Nuclear Testing 50 Years Ago Still Affecting DNA Today

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted May 15, 2007 in DNA in General

Daniel Goldberg at the Medical Humanities Blog is hosting this week’s Grand Rounds (Vol 3, No 34). You may be asking: What is medical humanities? According to the New York University School of Medicine, medical humanities is an interdisciplinary field of humanities, social science, and the arts and their impact on medical education and practice. From what I understand, it’s the role medicine plays in people’s lives, society, and history.

Speaking of humanity and history, a New Zealand study has found that sailors who were exposed to radiation from nine nuclear tests conducted on Christmas and Malden Islands by the British in 1957 and 1958 have abnormally high rates of “rogue cells” that are evidence of long term genetic damage. According to the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association:

• Of 2,500 men surveyed in 1999 30% of the men had died, mostly in their fifties.
• In their grandchildren spina bifida rates are more than 5 times the usual rate for live births in the UK.
• More than 200 skeletal abnormalities were reported.
• More than 100 veterans children reported reproductive difficulties.

Leading Seaman Peter CH Evans recounts the day he saw the nuclear blast:

ZERO. Now.

This is it. God the heat! The flash! A groan went up from the men on the beach as they felt the heat and saw the flash through their hands. The voice from the Tannoy broke the silence.

“Stand up and face the Bomb. Stand up and face the Bomb”. The voice seemed quite excited.

Unbelievable. Face the bomb and meet your genetic doom. And it’s not just each sailor’s own personal demise, the mutated DNA in their germ cells (sperm or eggs) affected their descendents’ health too. In 2002, scientists found that the rate of germline mutations doubled after exposure to radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons tests in the Soviet Union. For these families, the effects of nuclear radiation will be felt for generations to come.

Tags: nuclear tests, mutations, dna, genetics, genes, genome, genomics, nuclear testing, christmas island, health, medicine

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Comment by Brian

2007-05-15 19:40:33

What about all those poor scientists who tested the effect of radiation on fruit flies by putting them in the X-ray beam? Those poor guys all got cancer because they got their hands too close to the beam.

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