Introduction

Unfathomably rare and intensely powerful, glowing in the dark and utterly unaffected by any outside force of nature as it gave off rays of unprecedented energy, radium was perhaps the most wonderful and perplexing thing the modern world had ever seen—or had never seen, given that only the barest pinch of pure radium existed at the dawn of the twentieth century. The modern world had certainly heard about radium, however. Helping to overturn established ideas of atomic constitution and atomic behavior even as it gave birth to an immensely popular craze, radium challenged scientist and common man alike, and journalists scrambled to capture all its marvelous implications.

The eighty-eighth element in the periodic table was stunningly and starkly new. For melancholic man of letters Henry Adams, as for many others, the shock was indescribable: “Radium denied its God,” he remarked, “or, what was . . . the same thing, denied the truths of . . . Science. The force was wholly new.”1 William James compared the upset caused by the discovery of radium to something like his beginning to “utter piercing shrieks and act like a maniac on this platform” and the doubts this behavior would sow in the minds of his students.2 Adams, likewise, felt his “historical neck broken by the sudden irruption” of these forces that were both “anarchical” and “little short of parricidal in their wicked spirit towards science”—these rays were nothing like the wholesome, “harmless and beneficent” rays of the solar spectrum. Other phenomena could at least be measured—even “frozen air,” if only “somebody could invent a thermometer adequate to the purpose,” he said—but the new phenomena of X-rays and the radioactive properties of radium, the two of which seemed to be related in some as yet unknown way, brought about in Adams’s mind a new “supersensual world” where nothing could be measured except by the imperceptibles themselves.3 While the great mathematician Henri Poincaré had called radium a “great revolutionary,” for Adams it was simply a sign of “physics stark mad in metaphysics.”4

Depending on one’s cast of mind, the discovery of radium could be said to illustrate the dawning of “a new epoch in chemistry,” bringing investigators “nearer than ever before towards getting ‘a glimpse of the nature of things,’” as the Lancet reported in 1903, or to so challenge preconceived understandings of the world that it was useful for explaining the pragmatic meaning of truth, as James believed.5 Either way, one of the most striking features of those early years following the discovery of radium is the curious appearance of a metaphysics, and an attendant mode of metaphorical description, that suffused radioactivity with a peculiarly biological cast. Not only were radioactive phenomena characterized in quasi-biological ways from the earliest days, by their discoverers and by others, but radium itself—by far the most powerful and most popular of the radioactive elements—was often described as a “half-living” element in scientific and popular texts alike. Radium was sometimes even accorded vitalizing powers, an ascription that became part and parcel of the radium craze that swept the first decade of the twentieth century. While the earliest discoveries in radioactivity were immersed within rich sets of discourse that overdetermined radium’s living aura, the popular craze that followed radium’s discovery granted vitality and life a radioactive glow all its own.

Long before the hydrogen bomb indelibly associated radioactivity with death, many botanists and geneticists were eagerly remarking that radium held the key to the secret of life. No mere chunk of glowing earth, this most spectacular of elements was also, above all else, an ideal site for unexpected coincidences and fruitful confluences in the life sciences, for an overlapping of discourses and ontologies that persisted throughout the early twentieth century and proved as productive as it was provocative. Cross-fertilizing and recombining, these initially provocative connections between the radioactive and the living propagated over the decades, across disciplines, and between public and scientific discourses. These crossovers led to conceptual and experimental consequences and involved (at least in passing) many of the major biological questions of the day: the origin of life, the physiological effects of radiation, the nature of mutation, and the structure of the gene.

Emerging at a particular moment at the turn of the century and weaving together already-extant discursive strands and experimental traditions aimed at modifying and understanding life, this intersection between the physical and the biological—between the radioactive and the living—transmuted over the first half of the twentieth century, throwing off various new experimental systems and approaches. By critically engaging with the texts, narratives, and images generated both by scientists and by commentators of the day, I follow the varied and intertwining ways by which radium “came to life,” how it played a significant role in the history of biology in the early twentieth century, and, in particular, how it contributed in surprisingly revealing and novel ways to the history of genetics.

