The question of whether radium can cure cancer is rooted in a discovery made over a century ago. In 1898, physicists Marie and Pierre Curie isolated Radium (Ra), an element whose intense radioactivity instantly captured the world’s imagination. It was immediately perceived as a miracle element and a supposed panacea for many diseases. While raw radium itself is not a cancer cure today, its discovery laid the foundational principle for modern radiation oncology: the use of controlled energy to destroy malignant cells.
The Dangerous History of Radium in Medicine
Following its discovery, radium became the subject of widespread, unregulated commercial exploitation, leading to a dark era of medical quackery in the early 1900s. Manufacturers incorporated the glowing element into countless consumer products, falsely claiming restorative and curative properties. These products ranged from radioactive face creams and toothpaste to drinking water tonics, which were sold as elixirs for general health.
One of the most infamous examples was Radithor, a patent medicine containing dissolved radium-226 and radium-228 isotopes. Wealthy industrialist Eben Byers consumed approximately 1,400 bottles of this tonic, believing it would treat a persistent arm injury. He ultimately died in 1932 from acute radium poisoning, which caused his jawbone to disintegrate and riddled his body with radiation-induced cancers.
A separate industrial tragedy involved the “Radium Girls,” female factory workers who painted luminous watch dials with radium-laced paint. To achieve a fine point, they were instructed to “point” their brushes with their lips, inadvertently ingesting the paint. Radium is chemically similar to calcium, causing it to accumulate permanently in the bones, where it continuously emitted destructive radiation. These public tragedies established the long-term toxicity of crude radium and led to its eventual ban in most medical and consumer products.
Understanding Radium’s Cellular Impact
The initial therapeutic attempts with radium were based on the scientific principle that its emissions could destroy rapidly dividing cancer cells. Radium-226 decays by emitting three types of radiation: alpha, beta, and gamma particles, all of which are forms of ionizing radiation. Ionizing radiation carries enough energy to knock electrons out of atoms, creating ions that disrupt the cell’s internal chemistry. This energy directly smashes the strands of cellular DNA, often causing irreparable double-strand breaks.
Radiation also causes indirect damage by splitting water molecules within the cell, generating highly reactive free radicals that further attack the DNA and other cellular structures. The destructive power of radium lies primarily in its alpha particles, which are the most damaging type of radiation but have a very short range, traveling only the distance of a few cells. When ingested, radium-226 becomes fixed within the bone, and its powerful, short-range alpha particles continuously bombard the surrounding bone marrow and tissue for its entire 1,600-year half-life. This uncontrollable tissue destruction is why raw radium is no longer used.
Modern Applications of Radioactive Treatment
Modern cancer treatment has refined the destructive principle of radiation into highly precise and controlled therapies. The field moved away from long-lived, toxic isotopes like Radium-226 to safer, artificially produced radioisotopes with tailored properties. Today, the two main forms of delivery are External Beam Radiation Therapy (EBRT) and Brachytherapy.
EBRT uses a machine called a linear accelerator to fire high-energy beams, often X-rays, into the tumor from outside the body. This process is meticulously planned using imaging technology to ensure the radiation dose is focused on the tumor while minimizing exposure to healthy tissue, often delivered in multiple smaller doses over several weeks.
Brachytherapy, or internal radiation, involves placing small, encapsulated radioactive sources directly into or immediately next to the tumor. This technique, which traces its roots back to the early radium use, allows for an extremely high, localized dose of radiation to the cancer with a rapid dose fall-off, sparing adjacent organs. Modern brachytherapy uses isotopes like Iridium-192, Cesium-131, or Palladium-103, which have shorter half-lives and are safely contained in seeds or catheters.
A specialized, highly controlled form of modern treatment is Targeted Alpha Therapy (TAT), which utilizes a new generation of radioactive drugs. For instance, the isotope Radium-223 (Ra-223) is approved for treating bone metastases, particularly in prostate cancer. Like the older radium, Ra-223 mimics calcium and is selectively incorporated into metastatic sites, delivering high-energy alpha particles directly to the cancer cells while limiting damage to the surrounding healthy bone marrow. Another systemic therapy uses Iodine-131 (I-131), which the thyroid gland naturally absorbs to deliver a targeted beta-particle dose to destroy thyroid cancer cells.