The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  PART II

  6

  * * *

  The Cookie Jar

  “DOES ANYONE KNOW who Marie Curie was?”

  Taylor, in sixth grade now, wears his lab coat, bright purple rubber gloves, and a surgeon’s mask pulled down around his neck. He circles a table topped with gadgets, many labeled with the yellow-and-black radiation symbol known as a trefoil. He locates two black-and-white pictures and holds them high for the class to see. “These are the Curies, Marie and Pierre. I’m sure at least one person in here knows who Marie Curie was?”

  As Kenneth pans the camcorder around the classroom, no faces illuminate with recognition.

  “I’m ecstatic about her!” Taylor shouts, thrusting his spindly arms into a Y shape, comically accentuated by the purple gloves. “Marie Curie is the most amazing woman I have ever met—well, I’ve never met her because she’s dead, you know. But she practically discovered radioactivity!”

  Actually, Marie Curie coined the term radioactivity, in 1898, for the phenomenon described by French physicist Henri Becquerel two years earlier. Curie’s research into the extraordinary properties of radioactive materials overturned established ideas in chemistry and forced scientists to reconsider the foundations of physics. As a result, she became the first woman to win a Nobel Prize (for Physics, in 1903; she shared it with her husband, Pierre, and Becquerel). Taylor, who began his talk by drawing a classic picture of an atom—a nucleus of protons and neutrons circled by electrons with streaking comets’ tails—tells the class about Marie Curie’s discovery of radium, the most intensely radioactive of all the relatively accessible naturally occurring elements. “Radium,” he says, “is what killed her.”

  He pauses dramatically as he opens the top of a round lead jar. “And now,” he says, “I’m going to show you some real, purified radium.”

  Marie Curie died from aplastic anemia, which is associated with exposure to ionizing radiation. Curie and her collaborators had little sense of the damage that radiation could do to human tissue. They worked unprotected for decades; Marie carried radioisotopes in her pocket, stored them in her desk drawer, and marveled at the faint blue glow emanating from her test tubes:

  One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles or capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and one always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.

  Curie developed mobile x-ray stations to diagnose wounded soldiers in the First World War, then spent long hours operating her unshielded machines in wartime field hospitals. There was so much radiation bouncing around Curie’s laboratory and life that her logbooks from the 1890s, and even her cookbook, still retain enough radioactivity that they have to be stored in locked lead-lined boxes. Researchers (who must wear protective clothing) can see the indelible fingerprints that her radioactive fingertips left on the photographic film tucked between pages.

  Taylor has been talking nonstop for forty-five minutes while his assistant, Noah Jackson, stands patiently behind the table. Noah, wearing a mask and gloves, awaits instructions as Taylor, like a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, plucks one radioactive goodie after another from his lead pigs. Apart from asking Taylor to pull his mask down from over his mouth—“So we can all hear you better”—teacher Angela Melde has let her most intellectually precocious student keep rolling with his peculiar show-and-tell.

  In the three years since his astronaut presentation, Taylor has grown intellectually and physically. But emotionally, Taylor the eleven-year-old does not seem to be much more mature than Taylor the nine-year-old. Though many of his classmates are moving into the self-censoring coolness of puberty, Taylor lacks any hint of a typical sixth-grader’s self-consciousness. He prances around Peter Pan–style, flailing his purple-gloved hands as he proclaims the wonders of nuclear power, the electromagnetic spectrum, and cosmic radiation. When he pulls out plastic-encased samples of radioactive cesium and strontium, he clutches them to his heart and rocks back and forth, converting his voice into a baby’s squeak: “These little things, I like to call them my little pets, these radioactive friends, because they’re so cute. I love them so much.”

  “What are their names?” a kid asks.

  “I call this one Cesi, and this one Stronti,” Taylor replies. He hands the small disks to a girl in the front row to pass around. The girl hesitates a moment before taking it.

  “They’re safe?” Mrs. Melde asks.

