Half Lives

Lucy Jane Santos presents the surprising history of radium in everyday life.

With verve and vivacity, Lucy Jane Santos conducts her readers on a unique tour of the twentieth century's most significant scientific discovery. Before the R-word threatened destruction, it offered hope for the future -- teeth would glow white, cocktails would shine in the dark and cancer would be vanquished. This evocative account puts people and their emotions centre-stage of science's past.

Half Lives shines a light on the shocking history of the world's toxic love affair with a deadly substance, radium. Unnerving, fascinating, informative and truly frightening.

In Half Lives , Lucy Santos transports us back to a time when consumers wondered whether mixing radium into chicken feed might result in eggs that could hard-boil themselves; when diners cheerfully drank radioactive cocktails that glowed in the dark; and when people used toothpaste containing lethal thorium oxide in the pursuit of healthy gums. Santos unpicks fact from fiction and exhibits a masterful grasp of a complex area of science history that is so often mistold. Half Lives is a delightfully disturbing book that reminds us all of the age-old Latin maxim, 'caveat emptor.'

There was a time when radioactivity seemed to promise the future. It was the stuff that twentieth-century dreams were made of, before those dreams turned sour. This marvellous book explores the ways radioactivity stood for a better future, worked its way into money-making schemes of all kinds and offered hope to saints and charlatans. By doing all that - and doing it so well - it also offers a cautionary tale about the dangers of putting too much faith in simple technological solutions to all our problems.

A little gem of a book

Fascinating and well told

Truly mind-boggling ... I became so engrossed I read most of it in one sitting

An engaging and definitive history

With wit and empathy, Santos tells the story of the entrepreneurs and consumers in radium's history who have until now been considered quacks, or fools, or both

Lucy Jane Santos, author of Half Lives: The Unlikely History of Radium and Chain Reactions: A Hopeful History of Uranium , is an expert in the history of the twentieth-century with a particular interest in the cultural history of all things nuclear. She is the Executive Secretary of the British Society for the History of Science. Lucy lives in England.