Harvard Has My Teeth

Our email inboxes are crammed with messages from people we’ve never met. The vast majority are never opened.

If an email isn’t opened, it won’t be read. A compelling subject line will grab a prospect’s attention and get them to click.

I spent a good chunk of my sales career emailing strangers in an effort to start conversations. I admire a good subject line, and will reward it with my attention.

I recently received an email with the subject line “We Have Your Baby Teeth!” That line got me to stop scrolling long enough to see where it came from.

It came from a mailbox at Harvard.edu. I am not a Harvard alum — when it came time to choose a college, they did not invite me to attend.

I opened the message.

“Hello,” it began. “Are you Philip Bernstein, son of Neil?”

Yep, that’s me.

Turns out that at some point in the distant past, my parents donated my precious teeth to something called The Baby Teeth Survey. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the study…

…took 12 years. It involved thousands of school-age children and the collection of some 320,000 tiny teeth. The effort was in search of an answer to one somber question: Was radioactive fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing being absorbed by children in their bones and teeth?

Overwhelmingly, the answer to the question was yes. The study found that children born in St. Louis at the height of the Cold War in 1963 had 50 times as much strontium 90, a radioactive isotope found in bomb fallout and at nuclear reactors, in their teeth as children born in 1950 — before most of the atomic tests. Results ultimately contributed to the signing of an international treaty to ban atmospheric nuclear weapons testing.

I wasn’t born in St. Louis, but I spent the bulk of my childhood and adolescence in the St. Louis area.

So my mouth is probably a strontium 90 theme park.

Worth noting: almost 20 years ago, I had a cancerous tumor removed from my right lung. A year later, a pre-cancerous tumor was removed from my pancreas. It does make one wonder. And then there’s the Parkinson’s thing.

The Baby Teeth Survey project ended in 1970. 40 years later, someone found 85,000 teeth , including mine, in shoeboxes on the Washington University campus in St. Louis. Those teeth had not been analyzed.

After several twists and turns, the study’s been revived… this time by Harvard.

For those of us who agree to participate, Harvard (did you hear that, Mom? HARVARD!) plans to follow us, and our health, as we age — checking in every few years to see how we’re doing. Earlier this week I spent an hour filling out a lifestyle/health survey and taking an online cognitive test.

As I cast about for what may have caused my Parkinson’s — genetics? Pesticides? Concussions? — I can add “nuclear fallout” to the list of potential instigators.

Bonus For Those Who Read to the Bottom

The Chairman of the Board completely rewrites Paul Simon’s lyrics to “Mrs. Robinson,” and nobody has the guts to tell him he can’t. Ding ding ding!

According to Andrew Hickey’s 500 Songs podcast, Sly Stone and Doris Day were rumored to have had an affair in the early 70’s. I’ve seen no evidence to confirm or deny the report, but I really like Sly’s cover of “Que Sera, Sera.”