ABOVE: Aerial view of the Chernobyl nuclear power station
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On April 26, 1986, an accident at the nuclear power station in Chernobyl, Ukraine, released huge amounts of radioactive material into the environment. The radiation not only affected the surrounding areas but was carried by rain clouds to places as far away as Great Britain and Sweden. In a study published today (April 22) in Science, researchers found no evidence for transgenerational genetic effects on the children of people exposed to the accident’s radiation.
In a companion paper, the same set of investigators studied the development of papillary thyroid cancer, one of the most common cancers in Chernobyl survivors, and determined that thyroid tumors develop due to radiation-induced double-stranded DNA breaks.
Much of what researchers know about how the fallout affected genetic material comes from epidemiological data, says Anna Poetsch, who studies DNA damage and repair at Dresden University ...
