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Comment by epalmer | Hacker News Reader

My dad witnessed one of the Bikini Atoll nuclear bomb tests and was on the Atoll 24 hours later measuring background radiation. He never got cancer and lived till he was 83 and died of old age with his organs just shutting down. He was almost never sick. Many of the people that were with him died early of cancer. I hope I have some of his gene pool protection.

He also worked on the Manhattan project. He really never wanted to talk about either experience other than the days when he was assigned to the Manhattan project but before then got to Oakridge Tenn. He had some funny stories to tell about being stationed in NYC before transport to Tenn.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bikini_Atoll

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In addition to genetics, it can just be luck. Radiation damage is a probability game.

>>it can just be luck

You beat me to it. It is probably just luck. Some people do win the lottery, after all.

Yep, there were many people who were seemingly unaffected but in very close proximity to Chernobyl (employees of the plant), mostly likely due to sheer luck.

luck could be genetic, as posited in Niven's Ringworld.

Heck, I wonder if my dad knew your dad ;-). My dad also witnessed a number of nuclear tests, include at Bikini Atoll, and his ship went in to take measurements shortly after the explosion (he was a meteorologist in the Navy). He's 84 now and he will die before too much longer of old age, not cancer. (he also lived near Hanford, played with mercury as a kid, smoked a pipe his entire life... he's been lucky)

My dad had become a civilian employee at that time. Union Carbide I think. William Gerald Palmer (Jerry). It would be very cool if they knew each other. Dad was on a ship 10 miles from the blast.

I played with Mercury as a kid. I hope I am lucky.

Pure liquid mercury is not especially toxic so you're probably fine. That said it is damn stupid for kids to play around with it.

Lead is probably worse. I did a lot of soldering as a kid (like, from age 7 or so) and my ventilation/hygiene practices around it were far from ideal. I would not allow my kid to have that kind of exposure. If he needs to solder, then he needs to get a bench with proper ventilation and be scrupulous about clean-up and hygiene. Leadless solder is another thing but it has its own problems. Probably better is to do any electronic stuff in a format that doesn't involve soldering at least until more mature. These days it is not so important, though I expect it to be a useful tool indefinitely. All about proper balance.

Interesting tangent, as I understand it smoking a pipe isn't particularly dangerous compared to cigarettes, snuff, chewing tobacco, cigars, etc. When smoking a pipe the only contact with carcinogens is the smoke in your mouth. Chances of lung cancer aren't greatly increased as you shouldn't be inhaling and rates of mouth and throat cancers are only marginally increased. The chances of mouth and throat cancers are increased much less than if you were to chew tobacco or smoke cigars as both of those involve direct contact between the tobacco product and your lip. The biggest risk due to pipe smoking is heart disease due to nicotine. If you only smoke occasionally and choose tobaccos with lower nicotine content the risk here is negligible as well.

I always thought there were be a difference in cancer levels just never bothered researching it myself. My grand dad lived to 109, smoked a pipe pretty much all day long- every day since he started working at age 10. He's also known for drinking two bottles of scotch every day for almost as long. Though technically was a drinker because he when he was a child it was safer than the water. The double bottles of scotch didn't start until early 20s.

The thing that killed him was a slip on black ice in the morning that broke his hip leading him down to pneumonia and complications that came with it.

Source?

Btw my high school sports teacher, who smoked pipe, died of laryngeal cancer.

I replied to another comment further up the chain with further statistics and sources.

> as I understand it smoking a pipe isn't particularly dangerous compared to cigarettes, snuff, chewing tobacco, cigars, etc

Smoking a cigarette is a very dangerous activity, so very many things are safer than that.

Smoking a pipe does increase your risk of several cancers.

https://www.surgeongeneral.gov/library/reports/50-years-of-p...

> Most estimates of SAM [smoking attributable mortality] do not include mortality caused by cigar smoking, pipe smoking, or smokeless tobacco use. For example, an estimated 1,000 deaths in the United States were attributable to pipe smoking in 1991 (Nelson et al. 1996).

I'm not sure how many people were smoking pipes in 1991.

