Week 6--Molecular Weight

Alkali Earth Metal: Radium

Symbol Ra, Atomic number 88
highly radioactive and chemically reactive
mined from Uranium


Commercial uses:

Radium was formerly used in self-luminous paints for watches, nuclear panels, aircraft switches, clocks, and instrument dials. Due to its instability, it's luminescent and has a faint blue glow.

Radium was once an additive in products such as toothpaste, hair creams, and even food items due to its supposed curative powers. Such products soon fell out of vogue and were prohibited by authorities in many countries after it was discovered they could have serious adverse health effects.

In the mid-1920s, a lawsuit was filed against the United States Radium Corporation by five dying "Radium Girl" dial painters who had painted radium-based luminous paint on the dials of watches and clocks. The dial painters routinely licked their brushes to give them a fine point, thereby ingesting radium. Their exposure to radium caused serious health effects which included sores, anemia, and bone cancer. This is because radium is treated as calcium by the body, and deposited in the bones, where radioactivity degrades marrow and can mutate bone cells.

Medical uses:

The isotope 223Ra (under the trade name Xofigo) was approved by the FDA in 2013 for use in medicine as a cancer treatment of bone metastasis.

Avogadro's Hypothesis/Hypotheses

A hypothesis is an explanation of a phenomenon, one that still can be rigorously tested as opposed to a scientific theory, which has undergone extensive testing and is generally accepted as an accurate description of the observation.

Avogadro hypothesized that two volumes of gas of the same volume at the same temperature and pressure have the same amount of molecules. I'm not sure how I would test this, but I understand how an equal volume of, say, hydrogen and nitrogen have the same number of molecules when they are at the same temperature and pressure.

I also see that it took 50 years for Avogadro's Hypothesis to be accepted as it was refuted for years by Dalton's theory.  Even though Avogadro's work holds up with a more thorough understanding of molecules and bonding principles, it still took time to be tested and become the standard of thought.

Molecular Medicine

"The molecular medicine perspective emphasizes cellular and molecular phenomena and interventions rather than the previous conceptual and observational focus on patients and their organs."

With advances in medicine and biochemistry, molecular medicine allows for treatments of diseases on a micro level, ideally, with the benefits of doing less harm to the individual and being able to specifically target disease or malfunctioning cells. Another benefit is the compliance with easier administration of treatments as with inhalers for pulmonary diseases. The downside could be controlling people without their consent, or even children by their parents without understanding the long term effects of treatments. 

Another major side effect is bypassing treating the individual as a whole, as does Chinese medicine. If one misses treating the underlying causes, whether they be physical and/or emotional, the disease can reoccur.  Also,   strengthening underlying constitutional weaknesses is key to long term health and cures as well.