Eric Voice

In his obituary of my friend Eric Voice, writes Don Newton, Tam Dalyell reinforces the notion that Eric (with, incidentally, 11 others, including myself) was injected with a short-lived isotope of plutonium in order to gauge its effect on his health. Our real purpose was to identify where, and for how long, plutonium remained in the body, in order to inform assessments of risk from occupational exposure to much larger quantities of the long-lived material.

It's true that Eric did little to discourage the misconception, because he felt that his survival unscathed suited his contention that nobody had ever been harmed by plutonium. In this he was to be proved wrong, to judge from recent evidence of mortality among workers exposed in the former Soviet Union.