Vox Meditantis

Dr Elizabeth Rona (1890-1981) perfected the art of separating radioactive isotopes and transformed polonium from a laboratory curiosity into an industrial tool, yet her name remains largely absent from atomic age histories. A Hungarian nuclear chemist who fled war and antisemitism across three continents, she pioneered methods that underpinned both the Manhattan Project and modern marine geology. Her story illuminates how exile, classification, and the machinery of “big science” can obscure the contributions of brilliant minds – particularly women who operated at the dangerous frontier between chemistry and physics in the twentieth century.

Good afternoon, Dr Rona. It’s rather extraordinary to have this opportunity – you’ve witnessed the entire arc of nuclear science, from radium’s first medical applications to the atomic age. Your work spans continents and decades, yet many people don’t know your name.

Well, that’s the nature of the business, isn’t it? When you spend your career moving from one laboratory to another, fleeing politics and chasing research opportunities, you don’t leave the sort of institutional legacy that gets carved in stone. And when much of your work becomes classified for atomic weapons… the headlines go to the laboratory directors, not to the people working with their hands in the contaminated samples.

Let’s start at the beginning. Your father Samuel brought radium therapy to Budapest – was that your first encounter with radioactivity?

Oh yes, very much so. Father was quite progressive about bringing these new treatments to Hungary, you know. This was around 1904, 1905 – radium was still tremendously expensive, tremendously mysterious. He would come home speaking about this magical substance that glowed in the dark and could shrink tumours. As a girl, I found it rather thrilling. Of course, we knew nothing then about the dangers.

Initially, I wanted to follow him into medicine. But Father, bless him, was concerned that the work would be too demanding for a woman. Too demanding! If he could see what I ended up doing – working with polonium for twelve hours straight, handling samples that could have killed me in minutes if I’d made one mistake. Instead, I “settled” for chemistry and physics. Rather ironic, wouldn’t you say?

You earned your PhD in 1912 and immediately began working with some of the most prominent radioactivity researchers. Tell me about those early years with George de Hevesy.

Ah, Hevesy was brilliant – absolutely brilliant. This was during the Great War, you understand. I’d returned to Budapest when the fighting began, and there we were, trying to do cutting-edge research whilst the world was falling apart around us. Hevesy didn’t feel the need to keep his students “in their place,” as many professors did. He treated me as a colleague.

We were investigating this mysterious substance called Uranium-Y – what we now know as thorium-231. Others had failed to isolate it properly, but I managed to separate it from the interfering elements. Twenty-five hour half-life, beta emitter. The Hungarian Academy published my findings. But more importantly, we were developing the theory that diffusion velocity depended on atomic mass. I coined the terms “isotope labels” and “tracers” during that work – though it was just a footnote at the time.

That footnote became the foundation for mass spectrography and heavy water studies. Did you realise the significance then?

Not at all. We were just trying to understand how atoms behaved, how they moved through different materials. The idea that this could become a tool for medicine, for industry… that came much later. Science progresses that way, doesn’t it? You make a small observation, someone else builds upon it, and decades later it’s revolutionised an entire field.

After the war, you moved to Berlin, then Vienna. This was your most productive period in terms of polonium research.

Vienna was where everything came together, yes. Stefan Meyer at the Radium Institute was keen to develop alternatives to radium – it was so expensive, so difficult to obtain. Polonium seemed promising, but the preparation methods were crude, inefficient.

Meyer arranged for me to study with Irène Curie at the Institute in Paris. Imagine – learning polonium separation from Marie Curie’s daughter! Irène was exceptionally generous with her knowledge. She gave me a small disc of polonium to take back to Vienna, and from that, I developed our entire programme.

Can you walk us through your polonium preparation technique? The technical details that made you the world’s expert?

Right. The challenge with polonium is that it’s incredibly volatile – it wants to plate out on any surface, disappear into the air. The traditional methods gave you tiny yields and terrible contamination.

My enhancement involved a multi-stage process. First, you start with bismuth solutions containing the polonium. The key insight was controlling the pH precisely – I found that at pH 1.5, you could get selective deposition onto silver foils. But here’s the crucial bit that nobody else had worked out: the current density had to be exactly right. Too high, and you get poor adhesion. Too low, and the efficiency drops to nothing.

