The Birth of Living Radium

Abstract

This article traces the half-life of a series of provocative and productive interconnections between radium, radioactivity, and life in the early twentieth century. Examining the metaphysics of metaphor set in motion by a widespread discourse of "living radium" among physicists and a radium-crazed public alike, I suggest how such conceptions may ultimately have shaped fundamental biological research into the origin of life, the nature of mutation, and even the characterization of the gene.