EARLY X-RAY RESEARCH NOT UP TO MODERN SAFETY STANDARDS:

Because Taylor was one of only a few radiological physicists working on defining what amounts of radiation were harmful to humans, the lab he worked in at NBS wasn’t always the safest, especially early on. In a 1995 interview, Taylor recalled one such episode:

“The only single documented whole body exposure that I know that I’ve had was in 1929, and it was measured to be 150 [Roentgen]…. I sat in an X-ray beam for 20 minutes or half an hour or something…. I was just sitting right smack in the beam…. [With that much radiation] you’re supposed to get nauseated, but we didn’t know that in 1929, so I wasn’t.”

For the record, 150 Roentgen is equivalent to 1.4 sievert, which according to this chart starts to put you in the realm of “severe radiation poisoning, in some cases fatal.” But since the chart wasn’t around in 1929, Taylor was just fine. Indeed, he told the interviewer in 1995, “I also used to treat [my] athlete’s foot…. I don’t remember what the dose was, but it was probably four or five hundred R [3.7 to 4.7 Sv].”

“That exposure in addition to medical radiation treatment for bursitis and other benign conditions and from radiation experiments resulted in an estimated whole-body dose-equivalent in excess of a thousand rem [10 Sv],” Taylor’s obituary for the Health Physics Society stated. “He experienced no discernible adverse effect.”

Hmm. Either there’s some sort of quantum observer effect here, where you have to know about radiation sickness to suffer it — which I doubt — or he was just one of those individuals on the right tail of the sigmoid curve, with better-than-average resistance. And, of course, he didn’t receive that 1000R dose all at once. He lived to be 102.

Still . . . .