Life After Radiation: Sickness, Death and Sustenance

weeks ago. So we sometimes go on Facebook Live, the live streaming media service, and uh talk about in Aine garbage movie trailers and we're not in Maine garbage important B movie uh and sometimes non B movie trailers and discuss the way that they tie into our discussions here on the podcast. The topics that we cover, well, there's nothing wrong within a garbage that wasn't inherently a pejorative.

I mean, I love in a garbage, right, So we went on Facebook Live and we were talking about giant crab movies, a a film genre that I think is severely under realized. It has a lot of potential. There's just not enough there. The young aspiring filmmakers out there need to get on the giant crab movie train. Yeah. It's as easy as buying a real crab or catching one on the beach and filming it right, put it

in close up the little people. Yeah, it's amazing. Uh. And one of the movies we talked about was Attack of the Crab Monsters. So this was released in nineteen fifty seven, directed by as I would call him the crud Wizard, Roger Corman, and it is a plot you've heard a million times before, as scientists go to an island in the Pacific where there has been atomic testing and eventually they have to square off against a couple of giant, intelligent, sort of psychic crabs that project their

voices into your dreams. Stuff. It's it's odd. It's a script by Charles B. Griffith, who is a regular Corman writer. He's the same guy who wrote who wrote Little Shop of Horrors. Uh, not of This Earth and one of my favorites it Conquered the World, where Earth is attacked by an art of choke with an underbyte. Yeah, and of course you end up with a long The best part of that movie is you have lengthy scenes in which Levan Cliff and Peter Graves discuss that the philosophical

quandaries related to alien invasion? What does freedom really mean? So I I I have a special place in my heart for that film too. Anyway, In an interview, Griffith, the screenwriter of Attack of the Crab Monsters, tells the story about where this screenplay came from. And he says, Roger Corman came to him and said, I want to make a picture called Attack of the Giant Crabs. Obviously the name evolved a little, and then Griffith says, I asked,

does it have to be atomic radiation? And Corman responded yes. And you know, that's kind of the way it was in the sci fi and horror of the nineteen fifties we went through the atomic age. It was we we of course, had just had a World war that was concluded with the use of atomic weapons, and it was almost like if your Corman thinking about Griffith coming to you saying does it have to be atomic radiation? Again,

it's like, why are you even asking? Of course, this movie has to be about atomic radiation making animals bigger, more powerful, sometimes more intelligent, more rampage e versions of those same animals. Well, I love what you just said, because that, I mean, that's essentially what atomic power did for the human race, right once a society acquired it. Yeah, we became this this, this thing that was more rampage e,

more dangerous. The movies are always uh, the the initial uh sounding chamber for for cultural anxiety, and so it's you can think of it as as Oppenheimer uh invoking his famous uh uh quote from Hindu scripture and sing is saying, now I have become death, the destroyer of worlds. Imagine him speaking that into the amplifier of of B movie culture, and what you get are all of these atomic of super creatures and atomic Superman spiraling out into

comic book characters, etcetera. As this this anxiety works its way through our fiction. Now, I know you're like, you're sort of joking and sort of serious, and I want to agree with you on both halves, especially the sort of serious part. I totally agree that B movies are often where we work out are sort of taboo anxieties and uh, and it's where the conscience of the common

person comes through into the arts and entertainment. But another fun fact act I cannot leave this subject without divulging, is that Griffith thinks, he says in the same interview that in in some scenes in the movie, the person operating the giant crab monster prop may have been Jack Nicholson because he was working on sets there at the time. Man. That that's a great fact. That's magical to think of. Yeah, especially look up this crab and think it could be

Jack under there. Yeah, we we gotta give you. How often do you encounter that with us? Someone in a monster suit turns out to be an important, acclaimed actor later on. But then, of course, sometimes the monster itself becomes a character. Now, obviously there are not a whole franchise of giant crab movies. Uh, the the giant crab monsters never caught on as a beloved folk hero, but

some giant radioactive monsters do. Yeah. The best example of that would be, of course, so Gohedra Godzilla, who continues to rampage through our our cinematic history here. Now, is it officially part of the Godzilla cannon that Godzilla was created by atomic radiation? Yes? Yeah, I mean that's when you go back to the original Godzilla. That's the the idea that uh and and and it's really kind of

beautiful in its own way, right. I mean this is where, in the same way that all these other monsters managed to emerge from, you know, largely Western contemplations of the atomic age, Godzilla is a frightening manifestation of of the Japanese contemplation of the atomic age. And and it really shines through in that first film because that first film

is a spark darker. Yeah, it's a dark film. Uh, it just becomes campy over time as people and grow used to the idea of a giant rampaging lizard creature, and when the giant rampaging lizard creature becomes the hero

rather than the villain. Yes, you know, I I watched part of the shin Godzilla, the new Godzilla film out of Japan on an airplane recently, and I need to sit down and watch it in in you know, in complete form, because it seems like there are a lot of scenes of experts setting around tables discussing the political ramifications of combating Godzilla, which I love films like that they take the monster or whatever, the sort of fantastical element and just really get down and start teasing it

apart with the real world factors. But of course, more recently, more recently, for most American audiences, we had this um, this this new treatment of Godzilla that to introduce some additional radioactive elements, the idea that that Godzilla and his fellow massive unidentified terrestrial organisms or mudos were radiation dependent organisms, uh, radiation feeding leftovers from a primal terrestrial era in which there was a lot more radioactivity on the Earth and

organisms had evolved to depend upon it. Now, that could play into some of the science we actually discussed later in this episode, So keep that in mind. Yes, Now, of course there's plenty of people who would argue that, oh, you can't really nail Godzilla down. He's he's he can't throw too much science at godzilla is even though we can't stop doing it. It's more like a scaly zeus. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, there's a wonderful quote that I ran across.