Although it emerged in the context of the radium craze at the dawn of the century, this distinctive and provocative overlapping of metaphor and metaphysics, of terminology and technique, and of the living, nonliving, and even half-living proved remarkably productive in experimental terms and ultimately led to key insights into the origin of life, the nature of mutation, and the structure of the gene. Four revealing case studies form the core of my analysis as I examine how radium served for successive biological experimenters as vitalizer, stimulant, mutagen, and analytic tool.

This history does more than cast the established narratives of classical and radiation genetics in an entirely new light. In telling the story of how radium remained an epistemic tool, even as it eventually ceased to be an experimental one, I recount in later chapters how this powerful reworking of radium’s role contributed to a crucial and widely recognized, but heretofore unanalyzed, shift in the meaning of mutation itself, from organism and chromosome to gene. Radium was thus not only a primary and vital part of the arsenal of early twentieth-century mutagens, but also played a constitutive role in the historical genetic “redefinition” of mutation, a redefinition that in turn, to date, has helped to obscure the central place of radium in the history of classical genetics.

Moreover, as the role of “atom of life” shifted from radium itself to microbes, mutant organisms, chromosomes, and finally genes, the trope of the “secret of life” moved ever inward. From the initial discovery of the new element in 1898 to the putative discovery of the “secret of life” with the elucidation of the structure of DNA in 1953—a midcentury moment by which the ties that had once bound metaphor and experimental practice together so tightly had decayed to mere discursive residues—this study traces the half-life of this transmuting connection between radium and life.

An introductory chapter sets the stage, finding the roots of this powerful association between radium and life in the earliest biological metaphors and metaphysics of early radioactivity research; in preexisting discursive traditions and popularization practices relating heat, light, electricity, thermodynamics, and notions of a “living atom” to life (all of which were easily subsumed under the new radioactive umbrella); in the popular radium craze of the first decade of the twentieth century; and in the aftermath of controversy regarding other types of rays supposedly produced by living things. Radium, in short order, became the living element: the element of choice not only for biological metaphors in a new realm of physics, but even for biological application.

Radium’s presence in biology was to prove as striking as it would later be subtle. The first case study (chap. 2) examines the early apotheosis of these connections between radium and life in claims emanating from the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge that life had been produced from radium. John Butler Burke’s controversial work, which comprised some of the first experimental work on the origin of life, wove radium into the history of life on the primordial earth and proved to be a key reworking of the history of spontaneous generation. In a series of sensational experiments that involved plunking a bit of radium into a petri dish of beef bouillon, Burke claimed to have produced cellular forms that were, if not quite living, at least lifelike. Appearing to grow and subdivide over a span of days and demonstrating other lifelike phenomena at the cytological level, they nevertheless decayed in sunlight and dissolved in water. Half radium and half microbe, these “radiobes” proved both immensely popular and immensely controversial. In that chapter I examine the ways in which Burke’s work not only proved pivotal in the redefining of “spontaneous generation” in the Anglophone context, but also served as a founding moment in the history of experimental research into the origin of life that has to date been routinely overlooked. Burke’s work explicitly linked the discourses of cosmic and organic evolution with concrete experiment for the first time with an element that appeared to bridge the two realms. Revealed at the height of the radium craze, Burke’s findings also demonstrated the rapid sedimentation of the vitalistic metaphors surrounding radium. Not only reminiscent of life, radium itself, quite literally, vitalized matter.