  “Well, you don’t want to put them in your bed with you tonight,” Taylor replies, drawing the class into laughter, “but for a short time, they’re okay.”

  The class watches as Taylor, taking his time, pulls a larger, thicker orange glove over his right-hand purple glove. “These are my contamination gloves,” he says, “for when I’m working with very hazardous things. I’m going to keep them on, because I’m scared of these things I’m going to show you now.”

  Taylor lifts his mask over his face and reaches into the jar with his orange-gloved hand. He pulls out a dial, salvaged from an early Cold War–era aircraft, painted with radium-226. “You can see how hot it is,” Taylor says, picking up a Geiger counter. “Actually, you can hear it. I wonder how many of those pilots got cancer.” Having come to associate danger level with the intensity of the sounds coming from Taylor’s radiation detector, the students gasp at the frenzy of beeps.

  “I’m going to put it back behind the lead,” Taylor says, dropping the dial into the cookie jar, “where it will be safe.” He demonstrates by applying the instrument to the outside of the jar; it doesn’t click at all.

  Kenneth, from behind the camcorder, chimes in. “Taylor, tell ’em why they painted radium on the dials and numbers.”

  “It glows in the dark!” Taylor says. “There was a radium craze in the twenties, and they were putting radium-226 on airplane instruments, clock faces, car dials, everything. If it was darker in here, we’d see it glowing.” He pulls an old clock out of the jar and tells the class that, even though he washed most of the radium paint off the numbers, the clock is “still radioactive, and it will be for more than a thousand years.”

  A student asks why he washed it off, and Taylor’s face lights up.

  “Ah! Well, what I wanted to do in my laboratory at home is I wanted to purify radium and make it even more radioactive so I could use it to bombard stable things like nickel and transform it into an unstable isotope like nickel-65, which is radioactive.” He digs into the jar again and pulls out a vial. “Look down in this tube and you’ll see a white substance. That’s actual radium that I’ve collected and purified. It’s some of the most dangerous stuff on earth.”

  Taylor playfully waves the small glass ampule at a girl in the front row, who ducks.

  Among the elements on Taylor’s periodic table, few are more frightening than the one with the atomic number 88. Radium atoms emit radiation at an intensity three thousand times greater than an equal number of atoms of uranium. Outside the body, radium’s alpha-particle emissions are easily blocked. But if radium gets inside the body, its effects are devastating.

  Radium has become something of a fetish for Taylor the sixth-grader. Hahn, too, became obsessed with radium, though at a later age. He’d caught the nuclear bug while completing the requirements for the Boy Scouts’ Atomic Energy merit badge, and he decided to build a “neutron gun” to bombard elements with neutrons and change their atomic structure. “My goal,” he told me, “was to irradiate every element on the periodic table and see what would happen.” Hahn took apart more than a hundred smoke detectors and combined the tiny bits of radioactive americium-241 he’d found inside each one with lithium. But Hahn found that the neutron ouput wasn’t nearly enough to produce protactinium-233, which decays into fissile uranium-233. He needed something stronger.

  When Hahn got his driver’s license at sixteen, he began scouring antiques stores and junkyards for objects that might contain radium. Unlike
Taylor, he didn’t bring his parents along. Fearful that they’d try to shut down his collecting and experimenting, he increasingly kept his scientific pursuits to himself. When Hahn found a radium clock or instrument, he’d bring it to his potting-shed laboratory, scrape the paint off with a knife, and collect the flakes in small containers.

  Later, I would ask Taylor if he did the same thing when he was eleven years old and working with radium. “No!” he blurted out. “Scraping is the last thing you’d want to do. When you scrape, you get dust floating around, and you could breathe it in. Radium is a bone-seeker; it’s terrifying what happens when radium gets inside you.”

  After penetrating the membrane linings of the lungs or gastrointestinal tract, radium is absorbed into the bloodstream, where it works its way to the bone marrow. Once deposited in the marrow, it becomes a permanent internal radiation source, bombarding bone- and blood-forming cells with alpha radiation. Since radium has a half-life of 1,601 years, it is there to stay for the rest of a person’s—likely shortened—life.

