Slashdot Mirror
Jars of Irradiated Russian Animals Find a New Purpose
scibri writes with bits and pieces from the article: "From the early 1950s to the end of the cold war, nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated in the Russian town of Ozersk. Fearful of a nuclear attack by the United States, the Soviet Union wanted to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer. Now, these archives have become important to a new generation of radiobiologists, who want to explore the effects of the extremely low doses of radiation — below 100 millisieverts — that people receive during medical procedures such as computed-tomography diagnostic scans, and by living close to the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan."
I want a jar of irradiated Russian animal remains!
There's not been actual scientific evidence for radiation hormesis in humans, despite it being your pet theory.
I suspect that the reason for that is... you know... doing it in a controlled fashion to be able to test and gather evidence.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Well, its probably telling that even the Russians have not yet found a way to permanently deal with radioactive waste that does not offend people. :P
Joking aside, why would you discard this stuff? Unless such biological samples are contaminated, completely decayed or have completely lost their essential and interesting properties, the cost of storing them is usually negligibly in contrast to the cost of recreating those samples if you need them.
After all, back then nobody much cared about irradiating 250k animals. Nowadays even the Russians would be up to their gills in activists and their local kind of PETA members if they did something like that even semi-publically.