ABC Radio National’s Conversations recently ran a program where presenter Sarah Kanowski interviewed Dava Sobel, a biographer of scientists. Sobel’s most recent book, The Elements of Marie Curie: how the glow of radium lit a path for women in science, covers the life of Marie Curie. “Awesome” is a much overused word, but it is positively minimalist when applied to Curie.
It’s a terrific interview and the book sounds well worth reading.
But one shocker of a factual mistake stuck out like the Himalayas and demands a correction. Unfortunately, experience tells me that the ABC won’t issue one. Mistakes regarding anything associated with nuclear power, like radiation, seem immune to fact checking or corrections from the ABC.
The mistake concerns the “radium girls”. In 2025, we really should be called them the radium women. Here’s a photo of some of the over 3,000 people we are talking about … do they look like girls?
In 1911 Marie Curie won a Nobel Prize for discovering the elements radium and polonium. Both are radioactive and radium can be conveniently used to trigger other chemicals to glow in the dark. In our age of ubiquitous LEDs (light emitting diodes) and button batteries, it’s hard to imagine that getting things to glow in the dark used to be difficult. Radium was the miracle breakthrough of the day. By the late 1910s and 1920s plenty of companies were mixing up cocktails containing radium to paint watch faces and instrument displays.
This is where the women (and some men) come in. The men didn’t paint the watch faces, but did handle the pots of radium.
Sobel described how the women used to paint the faces of watches and other instruments. They would dip their brushes in the paint and then stick the brush in their mouth to form a fine point with their lips. Artists have been doing this for thousands of years. Back when there was lead in paint, the result was lead poisoning; aka painter’s madness.
So far so good. Sobel’s description of the activity was vivid.
Sobel’s grand fiction
But then she blew it; saying: “radium is very much like calcium in its chemistry so it would lodge in their bones, their jaws rotted and they died horrible painful early deaths.”. An interviewer with any understanding of cancer, let alone radiation, would have asked the question: “how many of them?” and “how fast?”. On the face of it, Sobel is implying all of them and quickly.
No such questions were asked and Sobel didn’t clarify.
Her description, taken at face value, is about as accurate as saying Australians put red and processed meat in their mouths, get bowel cancer and die a slow and painful death. Plenty of people know this to be true, but they also know it can take decades. The long latency means that few people (unfortunately) are too concerned; they are willing to risk it. Most people listening to Sobel would be surprised that radium also took decades; the longest latency being 60 years. They’d also be surprised at how few women died. Her misinformation is part of a long history of half truths and downright lies about radiation.
Let’s compare the two claims more carefully. Red and processed meat vs radium. Both are very loosely based on clear and unassailable facts, but both are also are utterly false and misleading.
Compare the pair
First some key facts.
About 1 in 16 Australians will get bowel cancer. But these days, many will survive long enough to die of something else. Some 30% will be dead within 5 years. And yes, there is strong evidence that red and processed meat cause the cancer (among other things).
About 1 in 40 of the radium women got bone cancer (and about 1 in 100 got an even rarer cancer in the head (not the brain)).
So the vast majority of radium women didn’t get bone cancer and die horrid deaths, just like the vast majority of Australians don’t get bowel cancer.
The percentage of the radium women getting bone cancer was about half that of Australians getting bowel cancer.
You may suggest that while people eat red and processed meat for decades, nobody painted those watch faces for decades. That’s true but irrelevant. Once in their bones, the radium emitted radiation into their bodies for as long as it remained there. Bone mineral turnover is very slow, with a half life of about 44 years.
So the radium women got doses of radiation to their bones every day for the rest of their lives; but mostly without any ill-effects.
Why is it that the overwhelming majority of the radium women didn’t get bone cancer? And why is it that so many red and processed meat eaters don’t get bowel cancer?
The key is in your genes and their ability to fix damage; DNA repair mechanisms. But back when the radium women were initially studied, nobody knew anything about DNA repair.
Your DNA is subject to massive rates of damage daily from normal metabolic processes compared to which radiation is a lightweight player, except at extraordinary doses. None of this makes sense without some numbers. No amount of trips to Europe to see where Marie Curie lived and worked can replace a solid understanding of the developments in the understanding of DNA that emerged more than 50 years after she died. You can’t understand why so many of the radium women lived long lives without understanding this stuff.
DNA damage and repair
The DNA molecule is two strands twisted about each other. Imagine one strand being cut. That should be easy to fix. But what if you cut both strands? For starters, they’ll drift apart.
These double stranded breaks (DSB) in DNA are buggers to fix but your cells have mechanisms evolved to handle the normal rate of daily breaks; about 50 per day in every cell in your body. The repairs are almost perfect. And if the repair fails, the cell will usually suicide, which is fine, because dead cells don’t cause cancer.