This is from film producer A show Go, Tomi Yama, and it was a two thousand four interview with the now defunct Penny Blood dot com. But you can find archive versions of this, and he said this is a translation. I believe Godzilla is closer to being a god. He's not just a living animal or a monster. The fact is that humans cannot control or judge the gods. They have their own will, they have their own way. In Japan, there are many gods. There is a god of destruction.

He totally destroys everything, and then there is a rebirth, something new and fresh can begin. Godzilla is closer to being that kind of god. Now this brings us to the Godzilla youthfro dilemma. Is the righteous righteous because it's loved by Godzilla? Or is it righteous because never mind? Uh? Yeah, what is love by Godzilla? It is that. There's an answer to that, but it changes, I think from film to film. It's obviously rampage. Yeah, I mean, it's easier

to nail down gammera. What does gammera love the children? Right? And and that's why I think I'm ultimately more drawn to Gammera. Okay, we shouldn't look at some other radiation eating organisms that are either powered up by radiation or or derived their their everyday energy from it. All right, Well, Christian and I recently did an episode dealing with some

of the science of the expanse. And if you're watching that show, or if you've read the first book, you know that there's this thing called the protomolecule that shows up and it's an extrasolar biolot biology reassembling system that enters the picture. And it's as shown that I and razing radiation is an energy source to this thing. So I'll say no more about that without getting into into spoilers. But yeah, radiation eating organisms of of of a sort do play into that series. Now, I see you have

a note about it here. I know the Ghouls and Fallout, yeah series they get they get love from the radioactive energy. Yeah, and even and also the main character, at least in the main you know recent games, uh, the character that you play with, the Wanderer, the vault Walker or whatever the descriptions are that they throw out for him. You can pick up perks where the radiation heals you and you kind of like feed off the radiation. So this is a path you can choose to take in the

game to say, I want to live on radiation. Yeah, I want to be able to drink radioactive water, which one of the things I love about the recent Fallowout games is they'll be these these moments where you're standing like ankle deep in maybe not full blown radioactive water, but bad water that you should not drink, like you're standing in a sewer, and you look down and you go, oh, there's an AMMO clip down there. I better pick it up.

But you accidentally click on the water next to the clip instead of the clip itself, and so you reach down with your hand and you get a big scoop full of the water and you drink it. And yeah, because I love I love the idea of that happening where it's, oh, crap, I just meant to pick up the clip and I just drank radioactive water instead. Such

such a duface. So those are just a few radiation eating radiation absorbing creatures to consider, but fiction is full of many examples of radioactive mutants, and giant mutant animals are a big one. So we we've talked about all a number of these examples before. You mentioned the crabs already, but it brings up another B movie icon. The director of of real one of my my favorite films from

this era, the amazing Colossal Man. Right, I haven't seen this one still, this is the one where there is a man who gets some kind of radiation and he grows huge and it of course it's directed by Birt Eye Gordon, Mr Big himself, who mostly made movies about

things getting big, about big spiders, big dinosaurs. Uh, there's one movie of his that made a great Mystery Science Theater three thousand episode called The Beginning of the End, where it explores the sort of downstream food ecosystem effects of radiation radiation gigantism, where this scientist makes some giant vegetables but I think he I may be remembering this wrong, but I think he injects them with radiation with a needle. I apologize if I've mischaracterized there, but that's my memory.

And then some bugs eat the radioactively injected fruits and vegetables or grains, and then the bug has become huge and attack Chicago. He Berney Gordon must have had either a needle phobia or a needle fetish because because there are some fabulous needle scenes in The Amazing Colossal Man as well. Yeah, yeah, there he like they have bring a huge needle to inject a huge man with and

then it is a wonderful scene. It's in the trailers and all where he picks it up and he kind of looked at Glenn Manning, the amazing glossal man does this, picks this this uh, this hypodermic needle up and it's it's regular size to him, and then he just with with with expert precision. He just throws it like a dart down at one of these soldiers who just pricked him with it, and it just skewers him. It's a

wonderful scene, but one of cinema's finest moments. Now, in addition to these examples, and you have legions of other mutant humanoids from telepathic nu nutants in beneath the planets, beneath the planet of the Apes, which I'd love to see those guys uh explored in some of these reboots that are coming out for the Apes movies. These are the ones that worship a giant bomb. They like sing hymns to the to the atomic bomb. Yeah yeah, yeah, they worship with the atomic bomb, and they they have

crazy mental powers. You also have the Chud's from Chud, the cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers. Um. We've mentioned the ghouls of Fallout. You've got the mutants of Total Recall. Nice, Yeah, they were. They were a lot of fun. You have the mutants of the Hills have Eyes not so much fun. Not not so fun pretty much an any installment of that. They are generally not that fun, but but certainly a good B movie example as well. And uh, of course,

let's not forget atomic superheroes. That is a huge area of of fictional exploration here, right, you've got the Hulk. So the official Marvel approved origin blurb I looked it up on Marvel dot com for the Hulk reads as follows. Caught in a blast of gamma radiation, alliant scientist Bruce Banner is cursed to transform in times of stress into the living engine of destruction known as the Incredible Hulk. So got that straight right. The origin story is gamma radiation,

then a curse. The curse is that when he gets his briefs in a twist, he changes colors, becomes huge, strong, invincible, rampage e. Now obviously this is not I don't need to tell you, but this is not what happens to a human who's caught in a blast of gamma radiation. We know this in theory and principle but even if we didn't, we would know it in practice because this

is literally actually happened. I want to talk about one example of a quote brilliant scientist caught in a blast of hard radiation which included gamma rays among other types of radiation, and that man was Louis Slotan, a Canadian physicist working at the United States Atomic Testing Facility at Los Alamos, New Mexico, go UH shortly after the conclusion

of the Second World War. So on May one, nineteen six, at about three in the afternoon, Slotan and colleagues were performing a nuclear criticality test on a core of plutonium. And the way a test like this worked is that you would take a mass of physile material and then bring it almost to the point of going critical by nearly covering it with a beryllium cap. Now what would

