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Marshall Brucer, MD
Tucson, Ariz

JAMA. 1990;264(22):2870.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Dr Macklis notes that Radiothor addict William J. A. Bailey "... reached the age of 64, an astonishing feat of longevity for one who... consumed more radium water than any living man."¹

Dr Macklis must have heard of Marie Curie. She breathed more radon than any woman and died at 67 years of age, 15 years beyond her cohort's life expectancy. Dr Macklis is at Harvard where a generation ago William Duane became famous: after 8 years of breathing radon, he ran the first somewhat leaky radium-radon source ("cow") until he died at 63 years of age. Victor Hess, maker of radon sources, died at 81 years of age, 30 years after his thumb was amputated because of a radium injection. And Friedrich Giesel, who made most of the early commercial radium sources and was the first to have his stratospheric body background measured by Elster and . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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