Then there is the anecdote about the founder, spotting a woman lip-pointing, telling her not to do that.
At this point, a person who actually cared about the welfare of their employees would have called a halt and investigated the practice, maybe held some training, set up some new rules.
Instead, we see episodes of making CYA rules meant to be broken, and only when there might some threat of litigation or government intervention.
However, I do agree that the author is placing blame through the eyes of hindsight: the amounts of radium used in the paints were miniscule, compared to the amounts being handled by the male scientists; it was possible that the problem was with the mesothorium and not radium itself (in fact, the evidence provided suggests that the jaw necrosis is a mesothorium-induced syndrome, whereas the sicknesses caused by the radium were mostly longer-term). And let us face it: in this modern day and age of "Fake News", "Flat Earths" and conspiracies around every corner, can we deny that there are people who will doggedly adhere to a belief even when there is an overwhelming pile of evidence proving otherwise?
|