The Best Australian Science Writing 2013

by Jane McCredie

  Radioactive cigarettes: X-ray inhale

  Karl Kruszelnicki

  When I was a medical doctor in the hospital system, every now and then I needed to order chest X-rays for patients who were cigarette smokers. Quite often, they would (correctly) get nervous about the potential radiation damage from a chest X-ray. Yet when I told them that two packets of cigarettes gave them about the same radiation dose as a chest X-ray, they just would not believe me.

  This raises two questions. First, how did cigarettes get radioactive? And second, why didn’t they believe me?

  Worldwide, we humans smoke about six trillion cigarettes each year – enough to make a chain that would easily reach from the Earth to the Sun, and back, and then do the whole trip again, just for good measure. By the year 2020, cigarettes will be killing about 10 million people each year. They already knocked off 100 million people in the 20th century, and if things don’t change they could kill one billion in the 21st century. Cigarette smoke is loaded with various chemicals that are well known to cause cancer. It’s estimated that the radiation dose from the radioactive metal Polonium-210 (Po-210) in cigarettes accounts for about 2 per cent of cigarette-related deaths. That accounts for several thousand deaths each year in the USA alone.

  Polonium-210 is extremely toxic – about 250 million times more toxic than cyanide.

  Po-210 is so radioactive that it excites the surrounding air, giving off an unearthly blue glow. Weight for weight, it emits 4500 times as many alpha particles as does radium – which is notorious for being incredibly radioactive and dangerous. A single gram of Po-210 (a cube measuring about 5 millimetres on each side) generates more heat than an old-fashioned 100-watt incandescent light bulb. That is a huge amount of power. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko became the first person confirmed as dying from acute Po-210 Radiation Syndrome. He had previously been an officer in the Russian KGB. After accusing his superiors of ordering the assassination of the Russian billionaire Boris Berezovsky, he escaped prosecution in Russia and was granted political asylum in the United Kingdom. In a London restaurant, he was somehow given about 10 micrograms of Po-210 – roughly 200 times more than was needed to kill him.

  Po-210 is always present whenever you have uranium. Developed countries use fertiliser that is manufactured from apatite rock, and this rock naturally contains uranium. The uranium decays to radioactive Po-210, which enters the tobacco plant through both the leaves and roots.

  When a cigarette burns, it reaches temperatures of 600–800° Celsius – much hotter than the melting point of Po-210. As a result, Po-210 becomes airborne very easily. The microscopic droplets of liquefied Po-210 stick to tiny particles in the cigarette smoke. As this smoke is sucked into your lungs, the particles (carrying their toxic Po-210) then tend to land at ‘bifurcations’ – locations in your airways and lungs where one pipe splits into two pipes. Po-210 is intensely radioactive, and sprays alpha particles into the surrounding tissues. These alpha particles have enough energy to cause mutations and cancers. Most people would definitely be worried if you suggested that they should have a chest X-ray every day for the rest of their lives. But some of these people quite happily smoke – sometimes up to two packets of cigarettes every day.

  It was first discovered that cigarettes contained radioactive polonium about half a century ago. So how come it’s not general public knowledge? The answer is simple: Big Tobacco is excellent at cover-ups. These companies realised that there was radioactive Po-210 in tobacco and did their own internal, and very secret, research program. They even came up with ways to drastically reduce the amount of Po-210 in cigarette smoke. But there was no money in it. One notorious tobacco company memo about radioactive polonium read, ‘removal of these materials would have no commercial advantage’.

