If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/07/17/156915881/if-you-are-hit-by-two-atomic-bombs-should-you-have-kids

by tokenadult • 14 years ago

49 27 14 years ago

npr.org

Zenst• 14 years ago

You can certainly try as that is one heck of a chatup line.

Tichy• 14 years ago

Could be a shot at creating a new superhero.

Also, big "anecdotal evidence" warning flag. One guy had relatively healthy kids, so radiation must be harmless?

ars4• 14 years ago

I guess you didn't read the whole article? It talked about studies that found no problems.

sureshv• 14 years ago

Read the section subtitled 'What Happened To The Kids?' - It covers this.

No large scale studies, says Sam, "have ever found significant evidence that these children had higher rates of any disease, or even higher rates of mutations. ... In the vast majority of cases, genetic fallout didn't settle onto the succeeding generation."

tptacek• 14 years ago

"Radiation must be harmless"? What?

michaelcampbell• 14 years ago

If you live through it, hell yes. Keep the longevity/survival genes in the pool.

pavel_lishin• 14 years ago

Or maybe we'll just be breeding a lot of anti-Teela Browns.

tokenadult• 14 years ago

The main story point here, of course, is that the human body has capacity to self-repair from exposure to ionizing radiation, which is to be expected given the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing multicellular organisms.

I found it interesting that this article stands as a counterexample to the "law" often referred to on Hacker News that one should assume the answer to a headline that asks a yes/no question is no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

Another unit of National Public Radio (the larger organization responsible for this story) has even provided advice on the subject of how to ask questions in headlines:

http://stateimpact.npr.org/teamblog/tag/questions-in-headlin...

Other headline tips (not specific to the issue of headlines that ask yes/no questions) can be found on the site of the The Poynter Institute.

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/14...

pygy_• 14 years ago

> The main story point here, of course, is that the human body has capacity to self-repair from exposure to ionizing radiation, which is to be expected given the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing multicellular organisms.

Actually, germ cells are the most sensitive to DNA damage, and commit seppuku if they can't repair it. Other cell lines are more resilient.

A complete answer to the question in the title would be "Yes, if you still can".

Samuel_Michon5• 14 years ago

To me, this once again proves Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

Just ask some Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing survivors, or survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.

ars4• 14 years ago

You are getting downmodded for not bothering to actually read the article.

Samuel_Michon5• 14 years ago

I did though. From the article:

“By the early 1950's, Yamaguchi and his wife Hisako felt strong enough to try [to have children], and the early 50s, they had two girls, Naoko and Toshiko. Both were born without birth defects, though when they reached their teenage years, they said they got sick more often than some of their friends. Both are still alive. The Yamaguchis' young son, Kasutoshi, lived to be 58 and died of cancer.”

Sure, the Japanese had expected the effects to be worse, but still, this doesn't sound like a glowing recommendation to me to have kids after having been exposed to mad amounts of radiation.

From the Atomic Bomb Museum:

“A Nagasaki survey of 98 pregnant women exposed at a distance of 2.0 km from ground zero and 113 pregnant women exposed at 4.0 and 5.0 km from ground zero, showed a high percentage of neonatal and infantile deaths for those exposed within a 2.0 km range, as well as signs of acute radiation illness such as loss of hair, bleeding tendency, and inner mouth lesions. Mental retardation was noted in 25% of newborn survivors.

Besides high mortality rates, retarded growth and development was also indicated. Most notable in those exposed within 1.0–5.0 km of ground zero were retarded stature, underweight, and smaller head circumference, a condition called microcephaly, one of the most pathetic aftereffects of the atomic bombings, especially when accompanied by mental retardation.

Genetic surveys have not yielded positive evidence of genetic hazards due to atomic bomb radiation. Even so, possible A-bomb-induced effects such as spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, congenital malformations, and more, require continued study.”

http://atomicbombmuseum.org/3_health.shtml

Or this one, 24 years after the Chernobyl disaster (no bombing, but high radiation nonetheless):

http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/24/us-defect-chernoby...

ChuckMcM• 14 years ago

Interesting story. Many people don't think about the fact that the world is a naturally a radioactive place, between radon, cosmic rays, and just uranium and what not. We've evolved great defensive mechanisms in our DNA.

That said, I worry about too much the 'playing down' of nuclear warfare. One of my fears these events move out of living memory into history is that people don't 'get' just how horrific the destruction is. Of course that isn't going to stop the crazies. I don't doubt for a minute that we'll refresh our 'living memory' of just what its like to have a nuclear bomb go off in a city of millions, too many people have access and probability tells us one of them is too stupid not to try it.

brc• 14 years ago

Indeed - one of the biggest learning moments for me in life is learning how much natural radiation exists. Housebricks and other items are radioactive.

A lifetime of anti-nuclear propaganda had made me fear anything that was radioactive. This ranges from the harmless (radiation plot points in movies) to the outright idiotic (Fukushima spawned plenty of this). There needs to be public education about what levels of radiation are safe, otherwise we're all as irrational as someone with arachnaphobia when a tiny spider walks into a room.

Yet in truth there are safe dosages of radiation, and all the man-made radiation in the world has actually been a strong net positive.

stephengillie• 14 years ago

http://xkcd.com/radiation/

cafard• 14 years ago

There was an essay by P.J. Plauger, I suppose collected into one of his "Programming on Purpose" volumes, talking about somebody he had worked with who was told to show off computers (then very new) to some biologists. He wrote a simple program that new how to generate itself to output (punched tape), and ran off copies. When the biologists arrived, he explained the program, and invited them to try creating mutations by punching extra holes. The usual result was a program that failed to run--call it sterility. Very rarely would a "mutation" occur and the program run to generate different output. I don't recall whether anyone managed to punch a no-op.

verroq2• 14 years ago

Sperm in testicles get purged naturally and/or through masturbation. Any damaged sperm would have been cycled through and removed a long time ago. However eggs are do not get recycled, so if his wife was hit by two atomic bombs, the results probably isn't going to be as rosy.

Peaker• 14 years ago

What about the (stem?) cells that generate the sperm? What if they are damaged?

verroq2• 14 years ago

He would probably be sterile then.

bobbypage• 14 years ago

This story was also covered in WNYC's Radio Lab podcast, which I highly recommend. http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/16/doub...

rcthompson• 14 years ago

Cells have the ability to sense DNA damage. They produce proteins that specifically recognize and bind to various signs of DNA damage, such as single-stranded DNA (normal DNA is double-stranded), DNA ends (which are normally protected inside telomeres), fused base pairs, etc. One possible response is to repair the damage, and this is done quite often. In fact, there is are several checkpoints during every cell division cycle where the cell will pause the cycle and wait for everything to report in as damage-free before continuing. It's actually a bit distressing to realize that pretty much every one of your cells is constantly fixing its genome in real time, and a bit mind-blowing how successful the process is (i.e. the fact that you don't get cancer several times a day).

However, another option in the case that the cell detects irreparable damage is for the cell to self-destruct. If the cell detects excessive DNA damage, it will initiate apoptosis. Also, if the DNA damage is taking too long to repair, the same will happen (kind of like Android's "force close" feature for hung apps). My assumption would be that most of the germline cells that are damaged by the radiation from a nuclear bomb would either fix it or kill themselves, leaving mostly perfectly healthy cells to produce healthy sperm & eggs.

In short, if 10% of your germline cells are damaged by radiation, you will not be producing anywhere near 10% mutated sperm (or eggs).

If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

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