  “I went to incredible precautions,” Taylor tells me. He dabbed acetone on the radium-coated surfaces, then decanted off the paint and let the acetone evaporate out, leaving mostly radium salts. As he worked, he set up several Geiger counters and wore a finger dosimeter, a ring that measures exposure to ionizing radiation.

  Hahn, working with inconsistent safety protocols—sometimes he wore a gas mask and gloves, sometimes not—never allowed others to witness his experiments. For the sake of anyone who might have dropped by the poorly ventilated shed, that’s probably a good thing.

  Taylor tops off his classroom presentation by demonstrating how an isotope generator works. It’s a classic and once-common university nuclear physics experiment (though it’s rarely done now, due to concerns about danger and expense), but the kids at St. James Day School are getting it in sixth grade from an eleven-year-old teacher.

  “Every isotope has a half-life. That’s how long until it takes for half the radioactive nuclei to decay. So if uranium-238 has a half-life of two billion years”—it’s actually 4.47 billion years, about the same age as the Earth—“half the radiation will be gone in two billion years. When doctors inject something into your body, you don’t want it to emit radiation all your life. You want it to show you the cancer and be gone.”

  Taylor says that nuclear pharmacists use isotope generators to “milk” technetium-99m—nuclear medicine’s most widely used tracer—from its parent isotope source, molybdenum-99. But since molybdenum-99 is more hazardous, Taylor is using cesium-137 as a stand-in.

  Taylor’s friend Ellen Orr volunteers to put a few drops of saline (which Taylor tests with his detector to show that it’s not radioactive) into the generator. As it flows down through the cylinder, Taylor explains that the liquid is washing out barium-137m atoms that come from beta decay of the cesium-137. The m in barium-137m, Taylor explains, stands for metastable. That means it has an excited nucleus that will quickly decay to a stable isotope.

  “We nuclear scientists like to joke about parents and daughters and cows and pigs,” Taylor says. “Think of cesium-137 as the parent, and the cow is the isotope generator. You milk out the daughter, barium-137m, which you put in the pig.”

  He moves his Geiger counter’s probe close to the liquid that drips into the bottom of the container, and it clicks like crazy. The whole class starts laughing and cheering.

  “Isn’t that neat?” Taylor says. “What you put in isn’t radioactive, but what comes out is! I’m going to put a lid on this, and I’ll pass it around with the Geiger counter.” He explains that barium-137m has a half-life of less than three minutes, and that within thirty minutes it will have decayed to less than one-thousandth of its initial activity, making it safe to dispose of.

  “But till then, y’all, don’t take that lid off!”

  Taylor had gotten his crowd-pleasing isotope generator just before his eleventh birthday during a trip he and Kenneth took to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, the wartime Secret City whose factories produced enriched uranium for the first atomic weapons. After he and Kenneth visited the museum, Taylor asked his dad to take him to Spectrum Techniques, a supplier of nuclear-research equipment. “I’d already collected a bunch of radioactive stuff, collectibles from eBay and stuff,” Taylor says. “Spectrum had more serious stuff, not really for hobbyists, more for the nuclear industry.”

  The ten-year-old rehearsed his approach with Kenneth on the way over. When they arrived, Taylor walked up to the receptionist. With his chin barely clearing the countertop, he announced, “We’re interested in purchasing some small check-source disks. Maybe cesium-137 or strontium-90, if you have them.”

  “The guy’s jaw kinda dropped,” Kenneth says. “For a few seconds he couldn’t say anything. Then he got up and said, ‘Uh, let me get a sales associate for you.’”

  The sales associate was just as gobsmacked. Taylor introduced himself and said he was an amateur nuclear scientist. The associate asked why he wanted the sources, and Taylor told him about his experiments.

