The Dose And The Poison

Todd Frankel: LAWRENCE, Kan. — The wind whistled innocently through the opening in the sliding glass door. Rushing in from a buttermilk sky, it gave no hint of radioactive traces from damaged nuclear reactors thousands of miles away.

The old man was not afraid. He welcomed any radiation that might blow in. He would have risen from his blue recliner in the living room and opened his arms to the invisible rays if he could somehow know they were there.

Don Luckey is 91. He has a full face and white beard. His blue eyes are failing. His hearing is fading. His balance, he recently noticed, has grown unsteady. He's getting toward the end, near as he can tell.

But he has work still to do, work on radiation begun 50 years ago as a respected biochemist at the University of Missouri-Columbia. His studies on antibiotics and pesticides earned him acclaim. But his work on radiation had always been controversial, running so against the established thinking, even as resistance has softened with time. He thought he was done with it. In his garage, boxes of research wait for shipping to a school repository. But then the invisible rays spilled from those reactors in Japan, seeding fresh worry.