Though ostensibly free of associations, the biohazard symbol arguably benefited from its similarity to the trefoil ionizing radiation warning symbol developed a number of years prior. This simpler predecessor was created at the University of California, Berkeley. Nels Garden, who was head of the Health Chemistry Group at the Radiation Laboratory at the time, later recalled that “a number of people in the group took an interest in suggesting different motifs, and the one arousing the most interest was a design which was supposed to represent activity radiating from an atom.” In hindsight, one
...more
