The Many Facets of X-rays
At school, they
teach X-rays as part of physics. Which is why I found Siddhartha Mukherjee’s
chapter on X -rays in The
Emperor of All Maladies fascinating.
Röntgen discovered
X -rays accidentally in 1895. Excited by his discovery, he then pulled his wife
Anna to the lab and placed her hand between the source of the radiation and a
photographic plate. Voila! The world had its first X -ray, a pic of Anna’s
hand, er, bones. Shocked, she said:
“I have seen my death.”
Today, of course,
X-rays are so common as exemplified by my daughter’s reaction to seeing an
X-ray of her hand: she started (and soon gave up) counting the bones in her
hand!
The discovery set
off other physicists in the quest for other sources of X-rays, Madame Curie
being the most famous among them. She found radium, an element that radiated so
much energy that it glowed in the dark. Unfortunately for Curie, it turned out
the amount of energy being radiated from different elements could be immensely
different. Like the difference between good for taking an X-ray v/s causing
cancer.
But right from the
time of its discovery, cancer researchers realized that X-rays tends to “preferentially
kill the most rapidly proliferating cells in the body, cells in the skin,
nails, gums, and blood”, writes Mukherjee. In fact, within a year of its
discovery, in 1896, Emil Grubbe used X-rays to try and treat a woman with
breast cancer. Doctors found that such treatment worked sometimes.
“Radiation therapy catapulted cancer
medicine into its atomic age.”
In the 1910’s, a
company called US Radium began to mix radium with paint to produce something
they called Undark. It was used to coat clock dials, to produce a
glow-in-the-dark effect. Workers didn’t know the dangers and used to “lick the
brushes with their tongues to produce sharp lettering on watches”. A decade
later, the effects began to show up. In some cases, it was horrifying:
“Some women, tested with radioactivity
counters, were found to be glowing with radioactivity.”
5 of those women
eventually sued the company. The media dubbed them by a name that is famous
even today: “Radium Girls”.
Useful, harmful,
treatment: turns out X-ray was all of those things.
Informative on X rays, highlighting bits of history, usages both good, bad and silly!
ReplyDeleteA couple of more bits can be added now to it (can't stop myself, the subject being physics!
1) Ridiculously, in the beginning people protested that X rays are 'immoral' since they expose women. Ignorantly, they had imagined that X Rays would selectively pass through clothes but render naked photos of clothed women to the delight of voyeurs! :-) This info initially surprised me because I had imagined that Europeans had a different attitude. But then it was the beginning of 20th Century. People endorsed Victorian morality, I think. [I am inclined to believe that some Indians are very Victorian even now!]
2) This blog covers X ray applications that are directly connected to human beings. In industry, the most important application is possibly the X ray inspection of welded joints. X rays would expose every defective welding. It is a boon. We can't allow defects on any account, since failed pipe/vessel joints in a running plant might prove catastrophic.
3) This one is only for physics enthusiasts,not lay persons: X rays are extraordinary high frequency electromagnetic waves. Even then, they can be produced artificially while they are also natural emissions of some radioactive atoms. Now comes the challenger. Still higher frequency waves are called Gamma rays. They too behave like X rays in the sense they pass through most matter. They are more energetic than X rays of course, so even more dangerous. That apart, there is this twist: so far gamma rays are not artificially produced. Whenever used, we use only the basic radioactive atoms emitting these rays!