Burke’s spectacular claims offset the other, more respectable uses to which radium was also put in understanding basic biological phenomena. The second study (chap. 3) examines how botanical investigators in the early twentieth century used radium to induce or control biological evolution. Explicitly linking the transmutation of the physical species of radium with the transmutation of biological species, Daniel Trembly MacDougal and Charles Stuart Gager of the New York Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, respectively, independently irradiated plants with radium in an attempt to study its physiological effects as well as to provide experimental confirmation of Hugo de Vries’s new “mutation theory.” One of the dominant evolutionary accounts of the early twentieth century, de Vries’s theory was widely seen as providing a mechanism for speciation where Darwinism had failed, and de Vries himself had suggested that radium and “the rays of Röntgen” might be useful in inducing mutations—a suggestion that was rapidly taken up. Metaphors of radium’s powers were put to the experimental test at this moment and passed. Even those plants that happened not to mutate were seen to have been “stimulated” by radium, which “accelerated” their growth toward an “early senescence.” What in a later nuclear age would be a clear sign of damage was—in the ongoing dynamic interplay between popular and scientific understandings of radium’s biological effects—clear proof of radium’s relevance in the novel early twentieth-century quest to induce and ultimately control evolution.

The third case (chap. 4) turns to further attempts along these lines made by two of the leaders of classical genetics: the Columbia University geneticist T. H. Morgan, best known for his work on the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster, and Cold Spring Harbor investigator Albert F. Blakeslee, who would later become the second director of the Station for Experimental Evolution. Morgan focused on animals and on the use of radium in producing phenotypic mutants that could be attributed to mutant genes; Blakeslee, by contrast, focused on plants and on the use of radium in producing phenotypic mutants that were demonstrably shown to be chromosomal, and not simply genic, in nature. Morgan had turned to radium after having tried a number of other unsuccessful techniques to induce mutations in Drosophila, and he succeeded in his quest at nearly the same time as his friend and colleague, Jacques Loeb. Though Morgan later disowned his own claim that radium had been responsible for the mutants he discovered, his discounting of Loeb’s mutants—and Loeb’s dismissal of Morgan’s findings in turn—presents a curious state of affairs that reveals how shifting ideas about radium’s effects were inextricably related to ongoing shifts in the understandings of the artificial induction of “mutation.” Blakeslee’s experiments with radium, for example, established to widespread acclaim that new species could be produced by what he called chromosomal mutation (or “chromosomation”), and that this was as important a mechanism of evolutionary change as the genic mutation with which the drosophilists were more familiar. Blakeslee’s work thus provides a key instance of the use of radium not only in attempts to confirm de Vries’s mutation theory, but also to investigate in deeper cytological detail the ways in which induced mutation could occur in a suitable model organism. Although heretofore relatively unstudied by historians of genetics, Blakeslee’s work shows how radium was instrumental not only in attempts to understand the physical nature of mutation, but also in what his contemporaries called “experimental evolution” or “evolutionary engineering” (Blakeslee himself would later refer to the emergence of a “genetics engineer”).6 The work of both Morgan and Blakeslee shows that radium remained a central experimental mutagen even as its precise role in inducing mutations—once so clear—came under increasing scrutiny as geneticists began their radium-inspired work on “artificial transmutation.”

The fourth case (chap. 5) focuses on Hermann J. Muller’s legendary “artificial transmutation of the gene,” which has frequently been presented as the origin of the modern study of induced mutation. What is less well known is that Muller came to his researches through his fascination with the powerful metaphorical and metaphysical connections between radium and life that he encountered as a young man. Muller ultimately reworked these tropes to suggest that mutation and transmutation were fundamentally connected and that radium could be useful to produce not only phenotypic and chromosomal mutants, but mutations at the most fundamental level of all: the genes. In seeking to more precisely characterize the nature of mutation in Drosophila, Muller began with radium before shifting to X-rays as his mutagen of choice by the late 1920s. This shift was due to technological advances in the delivery of X-rays—the two radiations were increasingly being equated in their physical nature and in many of their biological effects by the mid-1920s—as well as to contingent circumstance, as Muller’s vial of radium broke during a hot train ride through Texas in 1924. Muller’s landmark 1927 announcement of his spectacularly precise and detailed new methods for the “artificial transmutation of the gene” ultimately earned him the Nobel Prize.

