Join us on Friday, October 3, 2025 at noon PT for our free Scholar Series. Jeffrey Sanders will be presenting The Body is an Archive: Unearthing Hidden Histories of Radiation and Public Trust Through Baby Teeth. Register here.
What can a child’s tooth reveal about history, risk, and trust in science? In this talk, Professor Jeffrey Sanders will trace how the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey turned thousands of donated teeth into powerful evidence that Cold War nuclear fallout was entering children’s bones—evidence that helped secure the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. He follows the surprising afterlives of this archive, from rediscovery in a New Jersey garage to cutting-edge research today that uses lasers to link early exposures to later health effects. Along the way, he asks enduring questions about science, activism, and public trust: Who gets to measure risk, control knowledge, and decide what stories our bodies can still tell?
Jeffrey Craig Sanders is Professor of History at Washington State University, where he teaches courses in modern U.S. and environmental history. He is the author of Razing Kids: Youth, Environment, and the Postwar American West (Cambridge, 2020) and “History Uncontained at the B Reactor” in Making the Unseen Visible: Science and the Contested Histories of Radiation Exposure (Oregon State University Press, 2023). He is currently at work on a book-length project that examines the environmental and cultural history of Strontium-90.
The Nuclear Waste Scholar Series is funded through a Public Participation Grant from the WA State Department of Ecology.