When radium is taken in soluble form, 25 or 50 percent of it remains in the body for four or five days. The rate of excretion after that is only about one percent a day. “Wherever it is located, it carries on a constant bombardment in releasing its energy, giving strength to the tissues, cells and protoplasm of the body. And when once these begin to function actively, they begin to rebuild themselves.”
Radium does not combine chemically with any known substance in the body. The therapeutic effects are indirect. When the electrons are ejected with great speed from the atoms of the radioactive salts, they pass through millions of other atoms, knocking out new electrons as they go, leaving the atoms with a positive charge, in which condition they are called “ions.” These positively charged particles at once enter into new combinations, new chemical unions, which produce new substances. But these may be injurious to the normal tissues as well as to the cells of the disease which it is desired to destroy. In some cases, the diseased cells are more susceptible to the rays than are the normal cells, in which instances the growth of the abnormal or diseased cells may be retarded, or they may even be totally destroyed. It is thus seen that application of the rays may result in alleviation of the disease, or, possibly, effect a complete cure, as the case may be.
The action of radium on various (colloidal) substances is now well understood from the point of view of the biophysicist; but this phase of the subject is too highly technical for exposition in a book intended for popular circulation.
While it is fully recognized that there are quite definite limitations to the efficacy of radioactivity in its application to disease, as a matter of fact the use of radium as a therapeutic agent would be much more extensive were it not for its high cost and scarcity. No one questions its exceptional value in the treatment of certain diseases, and a method will probably be discovered, in the near future, by which it may veritably be used to postpone the age of senility.
A young man who had read somewhere that radium is a sure cure for any and all of the ills to which flesh is heir, entered a drug store and asked: “How much is radium an ounce?” The druggist smiled, and named a figure which made the young man blink. “Not really?” observed the prospective customer. “Then you may give me an ounce of cough lozenges.”
Until quite recently, an ounce of radium cost almost as much as 3¾ tons of gold! That is to say, an ounce of radium, if this much could be purchased “off hand”—which it couldn’t—would cost about $2,500,000. The price was at one time $3,000,000 an ounce.
When we speak of “radium,” we really mean—or ought to mean—radium salts. Pure radium soon abandons its metallic form by entering into chemical combinations. It is the purified radium salts that cost, as late as 1923, $2,500,000 an ounce—the price of ¾ of a ton of platinum, the most “precious” of all the metals excepting radium. In 1920, radium was 200 times more valuable than an equal weight of pure blue diamonds, and 180,600 times as valuable as gold. A cubic foot of the salts—had this amount been obtainable—would have been worth $7,000,000,000.
The reason for the high cost of radium is not far to seek. First, the demand for the pure salts far exceeded the supply—and this is still the case, though relief is now in sight. Secondly, the scarcity of radium was due to the enormous amount of time and labor involved in its production.
Although radium was discovered and isolated by Mme. Curie in 1898, 22 years later—at the close of 1920—scarcely 140 grams (or about five ounces) of pure radium salts had been extracted and put on the world market. Of this amount, about 70 grams had been produced in the United States (during the preceding seven years). The market value of the standard salts was at this time about $100,000 a gram (about 1/28 ounce). Eighteen grams were produced in this country in 1920, and the value of the purified salts was quoted in some journals as $2,160,000. At this price, about $100,000 worth of radium could be put into a glass tube about the diameter of a very coarse pencil lead and not more than an inch in length.
To produce the gram of radium salts presented to Mme. Curie by the women of America (in May, 1921), 500 tons of carnotite ore—containing two percent or less of uranium oxide—were treated, consuming in the process 1,500 tons of coal, more than a ton of chemicals, and over 30 tons of water.