  They also didn’t want any bad publicity. By the early 1960s, it had already been scientifically proven that smoking was the principal cause of lung cancer. However, Big Tobacco played down the scientific truth for several decades. At the Philip Morris tobacco company, a scientist wrote in a memo to his boss, regarding research on Po-210, ‘it has the potential of waking a sleeping giant. The subject is rumbling […] and I doubt we should provide facts’. Big Tobacco’s internal research showed that Po-210 was definitely harmful. But a 1982 internal Philip Morris document advised that as long as they kept their internal research secret, they could maintain that any suggestion of a link between Po-210 and lung cancers was ‘spurious and unsubstantiated’. Big Tobacco companies had yet another reason for not publishing their research. Their infamous motto, as observed by a tobacco company executive in 1969, was (and still is) ‘Doubt Is Our Product’. They used any tiny variation in the research to support the misleading claim that even the experts didn’t really agree that smoking was harmful. For example, suppose that Scientist A said that the link between smoking and lung cancer was 99 per cent certain, but Scientist B said it was 98 per cent. Big Tobacco would claim that even the scientists could not agree – and, therefore, how could anyone believe there was a link between smoking and lung cancer? Big Tobacco plays the same deadly game today. Perhaps it’s time Big Tobacco X-rayed their own internal research, so they can see through their own smoke screen.

  Drug habits

  Vested interests

  Martyrs to Gondwanaland: The cost of scientific exploration

  Chris Turney

  Something hidden. Go and find it. Go and look behind the

  Ranges –

  Something lost behind the Ranges. Lost and waiting for you.

  Go!

  – Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

  On 11 February 1913 England woke to the Daily Mail headline ‘Death of Captain Scott. Lost with four comrades. The Pole reached. Disaster on the return’. Just a day before, the press had reported that the British Antarctic expedition leader was back in New Zealand after succeeding in his goal to reach the South Geographic Pole; the Royal Geographical Society had even prepared a telegram congratulating him on his success. The palpable sense of anticipation and excitement now turned to despondence.

  A few days later a hastily organised memorial service was held in St Paul’s Cathedral, London. The numbers attending were staggering, exceeding those at the service for the 1500 lives lost on the Titanic in the same year. ‘The presence of the king’, The Times declared, ‘conveyed a symbolism without which any ceremony expressive of national sentiment would have been inadequate’. The Empire grieved.

  The details of what had happened in Antarctica appeared contradictory. The five men had last been seen heading confidently towards the Pole. They were well provisioned, and fit and strong. What had happened did not make sense – but the latest reports from Antarctica had a frightening ring of truth.

  These accounts described a team returning in deteriorating weather conditions, the likes of which had never been seen before. Pushing on in the bitter cold the expedition had continued its scientific program, making observations and collecting geological samples as it travelled back to the Cape Evans base. And yet the journey proved fatal.

  Petty Officer Edgar Evans (not to be confused with Scott’s deputy, Teddy Evans) was the first to die, apparently from the effects of concussion at the base of the Beardmore Glacier. Later, suffering from frostbite and exhaustion, and recognising his ever-slowing pace was threatening the others, Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates famously walked out into a blizzard with the words, ‘I am just going outside and may be some time’. Struggling forward with limited food and fuel, in plummeting temperatures, the remaining three men continued their trek to base.

  In late March 1912 a nine-day blizzard pinned down Scott, Dr Edward Wilson and Henry ‘Birdie’ Bowers in their tent. There would be no escape. All three wrote messages for loved ones until the end, which came sometime around 29 March. Scott’s diary reads:

  Every day we have been ready to start for our depot 11 miles away, but outside the door of the tent it remains a scene of whirling drift. I do not think we can hope for any better
things now we are getting weaker, of course, and the end cannot be far. It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more. R. Scott. For God’s sake look after our people.

  They died disappointed men, 150 days out from base and a mere 18 kilometres from salvation at One Ton Depot.

  In his ‘Message to the Public’, Scott wrote one of the finest short pieces of English prose:

  We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence, determined still to do our best to the last. But if we have been willing to give our lives to this enterprise, which is for the honour of our country, I appeal to our countrymen to see that those who depend on us are properly cared for. Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale, but surely, surely, a great rich country like ours will see that those who are dependent on us are properly cared for.