I used silver electrodes at 0.2 amperes per square centimetre, with the temperature maintained at exactly 60 degrees Celsius. The polonium would plate out uniformly, and then – this was my innovation – I’d anneal the silver foil in a hydrogen atmosphere to drive the polonium deeper into the metal lattice. This gave sources that were stable for months, not days.

The quantitative yields were remarkable – I could achieve 95% efficiency compared to perhaps 30% with the older methods. For the Manhattan Project, this difference was crucial. They needed sources a thousand times more active than anything we’d used in academic research.

Those yields made your technique invaluable to the bomb programme. How did the Manhattan Project approach you?

It was quite surreal, actually. I was at Carnegie, working on seawater research, when I received this cryptic telegram from Rochester. “War work… polonium… details to follow.” When I replied that I was interested but concerned about my immigration status – I wasn’t yet a citizen – this fellow Brian O’Brien appeared in my office.

They wanted to buy my method. Not hire me, mind you – buy the technique. They were very specific about the assistants I should train: people unfamiliar with chemistry or physics. For security, you see. I realised later they were planning to scale up production by enormous factors.

I gave them everything freely. No compensation. It seemed… well, when your adopted country is fighting fascism, when you’ve fled the Nazis yourself, you do what you can.

You never saw Los Alamos or knew exactly how your polonium was being used?

Never. They built processing plants in the desert based on my specifications, but I was told nothing. Only years later did I learn that polonium-beryllium sources were triggering the fission reactions. My little laboratory technique, scaled up to industrial levels, helping to end a war.

There’s something rather unsettling about that, you know. You develop a method for academic research, and suddenly it’s part of the most destructive weapon ever created. But then, that’s the nature of fundamental research – you never know where it will lead.

After the war, you transitioned to oceanographic research. What drew you to studying radioactivity in seawater?

The sea work began much earlier, actually. In Vienna, Hans Pettersson asked me to analyse sediment samples for radium content. But our laboratory was contaminated – hopeless for precision measurements. So we took the samples to the Bornö Marine Station in Sweden. Beautiful place – island in the Gullmarsfjorden. I spent twelve summers there.

What fascinated me was the global consistency. Uranium in seawater is essentially constant everywhere – about 3.3 micrograms per litre. But thorium behaves completely differently – it precipitates out, settles into the sediments. This creates a natural clock, you see.

Explain that clock mechanism – how uranium-thorium dating works.

Uranium-238 decays through a series of steps, eventually producing thorium-230. In seawater, the uranium stays dissolved, but the thorium immediately begins settling out. So in any sediment core, you can measure the thorium-230 content and work backwards to determine when that particular layer was deposited.

The half-life of thorium-230 is 75,400 years, which gives you a dating range perfect for marine geology. You can trace ocean currents from hundreds of thousands of years ago, understand how sea levels changed during ice ages, map the movement of tectonic plates.

When I developed this at Oak Ridge and later at Miami, it opened entirely new fields. Marine archaeologists use it to date ancient coral reefs. Climate scientists use it to understand past ocean circulation patterns. Nuclear forensics experts use similar principles to trace contamination.

You worked with some of the most dangerous substances known to science, yet lived to be 91. How did you protect yourself?

Paranoia, my dear. Pure paranoia. I saw what happened to researchers who were careless – cancers, blood disorders, shortened lives. From the very beginning, I insisted on protective equipment even when my supervisors thought it unnecessary.

Masks, gloves, proper ventilation – I supplied my own when the laboratories wouldn’t provide them. I developed techniques to minimise exposure time. When working with polonium sources, every movement had to be planned, practised. No improvisation when you’re handling something that alpha-emits at such intensity.

I also survived at least two laboratory explosions – one in Vienna, another in Sweden. In both cases, it was my insistence on working behind proper shielding that saved me. Many of my colleagues thought I was being overly cautious. Well, I outlived most of them.

Looking back, what frustrates you most about how your contributions have been recorded – or not recorded?

The invisibility isn’t entirely accidental, you know. When you’re a woman, when you’re Jewish, when you’re an immigrant moving from country to country… you don’t build the institutional power base that ensures historical recognition.

