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Those Dreadful Hammers
When I started graduate school in science journalism, my adviser insisted that I include history of science classes in my program. “No journalist really understands a subject unless she knows its...
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The Radium Girls
As we analyze and worry over radiation seeping from Japan’s earthquake-damaged nuclear plants, it seems a curiosity that less than a hundred years ago, many people still believed that radioactive...
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Life in the Undark
This is the second of a three-part “series” on the Radium Girls, the young workers who painted luminous watch faces during the 1920s – and unknowingly became some of the first human test subjects on...
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A Dazzle in the Bones
This is the last of a three-part “series” on the Radium Girls, the young workers who painted luminous watch faces during the 1920s – and unknowingly became some of the first human test subjects on the...
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The Protochemists Among Us
So, the term “chemist”? When did we first start using it? And does the label artificially separate scientists from the rest of us? After all, don’t all of us daily practice chemistry? In countless...
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At the Door of the Loony Gas Building
The only way to start this story is by opening a door – the door leading into the Loony Gas building. The workers at the Standard Oil Refinery in New Jersey, gave the building that name, waving goodbye...
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Of Dead Bodies and Dirty Streets
In the fall of 1924, five bodies from New Jersey were delivered to the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office. You might not expect that to cause the chief medical examiner to worry about the dirt...
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Arsenic and the Forgotten Serial Killer
Mary Ann Cotton (source: Wikipedia Common) Early this week, a British criminology professor wrote a slightly plaintive essay about the 19th century serial poisoner, Mary Ann Cotton. Why, he wondered,...
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Plumb crazy
The chemical symbol for lead is Pb, from the Latin word “plumbum” which refers to a malleable metal. And lead is that – soft, malleable, wonderfully conformable, metal of a hundred uses. Its presence –...
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Cough Syrup, Dead Children, and the Case for Regulation
Kathleen Hobson was eight years old when her mother unknowingly dosed her with poisonous cough syrup. She’d only taken a couple spoonfuls but when investigators came round, they still found nothing...
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