In Life Atomic, Angela Creager recasts the history of science and medicine in the United States. Hers is a history from below. In Creager’s hands, we see the full scope of biomedical research from the perspective of the radioisotopes that flowed out of nuclear production facilities and through an intricate network of laboratories, environments and living bodies. Isotopes went everywhere in the post-war period, and Creager follows them with rigour and verve.
As its title suggests, Life Atomic unearths that sweeping impact of the atomic age, and especially the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), on medicine and the life sciences. While radioisotopes had been in use for decades, the rapid growth of nuclear technology during and after World War II inaugurated a new supply chain and, especially after the war, a new need to depict the atom as a symbol of progress in an era of peace. This need energised the immense and rapid dispersion of radioisotopes and sustained a range of uses – therapeutic, scientific and industrial – in the face of mounting evidence about the unforeseen consequences of exposure to radioactive material.
Creager’s account is in a sense, then, an ironic one. The hope required to build and sustain the vast infrastructure at the heart of Life Atomic was undercut, again and again, by the actual results that scientists and health professionals achieved as they engaged with these materials. Chapters on the production, dissemination and regulation of radioisotopes give way to an exploration of their impact in a range of fields. Most central – and of most interest to historians of medicine – is the history of nuclear medicine, from hype about curing cancer to using isotopes in everything from the study of metabolism to medical diagnostics. Creager shows how optimistic attempts to harness the atom always entailed new knowledge about the risks involved. If radioisotopes were ‘magic bullets’, their potential power made them particularly prone to misfiring.
These ironies are most poignant in Creager’s chapter on ‘Guinea Pigs’. Here, a delicate dance unfolds between ‘the government’s vigorous promotion of the scientific and medical benefits of radioisotopes’ (263) and growing recognition of the harms produced by radioactive exposure. In government, military and private studies, human subjects (including pregnant women) ingested radioactive materials to aid the study of a range of metabolic and immunological processes. As knowledge about the adverse effects of even low-level radiation emerged, the government and its private customers worked to develop a range of regulatory practices – including ‘informed consent’, used for the first time in the context of such studies – that continue to govern human subject research today. Creager insists that we cannot presume ‘the necessity of federal government regulation to protect subjects of medical investigations’ (308). Instead, she shows how calls for oversight emerged from an uneasy balance between research and regulation.
Radioisotopes did more than reconfigure science and medicine in the post-war period. As Creager demonstrates, they also enabled a new way of thinking about life itself. Researchers in a range of fields, from biochemistry and physiology to ecology and public health, came to rely on radioisotopes as ‘tracers’ of the complex, often hidden, processes at work in our bodies and the environment. The use of atomic tracers allowed researchers to measure metabolic rates more precisely and quantify the bio-accumulation across the food chain. What is more, tracers revealed the specifically temporal qualities of such systems, enabling new understanding of the dynamic patterns underlying energy flows on scales from the cellular to the continental. Such discoveries reinforced new approaches to complex interactions in medicine and the life sciences that continue to shape research programs and funding priorities in the twenty-first century.
Creager does more than expose this ‘tracing’ epistemology – she adopts it. This self-conscious appropriation of topic as method is the most exciting feature of Life Atomic. Historians of science and medicine often invoke the rhetoric of ‘actor’s categories’, calling on one another to attend to the language in which historical actors understood themselves. Such warnings are, in part, a shared effort to ward off the evils of presentism – or, even worse, Whiggism – in historical analysis. Creager has gone one step further. Rather than rest in the comfort of actor’s categories, she has blurred the line between actor’s and analyst’s concepts as well. Just as scientists traced ‘dynamic transformations’, so Creager ‘uses radioisotopes as historical tracers’ (4). The same features that made them useful for biomedical research have enabled Creager to tell their history, and indeed the history of science and medicine, in a new way. Call it ‘endogenous analysis’.
Life Atomic is thus a historical epistemology from the inside out. Creager’s method is reminiscent of what Marxists call immanent critique and what Clifford Geertz once called ‘internal conversion’. (It is, I think, an accident of history that Geertz’s term is drawn from atomic physics.) Methodological innovation, in this mode, need not be imported. It can be found in the sources themselves. Creager gives us an epistemology of tracing; other histories will afford other endogenous analytics. Life Atomic is not a call for more histories of tracers, then – it is a call for a new kind of history, one framed less in terms drawn from without than in terms unearthed from within. Though Creager is too humble to admit it, her book suggests a new methodology for the history of science and medicine, if not history itself. If we adopt it, historical scholarship might become more unified and more pluralistic at once.
Creager has given us more than a new history. Life Atomic models a new way to write such histories. It should be read by anyone interested in understanding the past on its own terms.
