Acknowledgments
Researching and writing a book whose recurrent theme is that of the half-life accurately suggests that my gratitude knows no definite end. Primary thanks go to my intellectual mentors Mario Biagioli and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger for inspiring me with their scholarship and for guiding me from afar. Gratitude is due as well to Stephen Greenblatt for his provocative injunction to “find a resonant text!” which led me to stumble onto those first few passages relating radium to life in exceedingly curious ways many years ago. Many transmutations later, I see now how I have somehow arrived nearer the secret—if not yet the meaning—of life.
There is no warmer community of scholars than historians of biology, and my sincerest gratitude goes to Garland Allen, Peder Anker, Robert Brain, Soraya de Chadarevian, Nathaniel Comfort, Helen Curry, William deJong-Lambert, Evelyn Fox Keller, Dan Kevles, Barbara Kimmelman, Kim Kleinman, Sharon Kingsland, Robert Kohler, Matt Lavine, Susan Lindee, Elisabeth Lloyd, Jane Maienschein, Erika Milam, Staffan Müller-Wille, Lisa Onaga, Diane Paul, Karen Rader, Joanna Radin, Marsha Richmond, Neeraja Sankaran, Alexander Schwerin, Betty Smocovitis, Jim Strick, William Summers, and Mary Terrall, among many others. I would especially like to thank Angela Creager, who shares my passion for the life atomic. I am also grateful for wisdom from Gillian Beer, David Bloor, Sydney Brenner, I. B. Cohen, Diane Destiny, John T. Edsall, Donald H. Fleming, Richard C. Lewontin, Everett I. Mendelsohn, and John Stilgoe. I am deeply grateful to Karen Merikangas Darling and the University of Chicago Press, to my copyeditor Norma Sims Roche, and to three anonymous reviewers for their keen comments and queries.
This work would not have been possible without the support of the many caretakers of our cultural and scientific past. I am deeply indebted to the librarians, archivists, and assistants who have made the archival research on which this project depends both possible and thoroughly enjoyable: Rob Cox, Roy Goodman, Charles Greifenstein and Valerie-Anne Lutz at the American Philosophical Society; Mae Pan and Kathy Crosby at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden; Shelley Erwin and Loma Karklins at the California Institute of Technology; Clare Clark, John Zarrillo, Judy Wieber, and Mila Pollock at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library and Archives; and the hardworking staff of the Library of Congress, the University of Missouri at Columbia, and the Lilly Library of Indiana University. I would also like to thank each of these archives for their permission to quote from documents in their care and in some instances to reproduce photographs from their collections. In addition, I would like to express my gratitude to Fred Burchsted and the staff of Widener Library, the Ernst Mayr Library, and the library of the Harvard Herbaria for their unfailing help in tracking down sometimes difficult-to-locate materials. Thanks as well to Patrick McDermott, Paul Frame, Amy Viars, Joel Lubenau, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and the University of Texas for locating and providing images, and to Eileen Price, pictorial archivist of the University of New Mexico, for help with securing reproductions. Just before this book went into production I had the serendipitous pleasure of meeting Helen Muller, whom I am delighted to have as a colleague at the University of New Mexico, and to whom I am indebted for her permission to quote from her father’s papers and to reproduce images in her care.
Early portions of this book have appeared in print as “The Birth of Living Radium,” Representations 97 (2006): 1–27, and I gratefully acknowledge the University of California for permitting republication here. Financial assistance has been scarcer than radium, but some small support was provided by Harvard University, the National Science Foundation, the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Mel and Rita Wallerstein, and the American Philosophical Society.
On a more personal note, a shout-out goes to Glenn Adelson, who is everything a teacher and an intellectual role model should be; Diana Eck, Dorothy Austin, Tom Batchelder, Beth Terry, and my fellow tutors of Lowell House, who made our great House my beloved home “from the age that is past, / To the age that is waiting before.” My gratitude as well to Livingston Taylor and to Kim and Karen Serota for unparalleled writing and revising retreats on Martha’s Vineyard and in Scottsdale, respectively. And unanticipated acknowledgment even to those sun-dewed lilies amid thorny roses and burnt stones who drew me from green-walled wise books and readied me to head west into the high desert most radiant and fair.
Heaps of gratitude most deservingly go to my parents, Therese and Carlos; my sister Ana and her husband Dave; and to my extended family of friends past and present, whose support at various points over the past decade has stood me in good stead: Theresa Choe, Erika Evasdottir, Jamie Jones, Matthew L. Jones, Elizabeth Lee, Johannes Lenz, Heather Lynch, David Munns, Carolyn Parrott, Aaron Pedinotti, David Pollack, Tonya Putnam, Anthony Sagnella, Anna Skubikowski, Cheoma and Derek Smith, Mark Solovey, Benjamin Tittmann, Lisa Vogt, Tina Warinner, Audra Wolfe, and Elizabeth Zacharias. I am most especially indebted to Marga Vicedo and Colin Milburn for untold aid, and to KC, who makes me glow. To each of you, thank you, and may you all find the book as stimulating to read as I have found it stimulating to write.
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This book is dedicated to Lily Kay, whom I met only briefly many years ago, but whose magisterial work in the history of biology has been a constant stimulus to my own. She once asked about the history of the “secret of life.” I hope here to have honored both her query and her memory.