that do well. The reason a substance like plutonium is dangerous is that the heavy atoms inside it are unstable and they start to split apart and shoot neutrons off in every direction, releasing a lot of energy in the process. This is a nuclear fission. By covering a hemisphere of physical plutonium with this thick reflective material like beryllium. You reflect those neutrons back into the plutonium where they hit other atomic nuclei, knocked them apart, producing more free neutrons,

releasing more energy. And as this happens more and more you come closer to producing a runaway criticality event. The physicist Richard Feynman, upon hearing this type of experiment described in the forties, compared that compared it to quote tickling the tale of a sleeping dragon. Now that's because the dragon presumably breathes fire when it wakes up, and about

the same as true of a plutonium core. Now, this beryllium cap, called a tamper, it was supposed to be kept from going completely closed, from completely covering the core. As long as there was a gap through which some of the neutrons could still fly out and it wasn't completely covered, the dragon would not fully wake up. But on the day I mentioned earlier in ninety six, while Slotan was performing this experiment holding the tamper cap open

with a screwdriver, an accident happened. His hand slipped, the screwdriver came out of place, and the tamper briefly fell completely over the plutonium mass, causing it to go critical.

People in the room described that they saw a flash of blue light, which was the secondary result of the air itself being ionized by a blast of hard radiation, and they also felt this wave of heat wash over them, so their primary radiation exposure lasted really only a split second before Slotan was able to knock the tamper off. He sort of reached out and knocked it away, and he stopped the chain reaction, but he had already in that tiny split second, received more than enough radiation to

kill him. Uh. There's a good short New Yorker article about the history of this accident, and it reports that quote Slotan's whole body dose was around twenty one RIM of neutrons, gamma rays, and X rays. Five hundred RIM is usually fatal for humans, so this was an incredibly powerful close up door. Right after the exposure, he went outside and vomited, and then the hand closest to the core that he'd been holding right up next to the

plutonium turned blue developed large blisters. Uh, and he started experiencing systemic effects that developed for the next nine days before he died. UM. He was in continuously deteriorating health. His white cell count dropped, his temperature and pulse became erratic. He had digestive distress. According to one medical professional who was trying to explain the nature of his his wounds,

his internal radiation burns. They described it as quote a three dimensional sunburn if you can imagine being sunburned on the inside that is rough. Now here's a really crazy fact. This was not even the first time this had happened at this lab. Just months before, a Los Alamos worker named Harry dag Lean Jr. Had Been killed by radiation

exposure in a similar criticality experiment. Not exactly the same they were using some like a tungsten carbide bricks I think, but by the exact same piece of plutonium, which thereafter got its nickname, quote the demon core. And of course Slotan is not the only person to suffer death from radiation exposure. You know, victims of the atomic bombing in Japan at the close of World War two tragically suffered

many of the same effects. But what's sort of morbidly fascinating about the cases of Slotan and Daglian is that there's no explosion, no fire, there's no uh conventional physical destruction, just the pure isolated, almost instantaneous dose of hard radiation that makes every tissue in your body start to fail. There's almost a magical element to it. Yeah, in that with it would being devoid of the explosion and the sort of the the traditional um atrobutes of warfare. Yeah,

it does. It does have this kind of magical feel to it because you can't see the mechanism. Uh. And it kills you slowly then, because now everything in your body is irreparably damaged, but you can't see exactly what happened. So I think maybe we should take a quick break and when we come back we can talk about radiation. We we know now obviously it doesn't actually make you bigger, stronger, more intelligent, at least for large complex mammals and most

other organisms. But if it does kill, how does it kill? Why does it cause this problem? All right, we're back, so let's take a moment to just really talk about what radiation is. We've been, we've been, we've been talking about it, and I think most of our listeners have a you know, a reasonable working knowledge of radiation. But I think it's it's a it's a good opportunity to just stop and try and boil it all down here.

So it's important to note that our lives are filled with radiation, and much of it is harmless, and much of it is natural, not all radiations of the apocalyptic variety. Soil and underground gas is exposed us to radiation, and we're also exposed to cosmic radiation from the sun and outer space. It's mostly mostly all right, mostly fine if the doses are right and uh, and you're dealing with this, this natural mode of radiation, well, I guess it depends

on your definition of fine. But you might say it's unavoidable. That's part of being. And with all radiation, you know, it's going to depend on the type of radiation, the dosage level, and how long you're exposed to it. Because obviously radiation is coming from the sun. You can get too much sun, and they're varying their varying definitions of too much sun. There's too much sun over the course

of a lifetime. There's too much sun over the course of a day at the beach, right, But that's a good illustration of the different kinds of risks that are posed by radiation. For example, too much on it one day at the beach, you risk the sort of the slotan version, the acute radiation poisoning from the sun versus too much sun over a lifetime will tend to cause things like skin cancer, right, and not enough exposure to the sun can leave you with the vitamin D deficiency.

So you know, there's a balance in all in all things here. Uh. And one of the key aspects we'll get back to two is that just as radiation is around us, radiation has always been around us. Radiation has been there in the background of varying degrees throughout the evolution of life on our planets. So it's not like it's not like radiation. Even though radiation as this theme as this uh, this fear and this anxiety really arrived in the nineteen fifties, uh, you know, and we see

it echoed in these B movies. Radiation did not arrive on the scene. Then, radiation had always been with us. Now, in terms of radiation, the stems from human inventions. That that's that's a different area here. So we're when this we're talking about medical procedures. We're talking about television's, cell phones, microwave ovens. Uh. And again it all depends on dosage. The strength to type, the length of exposure. Electromagnetic radiation

is merely a stream of photons traveling in waves. So we have you know, low energy photons such as radio waves, and these spend These are just waves. They behave like waves. And while we also have high energy photons such as X rays, those behave more like particles. Uh So in this we're getting into this idea of the electromagnetic spectrum, you know, radio, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultra violet X rays.

