Radiation Won't Kill the Race

Mice had good news for men this week. Reporting on the results of a six-year study of the effects of radiation on mice, Dr. John Frederick Spalding, 44, of the University of California's Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, said that radiation may not be the genetic bugaboo it has been made out. In a nuclear world, man may survive, and even continue to look like man--whatever the mistakes of soldiers and diplomats.

Starting with a brother-sister pair of mice in the "mouse house" at Los Alamos, Geneticist Spalding raised generation after generation of mice, the equivalent of 900 years of mankind. When the males of one line of Spalding's mice were about 26 days old, they were dosed with one-third the amount of X rays that would have been necessary to kill them--as much as they could take and still reproduce. Females were not irradiated since a similar dose would have left them sterile.

Once a male was irradiated, he was caged with his sisters; the resulting litters were carefully studied and the young males were irradiated before they were allowed to breed. Another line of mice, a control group, received no radiation at all. Then 32 generations of both radiated and non-radiated mice were carefully inbred to accumulate evidence of genetic damage as rapidly as possible. For all the obvious differences between mice and men, the genetic mechanics in all mammals are the same, and in humans and mice the genetic material is basically alike.

Spalding found that irradiated mice matured at a greater age, were fertile longer, had more conceptions and more litters than normal mice. But in the irradiated mice the litters were smaller, more babies were stillborn, and more were cannibalized by the parents. Except for a few cases of hydrocephalus, Spalding found no malformed offspring in 32 generations; on the other hand, the non-radiated control group developed a strain of bald mice that was a spontaneous mutation.

"I do not want to imply that irradiation does not cause genetic damage," says Spalding, "because it does. But the damage is eliminated through lethality and by natural genetic processes. Though there were more stillbirths and smaller litters, the fact that the irradiated mice remained productive over a longer period and actually produced more offspring is an apparent attempt by nature to compensate. If the human race is to eliminate itself genetically, it will probably have to look for a more effective method than radiation."

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