  “At first he was just amazed, and then we ended up having quite a conversation,” Taylor remembers. “Then he said, ‘Hold on a second, Taylor,’ and he went in back.” He came out with two small, brightly colored disks, each an inch in diameter: one-fifth of a microcurie of cesium-137, and one-tenth of a microcurie of strontium-90. The sealed check sources typically sold for between fifty and a hundred dollars.

  “These are on us,” the sales associate said.

  “This is awesome!” Taylor said. Then he told the associate that he’d really love to have a cow, an isotope generator. Unfortunately, the associate said, the margins were too low to give away one of the three-hundred-dollar devices.

  “Well, Dad, what do you think, could we just buy one?” Taylor asked.

  Kenneth hesitated. It was already an expensive trip. After a few awkward moments, the associate motioned for Taylor and Kenneth to follow him. He led them through the production facility and into the warehouse, where he scanned a high shelf, found a box, and pulled it down.

  “This one here’s a demonstration unit,” he said. “It works like new.” He handed it to Taylor. “It’s yours.”

  “Are you sure?” Kenneth asked.

  The associate looked at Taylor. “One of these days, I get the feeling you’ll repay us.”

  “I decided that no matter where my career went,” says Taylor, “I would always go back there to buy stuff and I’d refer everyone to them—which I have.”

  Taylor and Kenneth also stopped by the University of Tennessee’s campus in Knoxville to meet Lee Dodds, chair of the university’s Department of Nuclear Engineering. One of Kenneth’s cousins had arranged the meeting, but Dodds had somehow gotten the impression that he’d be talking to a potential graduate student; he was shocked when tiny Taylor walked in. Dodds’s secretary had scheduled thirty minutes, but the esteemed professor immediately looked at his watch and said, “I’ve got ten minutes.”

  Three hours later, Dodds and Taylor were still together, laughing and talking nukes. “He was by far the smartest and most advanced ten-year-old I’d ever met,” Dodds remembers. “But he wasn’t a nerd or bookworm; he was extroverted, laughing and joking. He knew more than some PhD students, and he made more eye contact than most.”

  Dodds took Taylor and Kenneth on a tour of the labs and introduced Taylor to faculty members. At the end of the day, Dodds told Taylor, “Our department has its own scholarship for the most promising nuclear engineering students. If you do well on the ACT [college admissions test], that scholarship is waiting for you.”

  On the return flight, Kenneth recalls, “All I could think about was getting home and telling Tiffany that our ten-year-old had just been offered a college scholarship.”

  7

  * * *

  In the (Glowing) Footsteps of Giants

  ANGELA MELDE HAD GIVEN her students a maximum of thirty minutes for their presentations. But an hour after he’d begun, Tay
lor was still going on about the Manhattan Project, about dark matter and string theory, about Ernest Rutherford and Enrico Fermi. Why did his teacher let him continue?

  Melde had recognized that Taylor learned best by talking. “There aren’t that many people who are verbal learners to his extreme,” Melde says, “but for some, the concepts really jell and synthesize when they have a chance to explain them. When a teacher sees that much enthusiasm and that much engagement with a subject coming out, it would be a crime to stop it, because something magical is happening in terms of learning.”

  Only after ninety minutes did Melde finally ask Taylor to wrap it up.

  “I guess,” Taylor muttered, “we won’t be able to get into quantum mechanics.”

  Neither Melde nor long-time head of school Dee Miller had any formal training in educating gifted children, but St. James was committed to providing an accepting culture and an individualized learning environment for each student. “We have kids with handicaps and kids who are really talented in one way or another, kids who might be considered weird elsewhere,” says Miller. “We work hard at tuning in to what each boy or girl needs and creating a sort of micro-environment for them that helps them learn best.”

  One afternoon after school let out, Taylor stopped by Dee Miller’s small second-floor office. The school had recently purchased new computers, and Taylor wanted to know if he could have the old CRT (cathode-ray tube) monitors now stacked in a corner of the computer lab. He told Miller that he wanted to open them up and “try some experiments.”