Although we have to to gamma raise. Yeah, that's an ascending scale of the energy of of these photons and starting somewhere at the upper end of the ultra violet spectrum, so that the upper end of the ultra violet, the X rays, the gamma rays, those are the really dangerous, the ionizing types of radiation on the electromagnetic spectrum, that's right, So ionizing that that brings up the main distinction we should probably make about the different kinds of radiation, because

as we said, we're always surrounded constantly by radiation. It makes a big difference whether that radiation is ionizing or non ionizing. Right, And you had that wonderful example earlier about the flash of blue light is the the air uh ionized. Right, So the radiation that was coming out of that plutonium core was doing something to the to the atoms in the air. It was making some changes

to the structure of the very atoms themselves. Right Now, These lower forms of of radiation, the non ionizing variety, they don't have enough energy to ionize atoms or molecules, thus the name. They're located at the low low end of the electromagnetic spectrum and a non ionizing radiation sources in our life include power lines, microwaves, radio waves, infrared radiation,

visible light lasers. Although considered less dangerous than ionizing radiation, over exposure of course can cause health issues because again it comes down to uh to the degree and the length of exposure, right, I mean it can still non ionizing radiation can still for example, heat tissues which can have an effect. Yeah. But ionizing radiation is energy in

the form of particles or waves uh. And it's so high in energy that it can break chemical bonds, meaning it can change or ionize an atom that interacts with it. At a lower energy, it can strip off a couple of electrons. At higher energy, it can destroy the nucleus of an atom, it can damage DNA. So this is the stuff of radioactive material, very high voltage equipment, nuclear

reactions and stars. And by the way, as long as we're talking about natural versus unnatural radiation, even though there's you know, sometimes there's a you can kind of blur the lines there. On a terrestrial basis, the levels of radiation you would need to cause radiation sickness and really you know, acute form uh, pretty much require human technology

after a point. So naturally occurring occurring sites of radioactivities such as prinstance, if you were to travel to Ramsar around but that's like a naturally radioactive site, right, Yeah, if you were to travel there, you would you would encounter this, you know, in this radioactive environment, but it wouldn't be enough to produce anything near the high level of doses required to inflict the sort of harm we've seen via the detonation of atomic weapons or accidents at

nuclear power plants. Well that's good, yeah, I mean I appreciate that the Earth is like that. Yeah. And and this kind of I guess is a nod to this idea of you know, the the atomic age, what is invented in the atomic age. What is unleashed in the atomic age um. So while while we are naturally surrounded by all kinds of radiation, while we are naturally in a universe of highly radioactive stars and things like that, we're not naturally any universe of of you know, regular

human life scale nuclear reactors and atomic weapons. Right. It brings some very high radiation events uh and uh and items into our local environment that generally are not there. So ionizing radiation, the dangerous kind of radiation comes in a handful of main varieties. You've basically got high frequency electromagnetic radiation, and then you've got radioactive particles. So let's look at the particles first. You've got alpha particles and

beta particles. Alpha particles are relatively large, and they're made of protons and neutrons, right. And because you've got protons without any electrons, what does that mean? It's charged positive charge uh. And this means it wants to interact with matter to break bonds and strip away electrons. That's the ionizing part. So what it can do is turn atoms in your body into other differently behaving atom charged ions uh. And alpha particles tend to shoot off of atoms when

they undergo radioactive decay. Now, alpha particles can only travel a short distance. In fact, they can be stopped with just a piece of paper or even your skin. However, inhalation or ingestion of any material that gives off alpha particles that can be dangerous. Once inside your body, alpha particles can ionize your internal tissue. And this is what happens in some cases of like radioactive poisoning. Somebody has given a poison that contains a radioactive material and it's

putting off alpha particles inside your body. But now, what about beta particles. Beta particles are fast moving electrons that they can travel and penetrate far more than alpha particles. Beta particles can be stopped or reduced by a layer of clothing or a substance like aluminum. However, some beta particles have enough energy to penetrate the skin and cause

damage that's very similar to burns. As with alpha particles, beta particles are quite hazardous if you inhale or ingest something that releases them, right because yet again they have a charge, and for this reason they're going to interact electrically with the tissues inside your body, trying to change stuff around. Now, another type of particle radiation would be neutron radiation, and this just means a free neutron from the nucleus of an atom shooting off all by itself,

and this happens during nuclear fission. Neutrons can travel a really long distance, and they can penetrate deeply through many types of objects. And I've read that the best thing for stopping this material is actually something that's rich in hydrogen, for example water H two. Oh. This is a good reason water makes a good radiation shield. Um and neutron radiation is a major part of what actually happened at the Los Alamos criticality accidents when the demon core went

super critical. Lewis Slotan's body was bombarded by neutrons and this is part of what killed him. But you might be thinking, wait a minute, ionizing radiation. Why would neutrons be ionizing radiation, because if you remember your atomic chemistry, neutrons don't have a charge positive or negative, So why would they break chemical bonds and change atoms into other things that behave differently. Well, the answer is that neutrons

are sort of indirect killers. They themselves don't ionize your tissues, but If a neutron is absorbed into the nucleus of an atom in your body, that atom can now be an unstable isotope. It's got too many neutrons and it's and its nucleus, so the nucleus becomes unstable, meaning it could now undergo fission and emit radiation. So neutron radiation has the power to turn normal, safe materials into radioactive materials, which in turn with then emit ionizing radiation and harm you.