Researchers these days know plenty about the genes for DNA repair and the inherited defects that will increase your chances of bowel cancer.
Now for some radiation numbers. Radiation is measured in Grays or Sieverts. For many purposes the difference doesn’t matter. Get a 10 Gray dose during any day and you’ll almost certainly die.
The radium women who got bone cancer all got a radiation dose (over their lifetime) of over 10 Grays. But, of the 160 women getting over 10 Grays, only 46 got bone cancer and mostly they got it (as with bowel cancer) decades later. Of the 160, 26 got over 100 Grays but only 9 of these got bone cancer.
One women got her bone cancer over 60 years after her exposure.
DNA damage and cancer formation
The way it works is that DNA damage is caused by a burst of radiation from radium or some other carcinogenic process, like a gram of red and processed meat. There is no safe dose of either. Just like there is no safe distance you might walk outside you house without being hit by a car. But, of course, the more time you spend walking the more dangerous it is.
The DNA damage can be a mutation; which means damage that is passed on the subsequent cells by cell division and reproduction.
But that isn’t cancer … yet. Typically, you need a quite a few more mutations in that cell. A year later perhaps, there is a second mutation to that cell. And maybe 20 years later a third. Until eventually the cell becomes a cancer cell; or not. A few types of cancer involve a single mutation, but most need a cooperating gang of very specific mutations. The process usually takes decades.
Remember the double stranded DNA breaks mentioned above?
How much radiation would you need to produce a similar number of double strand breaks to the natural rate? Recall that this is natural rate is about 50 DSBs per cell per day.
The amount of radiation you’d need to produce 50 DSBs per cell per day has been measured and is about 1.5-2 Grays. That’s about 250,000 times the background radiation rate that you are exposed to unless you live in a naturally high radiation area of the planet.
So your cells have evolved to handle far more potent sources of damage than radiation at all but extraordinary levels. The damage from radium is actually far worse than the damage from other radiation sources, but that’s a level of detail too deep for this article.
Here’s some data from the radium women. Each black squares represent a women with bone cancer. The y-axis position of the square shows you the decades pre-cancer. The x-axis bands are dose ranges.
As you can see, nobody who received less than 10 Gray of radiation (over their lifetime) got bone cancer. Of the 160 women with such massive doses, 46 got bone cancer. The standard theory used in radiation safety industry predicts that ALL of these women would have got cancer. The standard theory (LNT) is wrong.
Wrong theories can be useful, but LNT’s only use is to make people unreasonably afraid of radiation. In Japan after the Fukushima meltdowns, people were thrown out of their homes and their lives massively disrupted despite no substantive risks from radiation. The anti-nuclear movement treats such people as collateral damage in its moral crusade against nuclear power.
What would Marie Curie say herself on the subject?
“Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
The way science should work is that data which is inconsistent with a theory causes the theory to be changed. Except that LNT and the entire edifice of radiation protection legislation serves a totally different purpose; to impede the development of nuclear power.
This claim shouldn’t be taken to imply that nuclear reactors don’t produce some critical and difficult radiation protection problems; they do. But the evacuation of the public at Fukushima was totally inconsistent with the very conservative International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) guidelines and should be regarded as a crime against humanity. One major purpose of any Government is to protect the population from raving nut cases, not cave into their demands.
Bowel cancer and genetics
The radium women mostly got their cancers a long time ago, before much was known about DNA repair and the genetics of cancer. Bowel cancer and the interaction with DNA damage from meat however, is under active study. For example, a 2024 study involving 76 researchers from over 50 institutions looked at the genes and red and processed meat intake of almost 70,000 people. The did, of course, find a dose response, the classic indicator of causality; meaning the more red and processed meat you eat the higher is the incidence of bowel cancer. They also identified some genetic variants which increase your risk. If you imagine DNA as a string of beads, then the researchers found locations where single changes made a clear and measurable difference to you cancer risk.
Perhaps somebody has enough stored material from the radium women to undertake similar research and work out what it was in the 46 women that prevented them from repairing the radium damage.
The biggest review of the scientific data contains the following summary:
“Given the number of people who acquired radium internally, it is remarkable how few suffered significant damage. To be sure, those who eventually developed radium-induced malignancies suffered severely. … However, the great majority of exposed individuals went through life with no recognizable consequences of their exposures. They lived as long as, and apparently in as good health as, their unexposed neighbors. This fact seems to have been little appreciated and seldom mentioned, but it may be the most important finding of the entire study.”
Fear mongering over radiation isn’t just intellectually lazy, sloppy and annoying, it can be literally deadly. Whether Sobel and Kanowski are victims or perpetrators isn’t possible for me to say. The “radium girls” is part of the anti-nuclear play book and the anti-nuclear movement is full of people who repeat bullshit without a moments thought.