Radium and the Secret of Life with Luis Campos

This is a production by the National History Center in cooperation with the Woodrow Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program in Washington DC Long before the H-bomb associated radioactivity with death, many scientists at the dawn of the twentieth century believed that radium might somehow hold the secret to life. The swirl of provocative metaphors surrounding Marie Curie’s newly discovered radioactive element not only transformed physics and amazed the public, but also ultimately led to key insights into the origin of life, the nature of heredity, and the structure of the gene. From the creation in the test-tube of half-living microbes to the earliest emergence of genetic engineering, in this talk historian of science Luis Campos will explore the long half-life of radium’s biological legacy. Luis Campos is the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA Chair of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress and Associate Chair of the History Department at the University of New Mexico. Trained in both biology and in