But I guess we should now let's look at the pure energy radiation, like gamma raise. Gamma raise are a type of electromagic magnetic radiation. Gamma rays often a company alpha and beta particles. Unlike alpha and beta particles, however, they're extremely penetrating. In fact, several inches of lead or even a few feet of concrete are necessary to stop gamma ray. Uh. They're a radiation hazard for the entire body, meaning that although they'll pass through you, your tissue is

going to absorb some rays. Yeah. And then also, of course there are X rays, lower energy than gamma rays, but still ionizing and potentially very dangerous depending on the dose. Basically, the way that X rays and gamma rays hurt you is by introducing huge amounts of energy into the atoms and your body, which again breaks molecular bonds, strips electrons away from atoms, creating free charged particles that want to

interact with other atoms and molecules to change them. Now, of course, in a lot of cases where you're getting a dose of hard radiation, it's not going to be just one of these things or another. You're getting a mixture of different types of radiation all coming at you simultaneously. So overexposure to ionizing radiation can cause mutations in your genes. This can cause birth defects, raised risk of cancer, and

then you go get burns, radiation, sickness, etcetera. But in order to kill you, it would just need to damage or kill enough cells to cause as a more immediate

or immediate death, or just to cause cancer. Yeah. So, for a really rough analogy, imagine a huge machine like a like a aircraft carrier or battleship that is bombarded by millions of invisible, tiny pin pricks, and each of these pin pricks has a certain random chance of hitting a component within that ship and then changing it into something else, like a maybe a screw turns into a nut or a copper wire into a piece of foam.

Uh And a ship might be able to survive a certain number of these magic pin pricks and still run, but a certain at a certain level of exposure, you're basically guaranteed to make enough changes to the ship that it no longer functions as a machine and maybe even sinks when the hull itself fails. Now, one thing to notice is that the harmful effects of radiation are based

on atomic physics and chemistry. Any complex system that's made out of atoms should be somewhat vulnerable to radiation, and for this reason, it really should affect any organism, right, it shouldn't be just humans or something. All organisms are made out of atoms and molecules. No organism wants to have its atoms and molecules broken up changed into different

atoms and molecules like no I need that. Uh So, the molecular structures in our bodies are the way they are for a reason that has to do with survival. But but where it's interesting is, again for the probably fifth time, if it comes down to to the dosage level and the exposure length and h and also varying species, varying organisms are gonna have different levels of resistance to radiation as well, exactly. So this is a concept in

biology of radio resistance. Not all organisms are equally susceptible to radiation. Some are able to withstand more than others, and as we'll get into in a bit, some might even go. Uh, I don't know what you'd say, go across the line to the other side of the ledger and not just resist but benefit indeed. Alright, So on that note, shall we go to Chernobyl? I think we should probably try to take a trip okay, just scenic Ukraine.

So Chernobyl is one of those um, it's one of those places, one of those events where that the name continues to resonate. Uh. And you know, listeners out there, we're going to have varying degrees of familiarity with Chernobyl. But I thought it would be helpful just to to very quickly run through what where, where Chernobyl is, and what occurred and now we should keep in mind that. I think in the future we might want to do a whole episode on the science of the Chernobyl disaster

and it's many downstream effects through time. Because there have been a lot of studies about not just what happened at this nuclear meltdown, but but what happened in the decades since, right, I mean, even the story of how it occurred is is fascinating as well. So tell me

about it. Right. So, when it comes to environmental disasters, uh, we're the nineteen eighties six Chernobyl catastrophe is often kind of at the top of the list or its It certainly has some of the uh, it has the name value that you you don't find with a lot of other environmental disasters. So this was this explosions fewed fifty tons of radioactive material into the air and the reactor burned for ten days, forcing the evacuation of at least

thirty thousand people from the Ukrainian town of Pripyat. In the decades to follow, we have we've had continuous study pretty much of how this affected not only the local environment, but but the broader environment. Now, when people here melt down in the United States, a lot of them might have the the the US point of Three Mile Island. You know something, they know something happened there, but it's

not comparable. Right, So nineteen seventy nine three mile Island incident that was a partial nuclear meltdown, Chernobyl was a total meltdown. Um So Russian teams chased the melted remnants of the plants reactor core into the facility's basement. They flooded it with water to cool off the materials, keep them from from burning down um to you know, to try to try and stop it before it could burn

through the containment building and pollute the groundwater. Next, they dumped a bore on clay, dolomite, lead and sand onto the burning core by helicopter to put off the fires and limit the radioactive particles that were now rising up

into the atmosphere. And in the months that followed, the encase the ruined plan and a concrete shielding that's often referred to as as the sarcophagus, which puts you know a suitably dark um darker uh note on everything here, But of course, the damage was already done by that point um and subsequent inquiries would reveal just what the damage amounted to as far as humans were concerned. The World Health Organised zation puts the fatality estimate set four

thousand deaths uh. This is a quote from World Health Organization.

They said this includes some fifty emergency workers who died of acute radiation syndrome and nine children who died of thyroid cancer, and an estimate in estimated total of thirty nine hundred and forty deaths from radiation induced cancer and leukemia among the two hundred thousand emergency workers from nineteen eight six to nineteen eighty seven, One hundred sixteen thousand evacuees and two hundred and seventy thousand residents of the

most contaminated areas total about six hundred thousand, so food contaminated with radioactive iodine was a major factor, especially with children. Radioactive iodine ended up in the milk from cows who ate contaminated grasses. Yeah, and then the environmental impact overall. This is a major release of radio nucleides that continued for ten days and contaminated more than two hundred thousand square kilometers or seven seven thousand, two hundred twenty square

miles of Europe. Most of the strontium and plutonium isotopes were deposited within a hundred kilometers or sixty two miles of the damage reactor, so the radioactive iodine luckily had a short half life and that's all gone now. Um the strontium and the cesium with has a longer half life of about thirty years, so that's going to remain

an issue for decades um. And but then this, this quote comes to us from a World Health again they said, although plutonium isotopes in americium to forty one will persist perhaps for thousands of years, their contribution to human exposure is low. This this shows the kind of crazy way that radioactive material can behave almost kind of like a plague spreading throughout except it's not like a plague because generally a plague is more contained to certain types of organisms.

