Louder Than Bombs

November 26, 2014 7:11 AM

"A few months earlier, an archivist friend had mentioned over lunch that she had a connection to my hometown—in fact her first job as an archivist was in St. Louis, organizing the papers from a midcentury study of radioactivity in children’s teeth. I had been unable to shake the story, and found myself up late at night reading about nuclear weapons testing, or daydreaming during work about purity and milk, innocence and poison, the movement of invisible contamination. A follow-up with my archivist friend revealed that the archive contained letters from children—to scientists, and to the tooth fairy." From The Appendix: "Atomic Anxiety and the Tooth Fairy: Citizen Science in the Midcentury Midwest."
posted by MonkeyToes (4 comments total)

In the mid-1950s, he U.S. government was secretly studying the issue... but having not thought of the baby-tooth idea, they came up with a more horrifying method: body-snatching. They couldn't do it on a large scale, but as part of Project Sunshine, the government apparently "acquired" several thousand baby corpses for analysis.

A quotation from a 1950s transcript, declassified years later, still sticks out in my mind:

"... human samples are of prime importance and if anybody knows how to do a good job of body snatching, they will really be serving their country...."

The speaker won the Nobel prize five years later.
posted by cgs06 at 8:29 AM on November 26, 2014

Environmental radioactive materials accumulate in milk. The milk lobby was of of Nixon's biggest supporters.
posted by StickyCarpet at 9:33 AM on November 26, 2014

My dad's teeth were part of this study. His father was a pediatric surgeon and was very involved in convincing patients to participate.
posted by schyler523 at 12:56 PM on November 26, 2014 [1 favorite]

The speaker won the Nobel prize five years later.

For chemistry, not peace :P
posted by pwnguin at 4:24 PM on November 26, 2014