But it’s more than that. My work was often embedded in larger projects, larger personalities. Hevesy won the Nobel Prize for the tracer work we developed together – and deservedly so, he was brilliant. But the footnotes where my contributions appear… footnotes have a way of being forgotten.

The Manhattan Project work was classified for decades. By the time it was declassified, the story had already been written – Oppenheimer, Teller, the famous men at Los Alamos. The woman who developed the polonium techniques? Merely a detail.

Do you think there were missed opportunities – moments when you could have received more recognition?

Perhaps. In 1933, Berta Karlik and I won the Haitinger Prize from the Austrian Academy for our work on radioactive decay chains. That should have led to more prominent positions, more visibility. But then the Nazis came to power, and suddenly being Jewish in central Europe meant survival, not career advancement.

I sometimes wonder what might have happened if I’d been a man, if I’d been Christian, if I’d been able to stay in one place and build a proper research empire. But then again, the life I lived – working across disciplines, across countries, seeing the field evolve from radium curiosity to atomic age – that gave me perspectives that more settled researchers never had.

Speaking of perspectives, you must have thoughts about how nuclear science developed. Any regrets about the militarisation of your field?

Of course. But you must understand, we didn’t set out to create weapons. We were investigating the fundamental nature of matter. The military applications… they were almost accidental discoveries.

When Otto Hahn split the uranium nucleus in 1938, he was trying to understand transmutation reactions. The realisation that this could release enormous energy – that came later. And once that possibility existed, once we knew the Germans were pursuing it…

I believe giving my polonium methods to the American bomb programme was the right choice. But it troubles me that so much nuclear research became militarised, became secret. Science advances best when knowledge is shared freely. Classification slows progress, creates unnecessary duplication, prevents the kind of collaboration that produces breakthroughs.

You’ve worked in an era when women in science faced enormous barriers. What advice would you give to young women entering STEM fields today?

Don’t ask permission. I spent too many years being grateful for opportunities, being the “nice” woman who didn’t make trouble. That’s a mistake. If you have good ideas, pursue them aggressively. If you develop expertise, demand recognition for it.

Build your own protective equipment – literally and metaphorically. I learned to supply my own safety gear because I couldn’t rely on institutions to protect me. Similarly, young women today need to build their own networks, their own sources of support. Don’t wait for established structures to change.

And document everything. Keep detailed records of your contributions. Too much scientific history gets rewritten by people who weren’t there, who didn’t do the work. Make sure your version of events survives.

Your uranium-thorium dating techniques are still used today. How does it feel to know that your methods continue to produce new discoveries?

Oh, it’s thrilling! Just last year I read about researchers using refined versions of my techniques to study ocean acidification patterns from 200,000 years ago. Climate scientists are using the same principles to understand how ocean currents might change as the planet warms.

Nuclear forensics experts use similar methods to trace contamination from weapons tests, from reactor accidents. It’s extraordinary how a technique developed to answer basic questions about seawater chemistry has become fundamental to understanding our planet’s past and future.

That’s perhaps the most satisfying aspect of a scientific career – you never know which small discovery will become crucial to solving problems you never imagined. The work lives on, continues to evolve, continues to surprise.

Finally, if you could correct one misconception about your career, what would it be?

That I was merely a technician who happened to be good with polonium. Yes, I developed exceptional technical skills – that was necessary for survival in my field. But I was also asking fundamental questions about atomic behaviour, about isotope separation, about environmental radioactivity.

The distinction between “technical” and “intellectual” work is often false, particularly in experimental physics. The people who dismiss careful technique as merely craft rather than science… they don’t understand how discovery actually happens. You need both theoretical insight and practical skill. The best advances come from people who refuse to accept that artificial separation.

I wasn’t just following recipes in some laboratory cookbook. I was designing new ways to understand the invisible architecture of matter itself. That my methods proved useful for bomb-making… that’s an accident of history, not the purpose of the work.

Science is about understanding how the world works. Everything else – applications, weapons, recognition, politics – that’s secondary. The polonium clock I developed will keep ticking in ocean sediments long after all of us are forgotten. That’s the real legacy.

