If You Are Hit By Two Atomic Bombs, Should You Have Kids?

The main story point here, of course, is that the human body has capacity to self-repair from exposure to ionizing radiation, which is to be expected given the evolutionary development of sexually reproducing multicellular organisms.

I found it interesting that this article stands as a counterexample to the "law" often referred to on Hacker News that one should assume the answer to a headline that asks a yes/no question is no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

Another unit of National Public Radio (the larger organization responsible for this story) has even provided advice on the subject of how to ask questions in headlines:

http://stateimpact.npr.org/teamblog/tag/questions-in-headlin...

Other headline tips (not specific to the issue of headlines that ask yes/no questions) can be found on the site of the The Poynter Institute.

http://www.poynter.org/how-tos/newsgathering-storytelling/14...

Interesting story. Many people don't think about the fact that the world is a naturally a radioactive place, between radon, cosmic rays, and just uranium and what not. We've evolved great defensive mechanisms in our DNA.

That said, I worry about too much the 'playing down' of nuclear warfare. One of my fears these events move out of living memory into history is that people don't 'get' just how horrific the destruction is. Of course that isn't going to stop the crazies. I don't doubt for a minute that we'll refresh our 'living memory' of just what its like to have a nuclear bomb go off in a city of millions, too many people have access and probability tells us one of them is too stupid not to try it.

There was an essay by P.J. Plauger, I suppose collected into one of his "Programming on Purpose" volumes, talking about somebody he had worked with who was told to show off computers (then very new) to some biologists. He wrote a simple program that new how to generate itself to output (punched tape), and ran off copies. When the biologists arrived, he explained the program, and invited them to try creating mutations by punching extra holes. The usual result was a program that failed to run--call it sterility. Very rarely would a "mutation" occur and the program run to generate different output. I don't recall whether anyone managed to punch a no-op.

Cells have the ability to sense DNA damage. They produce proteins that specifically recognize and bind to various signs of DNA damage, such as single-stranded DNA (normal DNA is double-stranded), DNA ends (which are normally protected inside telomeres), fused base pairs, etc. One possible response is to repair the damage, and this is done quite often. In fact, there is are several checkpoints during every cell division cycle where the cell will pause the cycle and wait for everything to report in as damage-free before continuing. It's actually a bit distressing to realize that pretty much every one of your cells is constantly fixing its genome in real time, and a bit mind-blowing how successful the process is (i.e. the fact that you don't get cancer several times a day).

However, another option in the case that the cell detects irreparable damage is for the cell to self-destruct. If the cell detects excessive DNA damage, it will initiate apoptosis. Also, if the DNA damage is taking too long to repair, the same will happen (kind of like Android's "force close" feature for hung apps). My assumption would be that most of the germline cells that are damaged by the radiation from a nuclear bomb would either fix it or kill themselves, leaving mostly perfectly healthy cells to produce healthy sperm & eggs.

In short, if 10% of your germline cells are damaged by radiation, you will not be producing anywhere near 10% mutated sperm (or eggs).

Sperm in testicles get purged naturally and/or through masturbation. Any damaged sperm would have been cycled through and removed a long time ago. However eggs are do not get recycled, so if his wife was hit by two atomic bombs, the results probably isn't going to be as rosy.

You can certainly try as that is one heck of a chatup line.

If you live through it, hell yes. Keep the longevity/survival genes in the pool.

This story was also covered in WNYC's Radio Lab podcast, which I highly recommend.  http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/jul/16/doub...

Could be a shot at creating a new superhero.

Also, big "anecdotal evidence" warning flag. One guy had relatively healthy kids, so radiation must be harmless?

To me, this once again proves Betteridge's Law of Headlines.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridges_Law_of_Headlines

Just ask some Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombing survivors, or survivors of the Chernobyl disaster.