  Scott wrote to his ‘wife’ – a word he later struck out and changed to ‘widow’ – and said of their two-year-old son and future conservationist, Peter: ‘Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games’.

  On 12 November a search party from Cape Evans came across the frozen remains of the three men. Apsley Cherry-Garrard later wrote, ‘We have found them – to say it has been a ghastly day cannot express it – it is too bad for words.’ But Cherry-Garrard was amazed:

  We have everything – records, diaries, etc. They have among other things several rolls of photographs, a meteorological log kept up to 13 March, considering all things, a great many geological samples. And they have stuck to everything. It is magnificent that men in such case should go on pulling everything that they have died to gain.

  With the papers and samples collected, the tent was collapsed over the men and, after a failed search for Oates’s body, the search team returned to base.

  Scott’s death with his men was a defining moment early in the 20th century, not least for those connected to Antarctic exploration. Polar veteran Sir Clements Markham eulogised in his diary:

  There has passed away, if it is really true, a very exceptionally noble Englishman. What struck me most was his chivalrous generosity in dealing with contemptible self-seekers such as Shackleton and Amundsen. Very rarely have so many great qualities been combined in one man. Perhaps the greatest was that which won him the love of all who served under him.

  Overseas, the shock was no less. Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen was quoted as saying, on hearing the news, ‘horrible, horrible’; while Count Okuma, public champion of the Japanese Antarctic expedition, wrote, ‘Scott rests forever in that frozen realm, and his great spirit watches for all eternity over the Antarctic’s icy wastes’.

  The president of the Royal Geographical Society, Lord Curzon, reflected:

  Arm-chair geographers were sometimes disposed to complain that the days of adventure and risk in exploration were over. The last year gave the melancholy lie to such fireside fallacies. The toll of human life was still demanded, and was still cheerfully paid. Should the day ever arise when it was not, then indeed might geographical societies shut their doors and hand over their work to an educational bureau of the State.

  The loss of life counted for something.

  * * * * *

  In 1912, five separate teams representing the old and new world had been south in a scientific exploration beyond the edge of the known world. Their discoveries not only enthralled the world, but changed our understanding of the planet forever. Inevitably more questions were raised than answered. One of the major conundrums was the presence of coal near the South Geographic Pole: how did vestiges of ancient forests come to be found so far south? As Australian Antarctic veteran and scientist Sir Edgeworth David remarked, ‘We are thus confronted with the extraordinary problem of trees, probably coniferous, flourishing within 5 degrees of the South Pole itself in a zone which is now, in winter-time, more or less in complete darkness for five months in the year’.

  Prophetically, David asked:

  Could this coal-flora have flourished, even under warmer conditions, with the Beardmore glacier situated in its present relation to the South Pole, so that the flora would have been in darkness for five months of the year? If not, has the Pole shifted, or has Buckley Island shifted in regard to its present distance from the Pole?

  The answer to why coal was in Antarctica lay within the 16 kilograms of samples Scott and his team had collected and dragged to their deaths. With the publication of Scott’s Last Expedition, a collection of the British leader’s journals, the public learned that on discovering the dead men the search party

  recovered all their gear and dug out the sledge with their belongings on it. Amongst these were 35 lb. of very important geological specimens which had been collected on the moraines of the Beardmore Glacier; at Doctor Wilson’s request they had stuck to these up to the very end, even when disaster stared them in the face and they knew that the specimens were so much weight added to what they had to pull.

  The remaining expedition members immediately saw their scientific value. The geologist Frank Debenham remarked that the ‘specimens brought back by the Polar Party from Mt. Buckley contain impressions of fossil plants of late Palaeozoic age, some of which a cursory inspection identifies as occurring in other parts of the world. When fully examined, they will assuredly prove to be of the highest geological importance,’ and argued that their preservation would allow people to ‘settle a long-standing controversy between geologists as to the nature of the former union between Antarctica and Australasia’. But what precisely the specimens were was not widely known.

