Program Description
Event Details
Discover information on historical people, places, or things.
Historian Luke Ritter tells the remarkable story of a group of citizens and scientists in St. Louis who collected over 320,000 baby teeth to measure the uptake of nuclear fallout in children during the era of above-ground nuclear weapons tests, known as the "St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey."
John F. Kennedy's administration paid special attention to the Baby Tooth Survey and even sought out Director Louise Reiss's council before finally signing the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. The study ended in 1969, once scientists confirmed that the uptake of nuclear fallout had decreased after the ban on aboveground tests.
The Radiation and Public Health Project in New York City recently reawakened the Baby Tooth Study, however, acquiring 50,000 of the remaining teeth donated 60 years ago for analysis at Harvard University.
Join us for this fascinating bit of local history that has impacted the world and continues to be reviewed.
About the presenter:
Dr. Luke Ritter is an Assistant Professor at St. Louis Community College - Forest Park.
He is the author of "Mothers Against the Bomb: The Baby Tooth Survey and the Nuclear Test Ban Movement in St. Louis, 1954-1969," which appeared in the Missouri Historical Review in 2018. He is featured in a forthcoming documentary about nuclear fallout in the U.S., titled Silent Fallout (2025).
He is the editor of American Conspiracism: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Routledge 2024). He is the author of Inventing America's First Immigration Crisis: Political Nativism in the Antebellum West (Fordham 2021) and over fourteen peer-reviewed scholarly articles.
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