Thank you, Dr Rona. Your story illuminates not just the development of nuclear science, but the human cost of political upheaval and the challenges faced by women working at the frontiers of knowledge.

Well, I hope it’s been illuminating rather than merely depressing. Science advances despite politics, despite prejudice, despite classification. The work finds a way to continue. That’s rather comforting, don’t you think?

Letters and emails

Our interview with Dr Elizabeth Rona has sparked remarkable interest from readers worldwide who want to explore her groundbreaking contributions to nuclear chemistry and the personal resilience that carried her through decades of scientific discovery. We’ve selected five letters and emails from our growing community who want to ask her more about her life, her work, and what she might say to those walking in her footsteps.

Leila Aboubakar, 34, Environmental Scientist, Lagos, Nigeria:
Dr Rona, your uranium-thorium dating work has become essential for understanding climate patterns in ancient ocean sediments. Given today’s urgent need to predict how warming oceans might behave, are there specific aspects of your marine radioactivity research that current climate scientists should revisit or expand upon?

Miss Aboubakar, your question strikes at the heart of something that has troubled me greatly in recent years. When I began measuring uranium and thorium concentrations in seawater back in the 1950s, we were simply trying to understand the basic chemistry of the oceans. Now I read that these same oceans are becoming more acidic, that temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates.

The technique I developed – measuring the disequilibrium between uranium-238 and its daughter products in marine sediments – that’s become your modern scientists’ window into past climate behaviour. But here’s what concerns me: we may not be asking the right questions of the data.

You see, my original work focused on the “steady state” assumption – that ocean chemistry remained relatively constant over geological time scales. But if your climate scientists are correct about the rapidity of current changes, then many of our baseline measurements from the 1960s and 70s might represent a very unusual period in ocean history, not the “normal” conditions we assumed.

I would urge today’s researchers to go back to some of the sediment cores we collected from the Scandinavian fjords – particularly those from the Gullmarsfjorden where I worked for twelve summers. These enclosed basins respond quickly to atmospheric changes, so they should show clear signatures of any accelerating acidification or warming patterns.

The specific isotope ratios I measured – thorium-230 to uranium-234 – these relationships change when ocean circulation patterns shift dramatically. If your warming oceans are disrupting the thermohaline circulation, as some scientists suggest, then the thorium deposition patterns should reflect that disruption within decades, not centuries.

But here’s the crucial point that modern researchers sometimes overlook: the precision of our measurements was limited by the counting equipment available to us. We were working with Geiger counters and primitive spectrometers, achieving perhaps 5-10% accuracy at best. Today’s mass spectrometry techniques could re-examine our archived samples and extract far more detailed information about short-term climate fluctuations.

I kept meticulous records of water temperatures, salinity measurements, even weather conditions during our sampling expeditions. Those contextual data might prove invaluable now for calibrating your climate models. The notebook from my 1967 Baltic Sea expedition, for instance, documented an unusually warm summer that matches patterns you’re seeing more frequently today.

The ocean chemistry techniques I developed were tools for understanding the past. But perhaps their greatest value now lies in providing a baseline for measuring just how rapidly your present is departing from what we once considered normal.

Amir Hosseini, 28, Nuclear Engineering PhD Student, Tehran, Iran:
You mentioned working with polonium-210 at extremely high activity levels for weapons research, yet your laboratory techniques kept you safe for decades. Could you walk us through the specific containment and handling protocols you developed that differ from standard radiation safety practices of your time?

Mr Hosseini, ah, now you’re asking about the real nitty-gritty! You know, when I was training those young fellows at Rochester for the Manhattan Project work, they kept asking me the same thing – “How do you handle something so deadly and still sleep at night?”

The key insight – and this took me years to develop – was understanding that polonium-210’s danger comes almost entirely from alpha emission. Alpha particles can’t penetrate paper, but if you inhale even microscopic amounts, they’ll destroy your lungs from the inside. So everything, absolutely everything, was about containment and ventilation.

My protocol differed fundamentally from the standard radium handling procedures most laboratories used. Radium work relied heavily on lead shielding because of the gamma radiation. But for polonium, the real enemy was airborne contamination. I designed what I called “negative pressure chambers” – sealed glove boxes with powerful ventilation systems that pulled air away from the work surface.

