![]() Physicists and epidemiologists worked together to piece all these direct and indirect measurements into a reconstruction of the radiation doses that the people who donated the tissue samples would have received. So information about dairy consumption offered clues about how much radiation someone had been exposed to. For example, radioactive isotopes from the reactor fell into the surrounding fields and were eaten by grazing cows, transmitting the radiation to their milk and subsequently to the people who drank it. Researchers also did extensive interviews with residents about their indirect exposure. By contrast, the thyroid cancers in the Cancer Genome Atlas and in the control group of 81 unexposed people from the area were more likely to be caused by single-point mutations, where just one single base pair of the DNA is changed.Īfter the disaster, scientists monitored many of the communities near Chernobyl, as well as the workers who were tasked with cleaning up and encasing the radioactive reactor in a steel and concrete sarcophagus. They found that the cancer cases caused by radioactive iodine exposure following the meltdown had mutated genes by rupturing the twin strands of DNA and breaking them apart. “This adds to our foundational understanding of radiation and society,” he says. He says this research is an important reminder of the long-term consequences of human decisions, and hopes it can help guide future conversations about nuclear technology. “Each of these are very strong examples of what we’ve learned from situations that we never want to visit again,” says Stephen Cranock, an author on both papers and director of the division of cancer, epidemiology, and genetics at the National Cancer Institute. The second focused on thyroid cancer caused by radiation exposure and examined how radiation acts on DNA to cause the growth of cancerous tumors. The first paper tracked the effects of radiation on the children of people who were exposed and found that there were no transgenerational mutations that were passed down from those parents. In two papers published Thursday in Science, an international team of researchers took on two very different but important questions. Now, 35 years later, scientists are still uncovering the extent of the damage and starting to answer questions about the long-term legacy of radiation exposure on power plant workers, the people in the nearby community, and even their family members born years later. Smoke from the fire and a second explosion launched radioactive elements into the atmosphere, scattering them over the surrounding fields and towns. ![]() But the test went awry, starting a fire in a reactor and leading to one of the largest nuclear disasters in history. On this day in 1986, workers ran a safety test at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in northern Ukraine. ![]()
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