It'll it'll target rats or bird or humans or something like that. This is almost like a you know, a material plague that split spreads all throughout the ecosystem. And because of the way that different organisms in the ecosystem absorbed materials, trap them and then get consumed and decompose and redistribute them, it just kind of goes everywhere. Now, one could quick note on the idea of giant mutants. Now, obviously no giant animals came rampaging out of the forests

surrounding Chernobyl and even giant Ukrainian crabs. No, no, giant Ukrainian crabs. The U S Department of Energies, Office of Human Radiation Experiments, they're they're very quick to remind us that genetic mutations due to radiation, they do not produce

the visible monstrosities of science fiction. You know, it just creates, produces a greater frequency of the same mutations that occur continuously and spontaneously in nature, so that the natural world does not produce radioactive giants, at least in the animal kingdom, because the realm of plants is another matter entirely in the in the wake of chernobyl uh and other radioactive accidents, we have seen various malformations including dwarf is m, strange growths, glowing,

and yes, even gigantism, especially concerning pine needles. So that's yeah. So that's one of the few areas where we can say, yes, we have seen atomic gigantism pine needles. But who's going to watch attack up the pine needles, right, I would, dude, do you think predatory animals are ruthless? Imagine predatory atomic plants. Plants have no compassion whatsoever. That I don't even process the concept of cuteness. A giant lion might want to kill you, but at least it recognizes that large eyes

are cute. The pine tree does not. All right, well, maybe there's some potential there, you know. I would say, though, if if I was going to get killed by killer pine tree, I would hope it was a Jeffrey pine. Oh yeah, the best kind of pine. Well it has

a friendly name. Yeah. Uh So, despite what organisms you might see like this surviving resisting and environments contaminated with radiation and radioactive particles, whether or not they've got apparent mutations, you would still expect that ionizing radiation is always a net negative influence on an organism, right, except in those rare cases maybe where the you know, it causes a

free commutation that provides a survival advantage. Those are going to be the minority, right, Some radio resistant or just plain lucky organisms might survive despite the hardship of ambient radiation. But what if there were organisms like the Hulk or like the crab monsters that seem to actively benefit from the universal high energy death magic of ionizing radiation. We are going to answer that question when we get back from this break. All right, we're back. All right. So

we've talked about ionizing non ionizing radiation. Well, ionizing radiation has always been a part of the terrestrial environment. Comes from space. Yeah, and early life forms here on Earth had to have considerable resistance to it in order to survive and to advance into other forms. Oh yeah, I should mention radioactive rocks as well, just on Earth. So background radiation levels are much lower now than they were on the early Earth, but terrestrial life still exists in

a field of radiation. Fungi in particular show a strong resistance. So you see this stuff thriving aboard space stations, adapting to extreme conditions. We've all I've we've covered on this on the show before. And imagine everyone out there from run across constant articles about the extreme file organisms in our world and how they force us to re examine what life is and where life can thrive. There's a reason there are limits to how you can spend on

the International Space Station. If you go up there, they won't let you stay forever. You need to come back, and that's for your own good. Uh. There are multiple reasons. I mean, some of them might have to do with like the long term effects of micro gravity on the human body, which we don't fully understand yet, but a lot of it is clearly due to the known risks from exposured ionizing radiation. While you're up there outside the

Earth's atmosphere. There are elevated levels of radiation in space, and you shouldn't get too much of this or it's going to hurt you. Now, as you say, there there are these micro organisms, these uh, fungal microbes that survive up there in the I s s for for generations apparently, uh, in space, and they seem to be doing just fine. And it's true you mentioned the radio resistance of fung gui. I think generally fungi are considered the most radio resistant

uh kingdom of life. I hope I'm not wrong about that. I think that's generally correct. Yeah, we're up there in space, you know, sort of barely managing when we come back. The fun Guide is saying, get me on that generation ship. I'm ready to go. Right, let's see some new worlds. Well, they might need to be on the generation ship if we need something to eat while we're going going out there,

But we'll get to that in a minute. So we're going to talk about a study by several authors, one of whom is the distinguished microbiologist and immunologist Arturo Casadival, and he tells this story about how years ago he was reading about how robotic exploration of the Chernobyl ruins that from the Chernobyl disaster. We were just talking about

the total meltdown of the power plant. So there's a robotic exploration of these ruins, and they revealed that something was growing on the walls of the abandoned reactor, some sort of matt of dark fungus. But this is definitely weird because this was a dangerously radioactive environment. You know, the pin pricks, the pin pricks of ionizing radiation are

going all over the place all the time. Be kind of like if you just let the demon core go critical for a while and discovered that a bunch of squirrels began nesting in the test check, you'd want to know what's the deal with those squirrels, and and please stay away from those squirrels. Yeah, not as bad as the pine needles that there, might be worse than the crabs. So one of the first things to notice about this fungus that's growing in the presence of radiation is that

it's specifically dark fungus. This is an indication of the presence of the pigment melanin. Now, melanin is a natural polymer pigments found in all kinds of organisms. In humans, varieties melanin are produced by special cells known as melana sites, and the melanin itself is responsible for providing the pigmentation of body parts like your iris, is your hair and your skin, and of course there are a couple of different kind of melanin. There are several kinds actually, like

there is you melanin. This is the common kind that's black or brown in color. So if your hair is dark, if you have black or brown hair, it probably has a lot of you melanin in it. There's also phia melanin. This is usually what's seen in like the hair of people who have red hair or maybe light brown reddish hair,

and in the skin. Melanin is believed to play a role in the natural human relationship to radiation because scientists think that it protects our cells, especially our d n A, from damage by an everyday form of ionizing or near ionizing radiation, which is the ultraviolet or UV radiation found in sunlight, so naturally, dark objects tend to absorb more light. This is, in fact, by definition, what makes objects dark

uh so black or brown. Melanin has properties of absorbing electromagnetic radiation, including UV radiation, and dissipating it by converting it into heat. In this way, it is thought to be able to protect the nuclei of your skin cells from being constantly bombarded, damaged, and mutated by the invisible death rays of the sun, and the pigment absorbs the radiation, so your genetic material doesn't have to So melanin in

that way is a natural shield against radiation. It's one of the ways that organisms have evolved natural radio resistance, and even our own bodies make use of it. But the role of melanin doesn't stop there. There's some evidence that melanin may play other roles in the human body and in other organisms. For example, uh, the fungal microbe Cryptococcus neoform us. Oh yeah, that's your DJ name, DJ