The electroplating process was particularly treacherous. When you’re depositing polonium onto silver foils at elevated temperatures, any tiny spatter or gas bubble could aerosolise the material. I developed a technique using magnetic stirrers instead of manual agitation, and I always worked with the solutions covered by thin films of oil to prevent surface volatilisation.

But here’s what the safety manuals never captured: the psychological discipline required. You cannot – absolutely cannot – allow yourself to become comfortable with the routine. I’ve seen experienced researchers grow careless after months of safe handling. They’d remove their masks too quickly, or forget to monitor their gloves for contamination.

I instituted what I called “paranoia protocols.” Every surface in my laboratory was surveyed daily with electroscopes. Every piece of equipment was considered contaminated until proven otherwise. I changed my clothing completely before leaving the laboratory – not just protective gear, but undergarments, stockings, everything.

The quantitative aspect was crucial too. With polonium sources exceeding 100 millicuries – activities that would be considered weapons-grade today – even a contamination event involving nanogram quantities could prove fatal. I developed sensitive detection methods using ionisation chambers that could detect contamination levels far below what Geiger counters could measure.

Most importantly, I never worked alone. Always had a colleague monitoring from outside the containment area, ready to initiate emergency procedures. The Manhattan Project safety officers adopted this buddy-system approach based on my recommendations.

You modern researchers have superior equipment, but the fundamental principle remains unchanged: respect the invisible danger, never underestimate it, and always assume your containment has failed until you prove otherwise.

Fernanda Silva, 41, Science Policy Researcher, São Paulo, Brazil:
Your career spanned multiple political upheavals – fleeing Nazi persecution, working on classified weapons research, then transitioning to peaceful oceanographic applications. How do you think the scientific community should balance national security concerns against the principle of open scientific collaboration?

Mrs Silva, you’ve raised perhaps the most troubling question of my entire career. The balance between national security and scientific openness… it’s a devil’s bargain that my generation of researchers helped create, and I’m not certain we fully understood what we were unleashing.

You see, when we began imposing secrecy in nuclear physics – and yes, it was we scientists who started this, not the military – we thought it would be temporary. A wartime necessity. Szilard convinced us to withhold publication of our fission results in 1940 because we knew the Germans were working on similar problems. It seemed patriotic, reasonable.

But once you begin compartmentalising knowledge, once you accept that some scientific information must be hidden “for the greater good,” you’ve crossed a line that’s extraordinarily difficult to uncross. The military officials who took control of our research during the Manhattan Project… they weren’t evil men, but they had a fundamentally different understanding of how knowledge should flow.

General Groves insisted on his “need to know” principle – even scientists working on the same project couldn’t share information freely. I saw brilliant researchers duplicating each other’s work because they weren’t allowed to communicate. It was maddening, inefficient, contrary to everything I understood about how science progresses.

Yet I participated. I gave them my polonium techniques without reservation, trained their assistants, helped them scale up production. Why? Because the alternative – fascist victory, Nazi atomic weapons – seemed far worse than scientific secrecy.

But here’s what troubles me most: once the war ended, the secrecy didn’t. It became institutionalised, permanent. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 created legal frameworks for classifying nuclear research that persist to this day. Scientists lost control of their own discoveries.

The damage to international collaboration has been… profound. Before the war, nuclear physics was gloriously international. Marie Curie shared radium samples with researchers worldwide. We published everything, built upon each other’s work regardless of nationality. That openness accelerated discovery in remarkable ways.

After 1945, nuclear science became nationalised, weaponised. Young researchers today don’t understand what we lost – the free exchange of ideas that once drove our field forward so rapidly.

My view now? The scientific community should maintain much stronger control over research that could have military applications. We shouldn’t simply hand our discoveries to government officials and hope they’ll use them wisely. Scientists have moral responsibilities that extend beyond national loyalty.

But we also can’t pretend that knowledge exists in a political vacuum. When I fled Nazi-occupied Europe, I understood viscerally how scientific advances could be perverted by totalitarian regimes. Complete openness in a world with such governments… that’s naïve, potentially catastrophic.

Perhaps the answer lies in international scientific institutions – organisations that transcend national boundaries but can still maintain appropriate restrictions. The early discussions about international control of atomic energy, before the Cold War hardened positions… those represented a missed opportunity that still haunts me.

