“Children of Chernobyl”: what the first genetic study of the descendants reveals

One of the big questions of the biggest 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 hours of April 26, 1986, the city in northern Ukraine became a ghost town and the lives of tens of thousands of people were marked by the atomic disaster. .

Since then, many survivors have had to deal with radiation-related illnesses to which they have been exposed and uncertainty over what might happen to their descendants, the so-called “son of Chernobyl“. And is that one of the questions that has bothered both scientists and survivors for decades is whether the effects of nuclear radiation could pass to the offspring.

Today, for the first time, a genetic study sheds light on the subject and its results have just been published in the journal Science.

Research, led by the professor Meredith yeager, from the US National Cancer Institute (NCI), focused on the children of the workers who enlisted to help clean up the highly polluted area around the nuclear power plant (the so-called liquidators). The descendants of evacuees from the abandoned city of Pripyat and other settlements within a 70 km radius of the reactor were also investigated.

The participants, all conceived after the disaster and born between 1987 and 2002, had their entire genome examined. And the result came as a surprise to many involved.

The results

The study found no “additional DNA damage” in children born to parents who were exposed to radiation from the Chernobyl explosion prior to conception.

“Even when people were exposed to relatively high doses of radiation, compared to background radiation, it had no effect on their future children,” the teacher explained. Gerry Thomas, Imperial College London, to BBC reporter Victoria Gill.

Thomas, who has spent decades studying the biology of cancer, particularly tumors linked to radiation damage, explained that this study was the first to show that there is no inherited genetic damage after radiation exposure.

“Many people were afraid of having children after the atomic bombs. [en Nagasaki e Hiroshima]. 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’s very sad. And if we can show that there is no effect, we hope to be able to alleviate this fear,” he adds.

Thomas was not involved in the study, although she and her colleagues have conducted further research into cancers linked to Chernobyl. His team studied thyroid cancer because the nuclear accident is known to have caused some 5,000 cases, the vast majority of which were treated and cured.

The study

One of the main researchers of the study, Stephen chanock, also from NCI, told the BBC that the research team recruited entire families so that scientists could compare the DNA of the mother, father and child.

“Here we do not see what happened to these children who were [en el útero] at the time of the accident; we see something called de novo mutations“. These are new mutations in DNA – they happen at random in an egg or sperm. Depending on where a mutation occurs in a baby’s genetic blueprint, it might have no impact or be the cause of a genetic disease.

“There are between 50 and 100 of these mutations in each generation and they are random. In a way, these are the building blocks of evolution. This is how new changes are introduced in a population, ”Chanock explains.

“We observe genomes mothers and fathers, then to the child. And we spent nine more months looking for any sign of the number of these mutations associated with parental radiation exposure. We can’t find anything ”.

This means, say scientists, that the effect of radiation on the parent’s body has no impact in the children they conceive in the future.

BBC Mundo