Science: Hot Antlers

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ANTLERS NEEDED, read the notice in the bulletin of New Mexico's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Dr Ernest C. Anderson of Los Alamos' Biomedical Research Group wants elk or deer antlers, asks prospective donors to describe their antlers first by letter, giving year and place where they were collected.

Fact is that antlers are superb collectors of radioactive fallout. Like bones, antlers are made largely of calcium compounds, and radioactive strontium behaves chemically like calcium. Deer ingest strontium with their forage. In slowly maturing humans, only a small part of the skeleton is built each year, and therefore human bone shows an averaging of strontium over many years. But a deer's antlers are grown afresh each year, concentrating in a handy package a calcium-strontium mixture that neatly records the prevalence of strontium for that year alone.

British scientists are also collecting antlers, especially from the Scottish Isles, whose damp green hills are apt to be relatively rich in fallout material dumped on them by Scotland's heavy rains. In this week's Nature two scientists from Glasgow's Royal College of Science and Technology report on an antler taken on the Island of Islay in 1957. It proved to have 126 micromicrocuries of strontium radioactivity per gram of calcium. A cross section cut from it and laid on X-ray film for 82 days gave off enough atomic radiation to take a sharp picture of itself. For contrast, an antler that grew in the same place in 1952, before the H-bomb tests, showed only 11.2 micromicrocuries of radioactivity.

If enough antlers can be accumulated and analyzed, British and U.S. scientists will be able to make rough maps of the distribution and intensity of fallout—at least in those areas where deer and elk still roam.