Description
Book SynopsisBefore the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many chemists, physicians, botanists, and geneticists believed that radium might hold the secret to life. This book recovers a forgotten history of the connections between radioactivity and the life sciences that existed long before the dawn of molecular biology.
Trade Review"Radium and the Secret of Life probes the experimental and metaphorical connections between transmutation and mutation. As that coupling makes clear, it was a book waiting to be written. Campos provides a deeply researched, engagingly written, and provocatively argued history of this potent conjunction and how it disintegrated so fully as to be nearly forgotten." (Angela N. H. Creager, author of Life Atomic)