  Buckley Island – or Mount Buckley, as it is sometimes referred to – is a nunatak atop the Beardmore Glacier. It was here, on the return from the pole, that Edward Wilson found the coal deposits first reported by Anglo-Irish explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton just a few years before. The men spent the afternoon of 8 February 1912 and some of the following morning under the cliff face. Searching among the jumble of rocks they scanned the surface for samples, splitting promising-looking blocks of stone in the search for elusive fossils while the eagle-eyed Wilson made detailed notes. On close inspection some were found to contain the clear impression of ancient leaves.

  Today these delicate samples are carefully preserved in London’s Natural History Museum, locked away in small cardboard boxes, hidden among a global collection that has been gathered over centuries. It is hard to believe these small rocks, several centimetres across and rough-edged, are the same ones that caught Wilson’s eye all those years ago. The scientist described them as ‘dark blackish slaty, shaly or coaly matter, some exceedingly hard, some splitting easily, and some breaking vertically into blocks’, where

  the best leaf-impressions and the most obvious were in the rotten lumps of weathered coal which split up easily to sheaf-knife and hammer. Every layer of these gave abundant vegetable remains. Most of the bigger leaves were like beech leaves in shape and venation, in size a little smaller than British beech, and the venation were much more abundant and finer in character, but distinctly beechlike.

  The romance of their effort was not lost on Markham, who commented: ‘There is no more glorious and more touching event in the whole range of polar history’.

  By 1914, analysis of these fossils was nearing completion at the University of Cambridge. Working on the precious samples, Albert Seward, a professor of botany, reported in the first of several natural-history accounts from the expedition that some of the fossils were Glossopteris, a giant tree-like fern that dominated the geological record in Australia, Africa and India during the Permian period, some 299 to 251 million years ago. Seward wrote: ‘the discovery of Glossopteris on the Buckley Island moraine supplies what is needed to bring hypothesis within the range of established fact’. Here was proof that Antarctica had not only been warmer in the past:
it had somehow been linked to the southern continents at the centre of the supercontinent known as Gondwanaland.

  The simplest explanation for how Glossopteris came to be in Antarctica was through one of the hypothesised land bridges connecting the southern continents. In the oceans, however, the much-sought evidence had remained elusive. As part of the Australasian effort the expedition ship Aurora had made several vast sweeps of the Southern Ocean, taking soundings for water depth and trawling the sea for biological evidence of an ancient link. Even though the Australian Antarctic explorer, Douglas Mawson, was keen to find proof, he was not convinced by what they had found. The most promising was the Mill Rise, south of Tasmania, but this was an isolated plateau and did not span nearly enough of the ocean to make the case.

  With no evidence for a land bridge, the question was: how did Glossopteris come to be in Antarctica?

  Bold new scientific ideas were coming to the fore as the Antarctic expeditions returned home. Alongside reports proving the existence of the atom and the discovery of a possible fossilised human species in England, a little-known German scientist called Alfred Wegener was suggesting something more controversial: the world’s continents formed part of an enormous jigsaw.

  By 1912 Wegener was publishing scientific papers on his solution to the confusing observation that distinctive fossils were found across many continents. Later developed in a landmark book called The Origin of Continents and Oceans, his ideas were not published in English until 1924, delaying their discussion among the wider scientific community. Wegener proposed that you did not need drowned land bridges to account for similar geological formations in disparate locations. Instead, everything could be resolved if the continents had ploughed their way through the oceans – which Wegener described as displacement theory – changing their location on the surface.

  Gondwanaland had been one massive supercontinent and, instead of parts sinking into the world’s oceans, it had split and the continents drifted apart from one another during the Jurassic period, which began around 161 million years ago. If the thinking was correct, it meant the Antarctic coal was no longer in the location where it had formed: Gondwanaland had torn apart and created the world we see today.