Radium was thus not only a primary and vital part of the arsenal of mutagens used by early twentieth-century researchers—from MacDougal, Gager, and Morgan to Blakeslee and Muller—but also played a constitutive role in the crucial and widely recognized, but heretofore unanalyzed, historical redefinition of “mutation.” In his shift from radium to X-rays, and from transmission genetics to transmutation genetics, Muller ended up radically recharacterizing what had been a pluralistic set of understandings of “mutation” as a fundamentally genic phenomenon. This shift in the meaning and referent of “mutant” and “mutation”—from organism to chromosome to gene—not only marked the beginning of the end of a multilevel, nuanced understanding of mutation and its replacement by a fundamentally genic theory of mutation, but also ended up distancing radium from life in experimental terms. As the γ-rays of radium were increasingly understood by biologists to have the same effects as X-rays (physicists had long since equated the two), Muller’s focus on the gene as the proper target for mutation and the X-ray as the proper tool for inducing it became a sentiment and a practice more widely shared. By the 1930s, X-ray-based “radiation genetics” had largely, but not entirely, replaced the use of radium in the study of the structure of the hereditary elements, and a larger “radiobiology” was still to come. This turn away from radium and toward other sources of ionizing radiation contributed in turn to the forgetting of the important role of radium in the successful earlier work of Gager, Blakeslee, and various others—work that Muller had encountered and studied on the path to his own remarkable experiments. Such was the aftermath of using radium as an epistemic, and not only an experimental, tool.

The fact that Muller’s radioactive metaphysics of the gene, inherited from this earlier work with radium, could contribute to this process of historical rewriting shows further ways in which the powerful association between radium and life continued to transmute over the course of the first half of the twentieth century. The case of Muller is thus neither the zenith nor the end of the tale, but a fascinating inflection point: the collective forgetting of radium’s early role is a consequence of the same processes of interpretation that permitted radium and life to become so closely associated in the first place. It is also reflective of the same historical processes that enable us to find and to trace this powerful association over the decades of this story. There is thus more to this account than the mere uncovering of the many and varied transmutations and disintegrations of the long-standing and powerful association between radium and life, or a series of disconnected musings on remarkable metaphors in a particular corner of biology.7 In fact, studying the ongoing transmutations of this powerful association between radium and life across experimental systems, historical actors, and decades can reveal as much about the nature of history as about heredity.

This book is therefore structured to be read at two levels. At one level, it is a series of straightforward case studies on the applications of radium in biology—how and why these applications came to be, and how they were eventually lost to historical memory, as just described. These fascinating stories about radium—a kind of “prehistory of radiobiology”—not only uncover heretofore unknown but important dimensions of radium’s life in biology, but also help to revise canonical moments in the early history of genetics. But at another level, the book is also a novel experiment in historiographical form in that it seeks to treat “radium” not only as the subject of the book and as an object that life scientists discussed and worked with, but also as the narrative conceit and immanent analytic for the book as a whole. In a manner broadly analogous to the ways in which the properties of radium inspired, structured, and sometimes disrupted the experiments of early physicists, botanists, and geneticists, I hope to reveal how reflexively taking “radium” seriously as an immanent analytic—tracing key moments of transmutation in the long half-life of radium’s association with life—can inspire, structure, and ultimately challenge a historical argument through dynamics of transmutation and decay similar to those that were at work for the historical actors themselves. Their struggles with the intersection of radium-based radioactive discourse and experimentation are not fundamentally different from those encountered by the historian seeking to narrate the half-life of such a connection.