> The average annual SAM for the United States for 2010–2014 (Table 12.15) is at least 480,000 premature deaths caused by cigarette smoking and exposure to secondhand smoke; however, this estimate does not include deaths caused by use of cigars, pipes, other forms of combusted tobacco (e.g., roll-your-own cigarettes, hookah pipes, bidis; see Chapter 13 for description of these various products), nor smokeless tobacco products. As discussed in Chapter 13, the use of these products has increased in recent years; while the methodology for estimating the current population burden from the use of these tobacco products remains under discussion, the number of deaths caused by these products is expected to be in the thousands per year (Shapiro et al. 2000)

I absolutely agree. Smoking a pipe does increase your risk for a variety of cancers and several other health problems. Sometimes manyfold. My main point here is that the dangers it presents are more easily mitigated and less significant than most other forms of tobacco use and that overall you're not really exposing yourself to that much more risk than you would be doing many other things.

Here's a study looking at mortality rates and causes for pipe smokers. At the absolute worst, the top end of the confidence interval, the mortality rate goes from ~1.3% per man year to ~1.7% per man year if you are currently smoking a pipe and surprisingly lowers to ~1.2% per man year if you previously smoked a pipe. [1]

Over 20 years that adds up to an increase of about 6% in your chances of death.

Like all good things in life it has risks attached. Know the risks; enjoy it in moderation. It's a risk, but I think people tend to blow it out of proportion. Probably has something to do with people underestimating the base cancer rate.

[1]https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/96/11/853/2520796/Asso...

Puffing a cigar is little different from puffing a pipe. If you're inhaling into your lungs, you are doing it wrong. In either case, you are pulling tobacco smoke into your mouth and throat and related cavities. Risk of cancers of the throat, mouth, tongue, etc. are all greatly increased. It's not as bad as a cigarette habit, but far from harmless.

The fellow in this video lighting a cigar was probably getting more cancer exposure from the cigar than any radiation from the bomb test.

It probably wouldn't be done this way today (though, it wouldn't shock me, with a novel new weapon), but the guys in this video were never in any real risk. Building those planes and bombs took some damn good scientists. They knew a thing or two about radiation exposure. Certainly more than was known at the time about tobacco exposure.

In terms of the comments below I'm still of the mind that I have the chance for good genes. That gives me hope and maybe the Placebo Effect will kick in.

Could be a bit of selection bias there.

Of the people at Bikini Atoll during the testing, just randomly some were more susceptible to radiation and sickness, others less. Those that were more susceptible died sooner, those that weren't lived long enough to be your father.

That's what OP said.

I think the GP means the OP's father survived long enough for OP to be born, so from OP's perspective it looks like his father had good genetics. The selection bias is that none of the children of those who died early would exist, so only the children of those lucky enough to live a long time could say their parents must've had good genes.

How many fathers do you think he has?

It's not about him. It's the odds that someone would have children from that original group.

Consider, it's in no way an unusual event for lotteries to have winners. Further someone can increase their odds of winning by buying a lot of tickets. However, winners are unlikely to buy thousands of tickets for that drawing because the pool of people that buy a few tickets are vastly higher than the pool of people that buy thousands of tickets to each drawing.

So, just because one guy did not get cancer does not mean he has unusual DNA. Granted, the odds of him having some anti cancer mutation is probably higher than the general population.

So you mean he's luckier because he has lots of fathers, therefore more lottery tickets, thus increasing the chance that at least one of his fathers will live a long life without getting cancer?

No, "It's not about him."

Doesn't matter from our probabilistic perspective. Odds of seeing someone with a father who survived atomic testing is different from odds that your father survived atomic testing.

Wouldn't the more appropriate question be 'how many people commenting on this thread know someone who was at the bikini tests'?

Responses to your downvoted post:

"It can't be selection bias because OP only has one father."

Come on, folks. It is selection bias, because we wouldn't hear a "my dad survived" story if his dad didn't survive. Otherwise known as "survivorship bias," which is a form of selection bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

Only if the deaths (or more correctly: any effects harsh enough to impede mating) happen before the typical age of becoming a parent. If it's just "live healthy to very old age" vs "cancer at fifty", then there is no selection bias since our anecdata here is based on the next generation.

Even if he successfully birthed a child, the child wouldn't come here to tell a survivor story if he died of cancer at 50 (probably)

Or it's how the photons happened to hit his body. They might have hit in just the right way to not do cancer-causing DNA damage, or if that did happen, then those cells weren't influential or died or were terminated by the immune system by pure luck (he could have had the same level of "immunity" as those who happened to die because their system simply had an unlucky miss).

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