Spilled Radium

The oil-booming east Texas town of Tyler (pop. 57,000) was recovering from a nasty jolt last week. RADIOACTIVE COBALT BURNS TYLER YOUTH, newspaper headlines had proclaimed; AEC and state health department officials with Geiger counters had combed the town with all the thoroughness of oil prospectors. Fortunately, they had found only negligible radioactivity at suspected sites. But the lad who started it all was still under observation for doctors to figure out how much damage he had done to himself.

John Giles Pierce, 19 next week, is a tall, husky youth with a yen to play with dynamite--or worse. Discharged from the Navy and also out on bond on a burglary indictment, he enrolled at Tyler Junior College. Aiming to be an X-ray technologist, he took practical lab work two hours a day at Mother Frances Hospital. In a back room at home he did such impractical work as making rockets that blew up ("The fuel was just too damn powerful," he explains).

"Bury Yourself." Fortnight ago, Johnny Pierce called on a friend, Chiropractor Harold D. Harrington, and told him that he had spilled cobalt 60 on his hands. Harrington told him to go straight to the hospital for a check. Instead, Johnny called on a pre-med student for advice. Says Classmate Douglas Thornton: "I thought he was kidding. I said: 'Bury yourself.' " The two went to a motel, where Johnny took a brisk shower. Hospital officials later found Johnny in a drugstore, called in AEC and U.S. Public Health Service officials.

For a while Johnny insisted that he had bought cobalt 60 for $18 from a "Canadian institution," spilled a solution of it on his hands. But with the notable exception of radium itself, most radioactive isotopes are under rigid control. They cannot be imported without an AEC permit. At length, Johnny spilled the truth.

He had wanted to expose mosquito larvae to radiation. So he had gone to the hospital and taken a 10-mg. radium needle. At home he opened it, expecting to find a single piece of radium. Instead, out came a powder that spilled over his hands.

Scrubdown. Since radium is under state control, Johnny Pierce's confession let the federal officials out of the case. But they had already been around with their Geiger counters, detected radioactivity at the motel and the drugstore that Johnny had visited, ordered a thorough scrubdown. State officials carried on, traced everybody with whom Johnny had so much as shaken hands that morning, got them started on the scrubbing routine. By week's end everybody except Johnny was in the clear.

Johnny was kept in isolation at Mother Frances Hospital (it happened to be in the psychiatric ward). Each day, doctors examined him and drew blood samples for testing. This week no definite signs of radiation injury had appeared, but it was too soon to be sure. In any case, Johnny's back-room lab, from which illegal stocks of barbiturates and chloral hydrate were confiscated, was closed indefinitely.

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