How Louise Reiss Saved The World With Radioactive Baby Teeth
You've probably not given much thought to children's teeth since ... well, since you had them yourself as a child. And while those memories may whisk you away to a simpler time of being able to cash in on your body's discarded parts via an overnight pillow ATM, the reality of what's growing inside kids' skulls is more like the work of some Lovecraftian Reverse-Tooth Fairy.
Thomas Crenshaw / CC BY-SA 2.0
Some examples are Old Gods-level terrifying.
But you know what would make baby teeth even scarier? If they were radioactive. Well, the thing is, a lot of them used to be, and that’s the reason no US President has ever tried to create a nuclear lake in the shape of their own penis. I know those two things sound unrelated, but I promise it will all make sense soon, and it begins with Dr. Louise Marie Zibold Reiss.
Dr. Reiss was part of the Greater St. Louis Citizen's Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI) fighting to stop nuclear bombs from being detonated on US soil. And sure, today we know we can't just go around detonating nukes all willy nilly, but back then it sounded a little like trying to start a committee to stop leprechaun poaching – not everybody saw it as a serious problem.
By the 1950s, the United States and the Soviet Union had conducted hundreds of nuclear tests, with their primary discovery being that if you set off an atomic bomb, bad things happen— like the fallout of said tests being carried by wind around the rest of the country, from farmlands to cities and straight into the bodies of unsuspecting citizens. But since people weren't visibly affected by way of glow-in-the-dark organs or turning into actual X-Men, there wasn't widespread outcry against the testing.
Sure, there were protests, citizen committees, and petitions. But on the whole, this was an era of nuclear optimism, and to most people the environmental scientists sounded a lot like anti-5G activists do today. Something needed to be done to convince everyone that inhaling nuclear fallout wasn’t the best idea, and that’s what The Baby Tooth Survey was about.
Conducted by CNI with the help of Saint Louis University and the Washington University School of Dental Medicine, The Baby Tooth Survey was a way to test the effects of nuclear testing on ... well, you probably guessed. You see, one of the products of nuclear fission is strontium-90, a cancer-causing isotope that’s basically like radioactive calcium, but only because of how easily it gets absorbed into bones. So if American air really had become Hulk farts, it would show up in our skeletons. And the easiest way to check for bone radiation that didn't involve harvesting body parts from the recently deceased was to just wait for some testable fragments to fall out of the mouths of kids.
According to Barry Commoner, one of the founders of the survey, Dr. Reiss was critical to the success of the project. Together with her team, she visited hundreds of schools, churches, and youth groups, asking parents for tiny parts of their children. Understand that this was a tough sell from someone in the 50s who was wielding the mystical and possibly evil powers of science, but Dr. Reiss managed to pull it off by appealing to common folks' innate scientific curiosity.
Just kidding – she gave every parent who donated baby teeth a “I gave my tooth to science” commemorative badge.
Pixabay
The Tooth Fairy is the one to blame for creating this “teeth for valuables” expectation.
Dr. Reiss’s team collected and analyzed tens of thousands of baby teeth throughout the survey, which showed that children born after the nuclear tests had begun had as much as 100 times more strontium-90 in their teeth than kids born earlier. Americans collectively had so much radioactive material in their mouths that if this was a comic book, they would have been able to breathe Godzilla fire. But since this was real life, the results were terrible instead of badass.
In 1963, Dr. Reiss’s husband presented the findings to a Senate committee (because sexism), although President Kennedy did personally phone Dr. Reiss about the results. In the end, The Baby Tooth Survey convinced JFK to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the UK and Soviet Union, banning atmospheric nuclear tests. Because not even the most egomaniacal leader wants to be known as the guy who irradiated children.
But the study did something more than simply help limit nuclear tests – it essentially saved the world by ridding the era not only of nuclear optimism, but specifically of its poster boy: Project Plowshare.
Project Plowshare received its name from a Bible verse that reads, in part: “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,” an idea of repurposing weapons for peaceful or civilian goals. Except here the weapons were WMDs, so they were ... limited in their non-lethal applications. But the US government plowed ahead anyway (heh!), trying things like nuking a salt mine to try to produce electricity.
Scientists and engineers were imagining a future where nukes could be used to dig out something like the Panama Canal in a fraction of the time. They wanted to create lakes with atomic explosions— something the Soviets actually did— and one guy even jokingly suggested blasting a polar bear-shaped harbor into Alaska. Then someone else said, “I love it except for the bear part!” and actually put together a proposal for nuking the state.
The Baby Tooth Survey helped put a stop to these and presumably an infinite amount of other insane ideas. Project Plowshare did continue on for a few more years, but thanks to Dr. Reiss and her team's efforts, people eventually stopped suggesting the use of atomic weapons as construction equipment, perhaps saving all of us from a planet-blanketing nuclear fallout.
Now all we have to do is figure out how to warn future generations about all the nuclear waste we're leaving behind.
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