"Salad with gamma rays": a popular science article

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When I started my job as Coordinator of Communication of Science at the Nuclear Sciences Institute of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), I was asked to write about the irradiator, which is located inside the Institute. Outside the institute, very few people knew that it housed this machine, which works with radioactive material, and which is used for pacific purposes.

The person who runs the area where the machine is located, Dr. Epifanio Cruz, is an expert on radiological security and management of radioactive material. However, he had never been interested in communicating his work.

The scientific articles about the irradiator are extremely technical, and impossible to understand for somebody who is not a physicist or a chemist. Hence, in order to write about the subject I carried out long interviews with Dr. Cruz, whom I asked to tell me about the uses of the machine and all the stories related to his work he could think of. That's how I learned that the irradiator was not only used to sterilize food for human consumption, and to sanitize material for medical use, but also to rid musical instruments of plagues.

Cobalt-60 in the irradiator of the Nuclear Sciences Institute

The story that Epifanio told me was that of a famous Russian violinist in Mexico, whose instrument had a termite plague. The musician's violin was as expensive as a house. Any chemical applied directly to the instrument could damage the sound forever. Dr. Cruz calculated the necessary dose of gamma rays, emitted by the radioactive Cobalt-60 which makes the machine work, so that the violin would be rid of the termites. 

After the irradiation session, the violin was indeed rid of the plague, without any damage to its sound. As a present to thank Dr. Cruz for his help, the violinist gave him two tickets to hear him play the irradiated violin in a concert hall.

 Based on this story, I decided to write the popular science article entitled "Salad with gamma rays", which talks about all the uses of the irradiator, such as disinfecting make-up or preserving the food astronauts eat in space. I wrote the article together with my student David Venegas, since it is very important to me to teach young, interested people to communicate science. The article was published in the popular science magazine ¿Cómo ves?, published by the National Autonomous University of Mexico and distributed throughout the country.

This article won the first prize of the First National Scientific Journalism and Communication of Science Contest, run by the National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT), a government agency in charge of financing most science projects in Mexico; this contest is the most important of its kind in the country. The article (in Spanish) can be consulted in this link: Salad with gamma rays.

To complement the work of this article, my team and I created a small pamphlet, which is handed out to all the visitors to the irradiator.

I also published an article with the same subject in Publimetro, a free newspaper which is distributed in Mexico City and has the widest circulation of any newspaper in the city.

As a result of this effort, the story of the irradiator has appeared widely in a number of newspapers, TV shows and radio shows. For instance, the mexican journalist Guillermo Cárdenas reproduced the story in the El Universal newspaper, and I was invited to appear on a radio show with a well-known radio presenter.

I usually take this case as an example of how a good anecdote can be used to relate a very technical subject to the context of the general audience. In this way, the use of literary tools in communication of science can be powerful and effective.