We created this dilemma. My generation of nuclear scientists bears responsibility for finding better solutions than the crude secrecy regimes we helped establish.

Jonas Müller, 52, Science Historian, Munich, Germany:
What if the Radium Institute in Vienna had remained a thriving international research centre throughout the 1930s instead of being disrupted by Nazi policies? Do you think your polonium expertise might have developed along entirely different lines, perhaps focusing more on medical applications rather than weapons?

Mr Müller, you know, that’s a question that has kept me awake many nights over the decades. What might have been… if Stefan Meyer’s institute had remained the international centre it was in the 1920s and early 30s, if the Nazis hadn’t destroyed that remarkable community of researchers.

The Vienna Institute was truly special, you understand. We had scientists from across Europe – Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, even some Americans coming to study our techniques. The atmosphere was extraordinarily collaborative. Meyer encouraged us to share everything, to build upon each other’s work without regard for national boundaries or academic hierarchies.

If that environment had continued… I believe my polonium research would have taken an entirely different trajectory. You see, at Vienna we were already exploring medical applications quite seriously. Berta Karlik and I were investigating how alpha-emitting isotopes might be used for targeted cancer therapy – the idea being that you could deliver highly localised radiation doses without the broader tissue damage caused by external beam treatments.

The medical potential was enormous. Polonium-210’s short half-life – 138 days – makes it ideal for temporary implants. Strong enough to destroy tumour cells, but it decays quickly enough that long-term radiation exposure becomes minimal. We were collaborating with physicians at the Vienna General Hospital on preliminary studies.

But here’s the crucial difference: in a thriving, international Vienna Institute, we would have had access to much larger quantities of radium sources from which to extract polonium. Meyer had connections with suppliers across Europe. The scale of our medical research could have been far greater.

More importantly, we would have continued sharing our techniques freely with researchers worldwide. By 1940, instead of me being the only person who truly understood large-scale polonium preparation, there might have been dozens of experts scattered across different countries. The medical applications could have advanced rapidly.

Imagine – polonium-based treatments for various cancers, developed through international collaboration rather than wartime secrecy. The therapeutic techniques might have been perfected a decade or more before they actually were. And without the stigma of association with atomic weapons, public acceptance of radiation medicine might have developed much more quickly.

The irony is profound, isn’t it? The very research that ended up contributing to weapons of mass destruction… in a peaceful world, it might have saved thousands of lives through medical applications instead.

Sometimes I wonder if my greatest contribution to humanity would have been not perfecting polonium separation for the Manhattan Project, but rather developing it for healing instead of destruction. That alternative history haunts me more than you might imagine.

But then again, without the weapons research, would anyone have invested the resources necessary to achieve those medical breakthroughs? War, unfortunately, has always been a great accelerator of scientific progress.

Zoe Mitchell, 29, Marine Geochemist, Vancouver, Canada:
Beyond the technical achievements, I’m curious about your emotional relationship with radioactive materials. You spent decades handling substances that could kill you instantly, yet you speak about them almost fondly. How did you maintain that balance between healthy fear and scientific fascination throughout such a long career?

Miss Mitchell, what a perceptive question. You know, most people ask about the technical aspects, the safety protocols, the scientific discoveries. But you’ve touched on something quite personal – the emotional relationship with materials that could snuff out your life in an instant.

I suppose it began with wonder, really. When I first saw a polonium source glowing faintly in a darkened laboratory in Vienna, there was something almost… mystical about it. Here was matter itself transforming, releasing energy that had been locked away since the formation of the Earth. How could one not feel a sense of awe?

But fascination without respect is fatal in this business. I learned that lesson watching other researchers who became too comfortable, too casual. There was a fellow at the Institute – I won’t mention his name – who developed such confidence in his handling techniques that he stopped checking his equipment regularly. A tiny contamination on his laboratory coat… within two years, he was dead from what we’d now recognise as radiation-induced cancer.

The key insight came to me gradually: these materials are neither malevolent nor benevolent. They simply are. Polonium doesn’t “want” to kill you any more than a fire “wants” to burn you. Both follow natural laws with complete indifference to human welfare. Once you accept that fundamental impersonality, you can work with dangerous materials without emotional turmoil.

