18. It is amazing how long it took for the reality of radiation sickness to dawn. One of the most famous cases of death-by-radiation was that of Eben Byers, a wealthy industrialist and amateur golf champion. In 1927, coming home from the Harvard-Yale football game, he fell out of his berth on a chartered train and hurt his arm. His doctor prescribed Radithor, a solution of radium in water, advertised as stimulating to the endocrine system. Byers felt a lot better after drinking just one bottle. Reasoning that if a little Radithor was good, then a lot of it would be extraordinary, Byers drank 1,400 bottles of the stuff, subjecting himself to many times the acute radiation lethal dose. He stopped taking it in 1930, but by that time his bones were dissolving. His long bones crumbled apart, he lost his teeth, then his jaw, and holes developed in his skull. He died in agony on March 31, 1932. The scientific community was still in denial in 1945 when the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Most of the scientists who worked on the bomb project believed that people would be killed by the shock-wave of the explosion and not by radiation. It would require an assessment of bomb casualties to finally clarify the effects of high radiation on human beings.