It’s been a stock trope of post-apocalyptic fiction since at least the late 1950s, when Walter M Miller published his classic A Canticle for Liebowitz. In Miller’s book, even a thousand years after a nuclear war, mutants like the two-headed Mrs Grales persist, like a nuclear Mark of Cain. More recently, films like Mad Max: Fury Road portray a poisoned wasteland whose inhabitants are plagued by generations of deadly mutation.
The closest the world has ever come to such a post-apocalyptic scenario was the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster. From “re-wilding” to the effects of fallout, Chernobyl has become something of a laboratory for studying the long-term effects of radiation exposure.
A new study suggests that the generational mutants of post-apocalyptic stories may well be just fiction.
In two landmark studies, researchers have used cutting-edge genomic tools to investigate the potential health effects of exposure to ionizing radiation, a known carcinogen, from the 1986 accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine. One study found no evidence that radiation exposure to parents resulted in new genetic changes being passed from parent to child. The second study documented the genetic changes in the tumors of people who developed thyroid cancer after being exposed as children or fetuses to the radiation released by the accident.
The second study analyses the cancer effects on people actually exposed to radiation, an important field of study. But it is the first that has more intriguing possibilities regarding generational effects.
“Scientific questions about the effects of radiation on human health have been investigated since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and have been raised again by Chernobyl and by the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami in Fukushima, Japan,” said Stephen J. Chanock, M.D., director of NCI’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics (DCEG)[…]
The first study investigated the long-standing question of whether radiation exposure results in genetic changes that can be passed from parent to offspring, as has been suggested by some studies in animals. To answer this question, Dr. Chanock and his colleagues analyzed the complete genomes of 130 people born between 1987 and 2002 and their 105 mother-father pairs.
One or both of the parents had been workers who helped clean up from the accident or had been evacuated because they lived in close proximity to the accident site. Each parent was evaluated for protracted exposure to ionizing radiation, which may have occurred through the consumption of contaminated milk (that is, milk from cows that grazed on pastures that had been contaminated by radioactive fallout). The mothers and fathers experienced a range of radiation doses.
The long-term assumption has been that radiation exposure might not just be detrimental to the individual exposed, but their descendants.
The researchers analyzed the genomes of adult children for an increase in a particular type of inherited genetic change known as de novo mutations. De novo mutations are genetic changes that arise randomly in a person’s gametes (sperm and eggs) and can be transmitted to their offspring but are not observed in the parents.
The results may be somewhat surprising.
For the range of radiation exposures experienced by the parents in the study, there was no evidence from the whole-genome sequencing data of an increase in the number or types of de novo mutations in their children born between 46 weeks and 15 years after the accident. The number of de novo mutations observed in these children were highly similar to those of the general population with comparable characteristics. As a result, the findings suggest that the ionizing radiation exposure from the accident had a minimal, if any, impact on the health of the subsequent generation.
“We view these results as very reassuring for people who were living in Fukushima at the time of the accident in 2011,” said Dr. Chanock. “The radiation doses in Japan are known to have been lower than those recorded at Chernobyl.”
Science Daily
Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth at Greenpeace etc.
When some have touted nuclear energy as the only current viable replacement for fossil fuels, the standard response has been “nuclear is too dangerous”. Yet, per kilowatt-hour, nuclear has proved to be one of the safest energy technologies of all.
The new study has removed yet another plank from under the soap box of anti-nuclear activists.
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