In 1953, under a $22,000 research grant from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Dr. Isabel Tipton of the UT Physics Department and her research staff mined with a spectrograph in an effort to find, identify, and measure all metallic elements present in tissue and bone. Previously unmeasured in human tissue, cadmium (the tin-white poisonous metal) was found in concentrations of more than one thousand parts per million in ashed kidneys.