TRANSCRIPT:
You’re listening to Consilience, a podcast from The Scientist. I’m Ben Henry. This month, we’re talking cancer. First, the story of why some people think burnt toast will give you cancer. And second, the man who turned folk medicine into modern cancer treatments.
“It was in September in '97, when they found paralyzed cows...and they found dead fish in the fish culture.”
That’s Margareta Tornqvist. The grim scene she’s describing was discovered near a construction site in Sweden, where a tunnel was being dug for a railroad When railway company executives heard about these mysteriously afflicted animals, they were concerned that they might be to blame.
That’s when they called Tornqvist, a chemist at Stockholm University who studies pollutants.
My colleague Diana Kwon spoke to Tornqvist for a story in the April issue of The Scientist.
“We were contacted, or I was contacted from this railway company—if we could ...
