Radioisotopes that were once viewed as “curative” were “increasingly viewed as contaminants, even carcinogens” (p. 147) by the 1960s. As experimental cancer therapies ultimately “proved overrated” (p. 156), radioisotopes came to be used increasingly in cancer research rather than cancer therapy. “Nuclear medicine,” Creager also notes, “emerged against a background of growing public anxiety—and scientific concern.” Finding a “medical-and civilian-dividend of an undeniably military infrastructure” (p. 332) is fascinating enough, but Creager also takes pains to point out the historical ironies that such “strong and often obscure connections between the military and civilian aspects of postwar uses of atomic energy” (p. 330) entailed. In a chapter on “Guinea Pigs,” Creager teases apart the complexities inherent a situation where “many of the leading institutions in the development of radioisotope studies and nuclear medicine were also involved in human radiation experiments for the AEC” (p. 343). In fact, she notes, the first use of the term “informed consent” appears in an AEC document, striking evidence of how “the most conscientious government oversight of human subjects existed for secret research oriented to military issues” (p. 401). Well into the postwar years, human subjects research reflected an enduring “legacy of military sponsorship and secret research” (p. 21). Creager’s inclusion of more than fifty images—from documentary photographs to political cartoons—to accompany her arguments is most effective. One image of a man rising from a wheelchair in front of a mushroom cloud is titled “Medical Dividend” (p. 144). A more effective visual accompaniment to her argument could scarcely be imagined. The book’s admirable and frequent use of direct quotation from historical actors is another of its great...
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May 8, 2020
Kamin J Johnson + 2
Open Access