Cryptococcus neoformons. Okay, I'll have to be able to say that really fast over a beat with you need to be able to stay in the house at the end of the dame. They need to know that not only are you here, but you are in the house else. And if you were playing house music, you need to be able to tell everyone that that is what they're listening to. I'm not in the house. I'm in the

abandoned reactor room. I'm just telling you the rules. So Cryptococcus neofemans is a fungus that's found everywhere, just pretty much everywhere in nature. It's also potentially pathogenic, causing diseases and people, especially with impaired immune function. For example, it often causes lung infections and people who have AIDS. So for some reason, it has been observed that melanin production

in this fungal germ is associated with virulence. More melanin production means a more powerful germ, and it's been suggested that this is because melanin helps the fungus protect itself against the host's immune response. So we're seeing that melanin may have a diverse role essentially in in different life functions and for all different kinds of organisms. I mean, this is weird to remember we're talking about a fungus here,

but this is also a pigment that animals share. It's in all the kingdoms of life, which tends to be an indicator that it's probably quite ancient in origin. That melanin goes way back. Now, Robert, you mentioned earlier that in previous geological eras, and you know, past life on Earth was exposed to a lot more ionizing radiation than we are on the surface of the Earth now. And uh, if you look at the role of melanin as a very ancient thing emerging very early in life on Earth,

that that may that may sort of provide an explanation. Right, if there was a lot of radiation back then, and melanin has this role in protecting organisms from radiation, you can see one reason it might have emerged. Now, let's

go back to the paper I mentioned earlier. So as we saw hinted in the blasted concrete dungeon of the Chernobyl reactor room, this dark pigment in some types of fungus plays an even weirder, more fascinating role, not just protecting or is ms from harmful radiation, but allowing them to thrive on it. Yeah. This uh, this paper, This is a two seven paper published in pl Os one titled Ionizing radiation changes the electronic properties of melan and

enhances the growth of melanized fung Guy. Right, And that was by a long list of authors data Cova, Brian, Hung, Model, Schweitzer, Ien Nosen, Chuck, and Cassadaval. Yeah, and they found they found some interesting evidence that the fungi containing the pigment melan and can utilize the ionizing radiation portion of the electromagnics spectrum to transform radioactive energy into biological energy. And uh, this would be in keeping crazy enough with the way

that chlorophylling plants converts sunlight into bio energy. That is crazy. Now, if that's correct, it would be absolutely bizarre and fascinating. That essentially a a cosmic dark kind of parody of Oh. I shouldn't say parody, I don't mean to demean it. A fascinating, weird parallel of photosynthesis, the kind of photosynthesis we see in plants and blue green algae and things

is going on with mushrooms. But instead of regular sunlight, they're using gamma radiation, this high energy stuff that should kill any organism. So if this is correct, how did they determine it, Like, how did they determine the fun fungi were not only surviving in the presence of this, but we're actively benefiting from it. So here's the basic experiment, or this part of the experiment. There were multiple experiments

in in this study. The basic experiment on the fungus was the two species of fungus contained melanin, the Cryptococcus neoformans and the Wengiella dermatiditis it's got a lot of dental consonants in it. Both were placed in environments with strong ionizing radiation than five hundred times what you'd get

from standard background radiation on Earth. And then these melanized cells in radioactive conditions were found to have had quote higher cf use, more dry weight biomass, and threefold greater incorporation of C fourteen acetate than non irradiated melanized cells or irradiated albino mutants. Now that's a mouthful. What did

that mean? In other words, by several measures, the melanin fungus exposed to strong radiation was more biologically successful, It grew more, it did better than fungus that was not irradiated, or fungus that was irradiated but didn't have significant melanin in it cells. So put a pale fungus in radiation that doesn't like it. Put have a regular non irradiated fungus, you know, it does its thing. But you put one of these dark pigmented funguses fungi under radiation and it thrives,

It loves it. It's a power up to it, it's food to it. In a sense, that's what appears to be happening. Now this isn't fully confirmed, but but that's what they think they observed here and and to further bols through this idea, they tried to uncover leads as to what the mechanism might be. Right. So, if you if you find something in nature that looks very odd, one of the ways that you can really help build your case that it is that what you're seeing is really what you think it is, is to find out

how it works. Right, So they tried to uncover a possible mechanism and uh and their mechanism of how ionizing radiation might be converted into usable energy went like this. They found through experiment that exposure to ionizing radiation increased the electron transfer properties of melanin. Again, what does that mean, Well,

essentially it changed the electronic capabilities of this pigment. The best way I've seen it put into simple, understandable terms is from a two thousand seven article and Scientific American by David Biello, who claimed that the melanin in this case quote acts like a step down electric transformer transformers you might see, you know, turning the electricity from the

power grid into something that you can use in your house. Yeah, taking something that would normally just fry to the Jesus out of everything, you know, dear, into something that was his tame enough, domesticating the current for you. Right. So, what what the pigment does under this model is it's hit with incredibly high energy radiation that should destroy life. Instead,

the pigment absorbs it through some electrical electrical transfer. It manages to tone it down a bit into some kind of energy that can be used by the organism to sustain its life function. So some of the far reaching effects of the study are pretty fascinating. The researchers suggests that radiation grown fungi might one day feed human travel

space travelers. Yeah, because out in space, you're exposed to a lot of ionizing radiation um and if you're say far from sunlight, Uh, and you don't want to have to use your own power on grow lamps to to to grow plants in your in your spaceship. What do you have to work without in deep space? While if you could actually grow something on ionizing radiation that you could eat, that would be amazing. And what if it glowed as well, and you have like glowing fungal of

spheres that are lighting your environments. You can really go go wild with some of the possibilities here. But they they they also speculate that this could even unlock unlock the possibility. Uh that no, this is just a possibility that this is not proven, that melanin in human flesh might provide energy to skin cells. Now that, like you say, it's just a speculation. It would be consistent with their findings,

but it's not something that's proven. But really interesting if that were true, it would also provide an interesting twist on this old claim. I know you've heard Robert the idea of the sun eaters, the people who that it's basically a supernatural claim. But these people claim that some monks and holy people can live for years without eating food, getting all of the nourishment and energy their body needs.

