Epistemophilia: take a ride on heavy metal

Nope not the movie (although I learned recently that squabbling over the music rights kept it out of the DVD market for 14 years.) I was listening to a Brain Stuff podcast on how smoking affects the fetus and they mentioned that smoke contained the heavy metals cadmium and arsenic and I thought--wait, arsenic isn't even a metal. It's a metalloid. And cadmium is kind of in the middle of the transition metals at #48. It's below tin at #50. How are these heavy? And it occurred to me that although I had heard the term many times, I didn't really know what the definition was. I had assumed it was anything of a certain atomic weight-like at the bottom right of the table. Wrong.

(and obviously bismuth is fairly heavy and isn't toxic...)

It turns out there isn't a very good or standard definition. In medical terms, a "heavy metal" is any poisonous metal regardless of its atomic weight. This means that beryllium at #4 is a heavy metal. And, yes, it means arsenic is included even though it's only kinda sorta a metal.

I was only vaguely aware of cadmium being poisonous. It's a common impurity in zinc ores. And excess cadmium can cause something called itai-itai disease (which means "ouch ouch" in Japanese) which causes your bones to soften and kidney failure. It was first discovered, appropriately, in Japan on the island of Honshu. The outbreak was caused by miners polluting local water supplies. This went on from around 1912 until 1946 when measures were started to eliminate the pollution (it also killed all the fish.) Cadmium was not seriously suspected as the cause of the disease until the mid 1950's. The victims eventually sued and won but it wasn't until the early 70's.

I also listened to a Do Nothing But Read about Gothic horror. Usually I like this podcast but I got agitated when one of the podcasters mentioned that Bram Stoker wasn't able to copyright Dracula so everyone stole the character without impunity. The story of the original Nosferatu movie is fairly well known though and contradicts that. Stoker's widow sued for copyright infringement. And eventually won. The prints were all to have been destroyed but some weren't luckily as it's very influential. It also introduced the idea of vampires being killed by sunlight (not Stoker) which writers have been using ever since. Up until Stephenie Meyer that is.

(Florence Stoker wasn't a bad lady. Dracula was just her only source of income.) 

Ok, did some more googling. The podcast got it sort of right. Stoker failed to follow proper copyright law and it was never copyrighted in the States. However, in the UK and other countries per the Berne Convention, it was considered to be copyrighted. Most countries, including the US, are signatories on the Berne Convention. The US did not join, however, until 1989.

The good news is that Universal negotiated with and paid Florence Stoker for the rights to Dracula when they made the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi, even though they didn't have to.

So, I heard two podcasts that I feared contained bad data but they didn't. Sweet.