And so a word about half-lives. Radium and the Secret of Life is thus also an exploration of how to write about the intersection of the worlds of the radioactive and the living in the first half of the twentieth century without relying on all-too-familiar biographical tropes and metaphors such as the “life and death” of an element. Splitting the difference, the trope of the half-life serves as a narrative tool that suggests what it might mean for radium to serve as an immanent analytic in a historical account. Radium and life were powerfully and closely associated with each other as early as 1904, both in the public imagination and in scientific terminology and experimentation. How far did this association extend, and how long did it last? It began with a sharp initiatory moment (which was itself a perpetuation of and refraction of earlier entities and analogies) and has since intermittently decayed toward—but has never quite reached—a leaden state of complete dissociation. By tracing this asymptotic process of decay, and in ultimately coming to a point in the Conclusion where it is no longer clear whether the historical evidence speaks to a still-extant connection between radium and life, I hope to explore the possibility of a more consciously reflexive history—one in which the radiant narrative itself comes to test the limits of evidence and argument.8

In the final chapter (chap. 6), therefore, I explore the afterlife and persistence of radioactive residues in Muller’s later work, in that of his contemporaries, and in the larger context of the study of heredity in the 1930s and 1940s. In these cases it becomes increasingly less clear whether there is any legitimate connection to be drawn to these further transmutations, decays, and disintegrations of what were once powerful associations between radium and life. In recounting this history, with its countless possible historical residues, Radium and the Secret of Life thereby challenges the very idea of any neat historical narrative of the “life and death” of radium’s role in biology. In a theoretical coda, I suggest that this is what a hermeneutic of transmutation, seriously attempting to deploy “radium” as an epistemic tool for the historian as much as it was for the scientist, might look like in the form of historical narration. In short, as the experimental productivity of the once all-powerful metaphorical and metaphysical association between radium and life slowly decayed to trace residues (and tracers) in a generalized background of radiobiology, the once-pronounced clicking of the Geiger counter of historical narrative slowly merges into noise.

Throughout this study, I therefore consciously draw on Hans-Jörg Rheinberger’s treatment of the historial and what he has called the “temporal structure of the production of a trace.”9 In his masterful empirical and theoretical analysis of “experimental systems,” Rheinberger traced the emergence into scientific reality of “epistemic things” from the articulation and composition of “traces.”10 The traces in the story of radium and the secret of life, however, are inverted—they do not lead up to an epistemic thing, but rather away from a powerful originary moment when radium and life were clearly and commonly associated, when the secret of life clearly had something to do with radium. And so, after tracing a path from radium and its intersections with the spontaneous generation of life (Burke) to the cell (MacDougal) to the chromosome (Blakeslee) and to the gene (Muller), by way of a theoretical coda, I explore how, as discursive tropes and material agents alike continued to transition from radium to other sources of ionizing radiation, this initially powerful association of radium and life continued to disintegrate. Initially so rich with metaphor and metaphysical association, the connection between radium and life bifurcated into increasingly instrumentalized or metaphorical traces such that only distant but tantalizing echoes of its power remained. Just as investigators and commentators at the turn of the century had once held that the discovery of radioactivity entailed the unveiling of the “secret of matter,” the ascription of the “secret of life” to the structure of DNA upon its discovery in 1953 can be viewed as one of many remaining radioactive residues in the midcentury disarticulation of radium and life some fifty years after their first powerful association—a well-known and convenient ending place for a story that, in approaching an asymptote, otherwise has no easy and neat narrative ending.

Interlinking metaphors and metaphysics, preexisting discourses and novel experimental ontologies, this story, then, in more ways than one, is the story of how radium came to life—and of how life came to radium. The element of choice for bringing together the realms of the radioactive and the living, radium was the atom of life and yet contained within itself the seeds of its own decay. This study thus seeks to reveal the changing particulars of this powerful association between radium and life over the decades and across experimental systems in order to illustrate how, as experimental productivity eventually outpaced metaphorical and discursive resonance, an initially unified coherence between “radium” and “life” was lost. Interacting with dominant conceptual frameworks, technological realities, and living organisms as this association generated a series of energetic and ever more productive experimental approaches, this initially powerful resonance between radium and life decayed to trace residues in a generalized background of radiobiology. Time after time, as the first half of the twentieth century unfolded, this nexus between radium and life—in a variety of directions and manners—transmuted.