In addition to the Edible/Audible posts, I'm creating another series, which I'm calling "The 3rd Millennium," celebrating all that is science fiction in our modern day dystopia. Things that, at least in my estimation, are science fiction or dystopian, even though they are 100% factual. These are not intended to be stories that are off the beaten track, or are in any way obscure. While they may not all be mainstream either, my intention is to show how sci-fi our everyday lives are. Don't believe that we're living in a dystopia? Then why does our national paper currency (specifically the 20) prominently depict a man who effectively eliminated any national paper currency during his presidency?
This first installment features two stories about having radioactive bones, one which is awesome and one which is hazardous to your health.
There's nothing more sci-fi than willingly having radioisotopes injected into your blood stream. I had this happen to me circa late May 2007 after I got a stress fracture in one of my sesamoid bones. The sesamoid bones are two small, free-floating bones located below the joint between the first metatarsal and the big toe, and are the insertion points for the flexor hallucus brevis; essentially, they are two small and brittle bones which receive a lot of impact and are essential for keeping the structural integrity of the foot. I was told that this would likely be the end of me running competitively, and I almost let the experts be right... but that's another story.
Anyway, to diagnose a stress fracture, you can't use an x-ray, because x-rays can only detect (and don't quote me on this, the number is probably wrong) a 5% change in bone tissue composition. Stress fractures don't show up on x-rays, so in order to diagnose one you need to use a bone scan.
For my bone scan, I lay down on a table underneath a large gamma camera, a camera designed to detect gamma particles. I was injected with a solution of technetium-99m, a metastable isotope of technetium with a half life of about 6 hours. Since the fluid had just come out of a refrigerator, I could feel my arm get colder as I was injected. I was told to hold my arm up, shake it around, to get the technetium-99m (A FUCKING RADIOISOTOPE!) evenly dispersed throughout my circulatory system. They turned on the gamma camera and pointed it at my legs. A screen was displaying a real time image of the gamma decay going on, let me state this again, inside my blood stream! It was pretty damn cool, if I do say so myself. You could see where the major arteries and veins were, as well as a big white cluster in the ball of my foot. Since there was some sort of tissue damage there - we didn't know if it was bone tissue or not yet - my body was sending as much blood as it could to the region. Then I had to wait three hours for the radioisotopes to work their way into my bones.
Technetium behaves similarly to calcium, similarly enough to the point where it tricks your body into thinking that it is calcium. So, what hasn't decayed or got squeezed out of your blood stream by your kidneys gets used to make bone. In areas where you are trying to repair a bone, calcium uptake, and therefore technetium uptake, will be higher. If, during the second sequence of imaging, there is a spot where the gamma camera detects significantly more particle decays, there is bone damage. And sure enough, when they took that picture, there was a white glowing hairline right on my outer sesamoid bone. "Oh my God," I thought. "There is a 50-50 chance my life is over." Stupid. But again, that's another story.
Technetium 99m decays to plain old technetium-99, an incredibly stable isotope with a half life of 211,000 years. It beta decays into the stable ruthenium-99, an incredibly rare metal (the 74th most common element on God's Spaceship Earth!) There are trace amounts of this rare member of the platinum family IN MY BONES! And if that's not sci-fi, then I don't know what is.
The second story is not quite as uplifting. While I will probably have no health problems as a result of the Technetium-99 in my bones (it's the equivalent of having about 500 chest x-rays performed during your lifetime), there have been plenty of people to die as a result of having strontium-90 in their bones.
Strontium-90 (along with a whole cocktail of radioisotopes) got introduced to the Earth during the early Cold War, the Golden Age of nuclear testing. Many of the superheroes from this era got their superpowers from being exposed to fallout from these tests. Well it turns out that something like this happened in real life, and it happened to millions of baby boomers. But their superpower ended up being cancer, and instead of using it to fight crime, they died. And they try to tell us that the Cold War had almost no casualties. Bullshit.
Strontium-90 works its way into the soil, where it is absorbed in trace amounts by plants, including those used to feed livestock. Strontium is right below Calcium on the periodic table. As a result, they behave similarly chemically. So, when cattle eat plants with strontium-90 in them, it gets put in their milk. That's right, in addition to that calcium for strong bones, you're also getting strontium 90. Much like technetium-99m, strontium-90 gets put into bones, where it sits until it decays. Strontium-90 has a half life of 28.8 years, after which it beta-decays into Yttrium-90. This is where it becomes dangerous. Yttrium-90 has a half-life of 64 hours, and when it decays, it emits some nasty gamma rays, which slice through your DNA. All that milk you were supposed to drink as a kid so you grow up strong may be the reason you get cancer when you're older. You can thank the good people in Washington and Moscow for it. And if that isn't a dystopia, I don't know what is.
(On a slightly redemptive note, Strontium 90 is also the name of a short-lived proto-new wave band that eventually led to the formation of The Police, so it can't be all bad.)