Just straight from the sunlight. Now, obviously, I don't think that even if this were true, that we were getting usable bio energy through the melanin in our skin cells, I don't think it would make those claims plausible. I think that's still pretty much nonsense. But it would be a cool twist on it, because even if you could get some tiny amount of usable bio energy from the sunlight, it wouldn't come close to the amount of concentrated chemical

energy you get from eating food. Right for for a rough analogy, think about the electromagnetic energy harvested from solar panels versus the dense chemical energy contained in gasoline. You know, it does make me think back to our episode on Chinese immortality where we talked about the idea of these aged individuals living just on undo and the wind. Uh would kind of fall in line with with that vision of this almost um you know, ephemeral of a life

form that's just just barely subsisting on the things around it. Well, I mean, it just makes me wonder if this were the case that you get some usable bio energy through your skin cells, what I would want to see is the thought experiment that explains, Okay, given how that works, what would the naked surface area of your body need to be in order to replace certain amounts of food? Like could you live on five hundred calories a day if you had x amount of naked surface area and

sat out in the sun all day? Like if you had like a large skin flap like a demetridon, Yeah, exactly, something that that nature basically human solar panel, Like if you had giant wings to stretch out and uh and absorb all the life, But then you'd also be losing a lot of heat energy against But I don't know. I do love, I do love the idea of it. The big thing is that this, this study does force us to reevaluate life and uh and how life not only interacts now but has just evolved in the presence

of radiation. Yeah. I mean it's weird how the stuff that seems so normal to us on Earth is maybe not normal. In fact, it's just a circumstantial byproduct of what Earth is like, and that life on another planet, the same kind of biology, the same kind of relationship with energy in the universe that seems so intuitive to us might be very weird to them. I mean, what if there's a planet that really thrives on gamma radiation. I'm not sure if that's plausible. That might not make sense,

but uh, you know, I can imagine it. You know what if they're really just confused by the idea of a whole food ecosystem that's built off the energy from sunlight, which is where everything on Earth comes from. Yeah, yeah, this is This is something that came up in the episode that did recently with Christian on butter. Like you you really break down butter, Butter comes from the sun.

Everything comes from the sun. It's all solar. I mean, your steak comes from the sun, Your your your whatever, your milkshake comes from the sun, and all of it is essentially solar energy that has been transformed into into something else, something that you can consume. You're just you're just gobbling it up further down the food jake. All right, we gotta end with crazy ideas. I've got one. Here's

one has matt suits made entirely out of mold. I like it like a black fungus, black fungus body suit to cover you up and protect you when you wade into the nuclear waters. Especially if it's rare. It grows rapidly, So it's essentially like it's kind of like a glow stick. You just break this in half in two fluid chambers, converge and then this black mole just grows all over you. And it's because it's alive. It's self healing. So instead of your has mat suit getting punctured and now you're like,

oh well I'm ruined now. Uh, instead it would it would grow back, seal itself up. That wouldn't really work with it, maybe not, but you know, it makes me think think about the various theories have been thrown out over the years about the future of of the human species in space. The basic cyborg idea that that human and must become more machine. It has been be this the synthesis of of biology and technology in order to

make this adaptation possible. What if the future is is is Homo sapiens becoming a symbiotic more of a symbiotic go organism. Uh and uh and and bringing in this this fungal existence is the space You know, this idea of the living suit. But what if that is the future of the human race. Yeah, well, I mean it goes to the idea of when we think of the cyborg. It's it's humans joining with human made artificial technology that's you know, made of metal and plastic and molded pieces.

I like the idea of the biocyborg, the hybrid organism. Yeah, especially if we end up with a big mushroom cap head and then then you know, it's it's it's all worth. It will become space Lins. Yeah, space Lins Invasion of the Space Likens. There's the next the next movie I'd like to see, along with The Killer Pine Trees and some of the other hypothetical B movies we've discussed in this episode. Have I told you about the B movie that I I've recently been thinking, we've got to rite

and produce what's this? This the No? No, it's called Planet of the Satan's, of the Satans, of the Satan all Satan's. Yeah, well, I mean you got Planet of the Vampires, but you gotta go step up. Planet of the Satan's. That would be good. Yeah, that or a Planet of the Frankenstein's. I would like that as well, but Planet of the Satans. It would be kind of like everyone on the planet is a Satan. And then yeah, okay, well not the people who arrived there they've got to

deal with the native Satan's. Oh, what if you do a Santa Claus versus the Martians kind of thing where you have a world where there is no Satan. And they said that children need Satan. Without Satan, how are they to live their lives? And then they decided, well, we're gonna go and we're gonna steal a Satan from the planet of the Satans, and then that will be our world Satan and then will put everything in balance. And then that's the origin story for life on Earth.

Big spoiler at the end, Yeah, the Fall of Man. All right, you lived up to the name. That's how we do it, all right. So hey, if you want to more on this topic and other topics, head on over to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where we have all the podcast episodes. Video's blog post links out to various social media accounts such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etcetera. We'll also include links to related material on the landing

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