I developed what I called “respectful partnership” with my polonium sources. Each morning before beginning work, I would spend a few moments contemplating what I was about to handle – not with fear, but with the sort of careful attention a mountaineer gives to weather conditions or a surgeon gives to her instruments.

There’s something almost meditative about working with such precision requirements. When you’re electroplating polonium at exactly the right temperature, maintaining precise current densities, monitoring for the slightest deviation… your entire consciousness becomes focused on the immediate task. No room for anxiety, no space for careless thoughts. It’s rather like prayer, in a way.

The strange comfort came from routine, from competence built through years of careful practice. My hands knew the weight of safe containers, the sound of proper ventilation, the feel of uncontaminated surfaces. The materials became familiar colleagues rather than alien threats.

Perhaps that sounds peculiar to someone who works with ordinary seawater chemistry. But there’s something profoundly humbling about working at the very edge of what human beings can safely manipulate. It teaches you patience, precision, and a deep appreciation for the invisible forces that govern our universe.

The fear never completely disappears – and it shouldn’t. But it transforms into something more useful: vigilant respect for the awesome power contained in those tiny, glowing samples.

Reflection

Dr Elizabeth Rona died on 27th July 1981 at the age of 91 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee – a remarkable longevity for someone who spent decades handling some of the most dangerous radioactive materials known to science. Her story embodies the themes of perseverance, ingenuity, and the tragically overlooked nature of women’s contributions to nuclear science, particularly those who operated at the intersection of multiple forms of marginalization.

What emerges from this fictional conversation differs markedly from the sparse official record. Where histories typically frame her as a skilled technician who happened to possess useful polonium expertise, Rona’s own perspective reveals a theoretical innovator who coined fundamental terminology like “isotope labels” and “tracers,” developed safety protocols that became industry standards, and bridged the gap between pure research and practical application. Her account suggests that the traditional separation between “technical” and “intellectual” work has obscured the depth of her scientific reasoning and the breadth of her influence across multiple disciplines.

The historical record remains frustratingly incomplete, particularly regarding her classified wartime contributions and the full extent of her theoretical insights. Many of her innovations appear only in footnotes to more famous colleagues’ work, reflecting how institutional structures and classification systems have systematically erased women’s contributions to what became “big science.”

Today, Rona’s uranium-thorium dating techniques remain fundamental to climate science, with researchers using refined versions of her methods to understand ocean acidification patterns spanning hundreds of thousands of years. Her polonium separation protocols influenced modern nuclear forensics, whilst her marine radioactivity research underpins contemporary efforts to monitor nuclear contamination and trace ocean circulation changes. Modern practitioners continue building upon foundations she established, even when they remain unaware of her original contributions.

Perhaps most powerfully, Rona’s story illuminates how scientific progress often depends on individuals whose names never appear in textbooks – particularly women who developed crucial techniques whilst navigating exile, discrimination, and the machinery of wartime secrecy. Her fingerprints remain embedded in nuclear science’s infrastructure, a testament to how brilliant minds persist in shaping our understanding of the world, regardless of whether history bothers to remember their names.

Who have we missed?

This series is all about recovering the voices history left behind – and I’d love your help finding the next one. If there’s a woman in STEM you think deserves to be interviewed in this way – whether a forgotten inventor, unsung technician, or overlooked researcher – please share her story.

Email me at voxmeditantis@gmail.com or leave a comment below with your suggestion – even just a name is a great start. Let’s keep uncovering the women who shaped science and innovation, one conversation at a time.

Editorial Note: This interview is a fictional dramatisation created to explore the life and contributions of Dr Elizabeth Rona, the pioneering nuclear chemist whose work shaped both the Manhattan Project and modern marine geology. While grounded in extensive historical research and documented facts about her scientific achievements, personal experiences, and the broader context of 20th-century nuclear science, the conversations and specific quotes presented here are imaginative reconstructions designed to illuminate her remarkable but often overlooked legacy. Any dialogue, personal reflections, or technical explanations attributed to Dr Rona represent plausible interpretations of her documented work and historical circumstances, not verbatim historical records.

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