Photo: SERGEI SUPINSKY / AFP / Getty Images
One of the great questions of the largest nuclear accident in history seems to have found an answer, 35 years later.
When reactor number four at the Chernobyl power plant exploded in the early morning of 26 April 1986, the northern Ukrainian city turned into a ghost town and the The lives of tens of thousands of people were marked by the atomic disaster.
Since then, many of the survivors have had to deal with diseases linked to the radiation to which they were exposed and with the uncertainty of what could happen to their descendants, the so-called “ children of Cher n weak “.
And is that one of the questions that has disturbed both scientists and survivors for decades is whether the effects of nuclear radiation could pass to descendants.
Now, for the first time, a genetic study sheds light on the matter and its results have just been published in the journal Science .
The research, led by Professor Meredith Yeager , from the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) ., focused on the children of workers who enlisted to help clean up the highly polluted area around the nuclear power plant (so-called liquidators).
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Descendants of evacuees from the abandoned city of Pripyat and other settlements within a radius of 70 km around the reactor.
To the participants, all conceived after the disaster and born between 1987 Y 2002, the entire genome was examined.
And the result was a surprise to many of those involved.
The results
The study found no “harm addition to DNA “in children born to parents who were exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl explosion before they were conceived.
” Even when people were exposed to relatively high doses of radiation, in co Compared with the background radiation, it had no effect on their future children ”, explained professor Gerry Thomas, from Imperial College London , to BBC journalist Victoria Gill.
Thomas, who has spent decades studying cancer biology, in particularly tumors that are related to radiation damage, explained that this study was the first to show that there is no inherited genetic damage after radiation exposure.
“There are many people who were afraid of having children after the atomic bombs . And also people who were afraid of having children after the accident in Fukushima, because they thought that their child would be affected by the radiation to which they were exposed ”, he recalls.
“It is very sad. And if we can show that there is no effect, hopefully we can alleviate that fear. ”
Thomas was not involved in the study, although she and his colleagues have done other research on Chernobyl-related cancers.
His team has studied thyroid cancer, because it knows that the nuclear accident caused about 5, 000 cases, the vast majority of which were treated and cured.
The study
One of the lead investigators on the research, Stephen Chanock , also from NCI, explained to the BBC that the research team recruited entire families so that scientists could compare the DNA of the mother, father, and child.
“Here we are not seeing what happened to those children who were [en el útero] at the time of the accident; we’re looking at something called de novo mutations “.
These are new DNA mutations – they occur randomly in an egg or sperm. Depending on where in a baby’s genetic blueprint a mutation arises, it could have no impact or it could be the cause of a genetic disease.
“There is between 50 Y 100 of these mutations in each generation and are random. In a way, they are the building blocks of evolution. This is how new changes are introduced in a population ”, explains Chanock.
“We look at the genomes of mothers and fathers and then the child. And we spent nine more months looking for any sign in the number of these mutations that was associated with parental radiation exposure. We didn’t find anything. ”
This means, scientists say, that the effect of radiation on the parents’ body has no impact on the children they conceive in the future.
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