"Radium Girls" and Stumbling Toward Dominion

Chernobyl.

Bophar, India.

These only begin the list of health and environmental disasters.
Thalidimide (see short video of a “thalidomide baby” who now plays
guitar professionally . . . with his toes. Please press "play" below.)




Radium.

When our school drama department recently presented “Radium Girls”, I
had no idea of this chapter of American history. In the mid 1920s, it was a miracle cure and Madame Curie was a celebrity. The dial painters of the U.S. Radium Corporation enjoyed neither health nor fame.



“Radium is one of the most dangerous substances known to man,” says Dr. Von Sochocy, a character in the play. But this was after he had founded and guided a successful enterprise that made luminous watch and clock dials, Von Sochocky then sold his Orange,NJ plant, but workers had already been tipping their radium-laden paintbrush bristles with their lips . . . and getting sick.

And dying. At the U.S. Radium Corporation, it was killing the workers who painted the watch dials.


The Love Canal.

Leaded paint.
Bysinosis (brown lung disease)
Leaded gasoline, something that concerned us personally here in the
developing world. Now it has been replaced with unleaded.

Madame Curie was said to have loved radium but it eventually killed her. She
evidently didn’t realize it had the power to kill her, just as the
character, Harriet Roeder, flippantly dismisses the radium sickness
deaths (as she takes a drag on a cigarette) with “science just wasn’t
as advanced, the way it is now.)

It is easy enough to adopt an attitude that science sufficiently
explains all, but God told Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden,
“Multiply and fill the earth and subdue it; . . . “

In our confidence in science on such controversies as embryo stem cell
research and the scare about global warming, what is our attitude? A
flippant arrogance that looks back on society’s many accomplishments
and advances? Or utmost dependence on our Creator?

Sometimes the scientific advance is a juggernaut, pushing to explore
every benefit the created universe offers. But then again, sometimes
too, it is a stumble.

graphic arts: R. Sams