Radioactive Material in Two Graduate Students' Apartment Baffles Columbia

["Jacobus, John (OD)" <JJacobus@ors.od.nih.gov>]

This is from today's New York Times. -- John

February 29, 2000

Radioactive Material in Two Graduate Students' Apartment Baffles Columbia 
 
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
It is a puzzle baffling enough to furrow the brow of scholarly types, and
serious enough to raise concerns of city and federal officials about a security
lapse at biological research laboratories using nuclear materials. 

Somehow, several weeks ago, a highly radioactive stain of phosphorus-32 ended up
on a pillow belonging to a young married couple on the Upper West Side. The
couple are graduate students at Columbia University, she a doctoral candidate in
biology, he pursuing a Ph.D. in computer science. 

The husband and wife, Lei Liu and Yao Cheng, who met at Columbia while on
student visas from China, said in interviews yesterday and in briefings with
investigators that they had reported the suspicious radiation in their
university-owned apartment at 542 West 112th Street, and that they had had
nothing to do with the radioactive material that was found. 

But Columbia's radiation safety inspectors and radiation experts at the New York
City Health Department suspect otherwise. 

According to identical letters sent by the university administration to the
couple on Feb. 24, the students have been barred from the campus and suspended
because an investigation determined that they "appear to have some
responsibility for the radiation incident." 

The letters and a Feb. 21 report on the radiation stain by the university's
office of environmental health and radiation safety have been distributed widely
within the university administration. 

Copies were provided to the city's Health Department, which is responsible for
investigating releases of radiation. 

Columbia officials said there was no indication that the couple or anyone else
was harmed by the phosphorus-32, which is widely used to diagnose and treat
certain diseases and in biology experiments to mark cells or bits of genetic
material. The bedroom pillow was removed two weeks ago, and the apartment has
since been inspected several times with no new signs of radiation, Columbia
officials said. Only very low levels of contamination were found on Ms. Cheng
and Mr. Liu, officials said: traces of phosphorus-32 on their hands and hair,
and on Ms. Cheng's chin. 

But university officials and the Health Department were engaged yesterday in an
intensive investigation of how the material left a laboratory -- at Columbia or
elsewhere, they said -- and ended up emitting hazardous levels of radiation on a
bedroom pillow in an eighth-floor apartment. 

In the report, Columbia's investigators concluded that the stain must have been
intentionally deposited on the pillow, that the phosphorus was too highly
concentrated to have been a result of some unknowing swipe by a contaminated
hand, for example. The report also noted that the lack of any other similarly
tainted places in the apartment suggested that no one had touched the pillow
after it had been contaminated. 

The report concluded: "The amount of contamination on the pillowcase immediately
raised the suspicion that the contamination was not an accidental event, but
rather the result of a deliberate act." 

Sandra Mullin, a spokeswoman for the Health Department, said, "What we found is
very consistent with Columbia's own investigation." 

Even though phosphorus-32 cannot legally be possessed without a Health
Department license for radioactive materials, the Health Department has not
referred the case to prosecutors or the police, preferring to wait for the
university to continue with its inquiry, Ms. Mullin said. A university panel of
faculty members and graduate students is to meet with the couple next week to
hear the case and recommend possible discipline. 

Ms. Cheng and Mr. Liu say they have done nothing wrong. 

"I never brought radioactive substances home, and we don't know how the pillow
became radioactive," said Ms. Cheng, sitting in their apartment in a 10-story
dormitory on 112th Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. The university
has not asked them to move. 

"I want to continue my studies," Mr. Liu said, adding, "I don't want to upset
the university." 
University officials have yet to find any reason or opportunity for someone
other than the couple to have put the material on the pillow, said Virgil
Renzulli, a spokesman for Columbia. "How do you get it into a locked apartment?"
he asked. 

The incident began to unfold on Feb. 8, according to the report by Columbia's
environmental health and radiation safety department. On that day, a routine
check after Ms. Cheng did some laboratory work showed she had slight
contamination on her hands and chin, and on one spot on her hair. 

The report said she worked in a complex of laboratories in the Fairchild
building at the north end of Columbia's main campus. She worked on a floor where
phosphorus-32 is used in many experiments, so many that new sets of vials are
ordered every week, said one official involved in investigating the matter. 

The day after the routine tests showed some contamination, the report said, Ms.
Cheng borrowed a Geiger counter from the laboratory and scanned her apartment,
where she told investigators that one spot on one pillow was "very hot." 

Follow-up tests by radiation specialists from the university and the city's
Health Department confirmed that one spot on the surface of a pillow was very
radioactive. 

Phosphorus-32 used in biological work is stored in a liquid solution in vials
typically holding 0.25 milliliters of the isotope, and investigators have
estimated that the contents of one vial were poured onto the pillow. The stain
was emitting radioactivity at 200 millirems an hour, said officials involved in
the investigation. 

The normal background level of radiation, which varies by altitude, averages
about 0.02 millirems an hour in New York, one ten-thousandth of the amount
radiating from the surface of the pillow. That average totals 175 millirems a
year. The acceptable safe limit for the public is 100 millirems a year above
that, according to federal health officials. 

The incident raised questions, both inside the investigation and in the
neighborhood around the university, about how the phosphorus-32 ended up on a
pillow. 

The federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission has tracked previous accidental and
intentional mishandling of phosphorus-32 at other universities and laboratories,
including incidents at Harvard, Brown and the National Institutes of Health. In
several cases, phosphorus-32 was slipped into food or drink in an effort to
poison someone. 

Ms. Mullin at the City Health Department said that the incident had been
described in an initial verbal report to the federal agency, but that no formal
written report had yet been filed. 
Columbia officials said yesterday that they were certain that the material could
not have come from Yao Cheng's laboratory, where an inventory turned up no
shortages. 

Some residents and workers in the couple's Columbia dorm were disturbed to hear
that an apartment in the building had been tainted with radioactivity. 

"I am reporting this to my union right now," said the building superintendent,
Rudy Hamarik, 48, who has worked in the dorm for 23 years. He and a security
guard at the building said they had never been informed about the contamination.


Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company 
  
. . . 

Truth is so precious that she must often be attended by a bodyguard of lies.
--Winston Churchill

John Jacobus, MS
Health Physicist
National Institutes of Health
Radiation Safety Branch, Building 21
21 Wilson Drive, MSC 6780
Bethesda, MD  20892-6780
Phone: 301-496-5774      Fax: 301-496-3544
jjacobus@exchange.nih.gov (W)
jenday1@email.msn.com (H)
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