Apologies if the tag is wrong!
From what I understand, the radiation doesn’t do squat untill it’s ionized. The way it was explained to me is that the Radiation is the knife, while the ionization is the hand weilding the knife.
So how does it affect the body? I know it does something to our DNA but what does it do specifically?
Bonus Question: What did scifi writers assume Gamma Ray’s would do to Bruce Banner to make him the Hulk, as opposed to what it does IRL and just… kill you.
In: 63
I’m not a nuclear physicist. But this isn’t *that* sub.
Heat is the answer. But it’s not the entire answer because wavelength matters. You need a wavelength that is going to be just the right scale to bypass the dermal layer of our skin. But large enough to interact with our DNA. That leaves a pretty small spectrum of the EM field.
As to what it does? It introduces energy, heat, into the structure. Whatever that structure might be. From cells to DNA, again depending on wavelength. And that extra heat and energy can cause the original structure to change chemically.
That change can come in many forms, from death of a cell, to mutation of a nucleotide.
But it’s always from heat, applied at very specific wavelengths.
> The way it was explained to me is that the Radiation is the knife, while the ionization is the hand weilding the knife.
Radiation is just high energy light or particles. Radiation is “ionizing” when it is strong enough to break the bonds between atoms (and makes them ions, hence the name).
Your fats, proteins, DNA, etc. all perform their function by way of their very precise structure. If that structure gets messed up, they won’t function properly. Ionizing radiation can break DNA in a number of ways, damaging or destroying the information encoded in its structure. Depending on the information affected and how it was damaged the cell may be totally fine, may be so damaged that it can’t function and dies, or may keep functioning but with some of the information altered (i.e., a mutation).
> Bonus Question: What did scifi writers assume Gamma Ray’s would do to Bruce Banner to make him the Hulk, as opposed to what it does IRL and just… kill you.
You’d have to ask the writers, but it’s just kind of a trope in superhero comics.
Different types of radiation have different effect. Like infrared radiation won’t really cause mutations as much as just bake you. The ionizing types of radiation will… drumroll… ionize atoms in your body. Some of those will be part of proteins and aminoacids, causing them to react with other nearby matter in ways not usually encountered in your normal lifecycle. Most of the time this will be oxidation, because oxygen is kind of the most reactive substance that’s abundantly everywhere in your body. Some of that reaction happens during the process of generating new cells, where a lot of the result will just be dead cells, but once in a while it will be a stable mutated cell, where mutation is caused by the process of making a new copy of your DNA being disrupted via a reaction of an inappropriately ionized molecule/atom. From there on, you’ll have a mutated cell that may produce new mutated cells. If by some reason this mutation caused that new cell to just reproduce uncontrollably – there you go, you got cancer.
As it stands with Bruce Banner – no one can tell you what the comic writers assumed would happen except themselves if they felt like answering this candidly. In all likelihood – nothing, they just needed a cool sciency-sounding term that nobody understands as part of a composite deus-ex-machina.
It’s not the radiation that’s ionized; it’s the target.
An ion is an atom which has an electrical charge, i.e. it has more or fewer electrons than protons. Chemistry is the science of atoms getting together so that they have the same, so ionization upsets the natural order of things.
Dunno about the Hulk … maybe the idea is that he’s filled with energy?
Radiation can be high energy particles or light. These particles have enough energy that if they hit a molecule, that molecule will break apart. If it happens to hit your DNA, the DNA will be damaged. If your cell’s DNA repair mechanisms fail, they can either cause a mutation or kill the cell. If that mutation harms the cell, the cell will likely die. If your immune system notices the change, it will likely kill the cell. Only if the mutation occurs in a sex cell (sperm or egg cell) will the mutation be passed on to a child (the mutation may not even be expressed).
You’re not going to grow a third arm from exposure to radiation. If you expose a population to increased radiation for a long period of time, one of two things would happen. 1. The entire population dies of radiation poisoning. 2. Over time (several generations), the population evolves a resistance to radiation. There’s already enough factors leading to mutation (from normal background radiation to just normal cell reproduction) that there’s no benefit to speeding it up, only downsides.
You know how uv light burns your skin? I always imagine radiation being the same, but it burns every layer of your body. Sometimes the DNA is what gets burned/damaged and that where the mutations and cancer can kick in.
There’s lots of different kinds of radiation. The light from a bulb, heat from a fire, etc..
Microwaves can cause molecules to vibrate to and make heat, so you can heat cells (cook them) until they die. No mutations, but dead cells anyway.
Ultraviolet (UV) light stimulates the bases that make up DNA to bond together. Your body has proteins to fix the damage by removing those bonded bits and replacing them, but periodically it makes a mistake and puts the wrong bases back in. When that happens, sometimes there’s subtle changes that cause the cell to stop working properly. It can cause it to go haywire and grow out of control (cancer), cause a inflammation, or just get overwhelmed and die. For people, the UV can’t get farther than our skin, so it means sunburn or skin cancer.
Ionizing radiation is fast-moving particles or very energetic packets of light that can hit a chemical bond and break it. The radiation itself doesn’t become ionized; it breaks apart molecules that become ions (charged atoms / molecules). This type of radiation can damage all sorts of bits of a cell and make some very harsh chemicals in a cell (and interfere with its function), but it’s really when they hit DNA that they cause the biggest issue. The energy is enough to break the DNA chain. A single nick can be repaired fairly easily, but if it happens while DNA is being copied, it might mean errors in the copy (mutations). A nick in multiple places might mean the DNA is cut and maybe reassembles differently the way (rearrangements of DNA). Those can cause cancer, or change the way something grows or looks. A lot of radiation can break the DNA into many pieces that cannot be repaired, and without the DNA intact the cells die off (radiation poisoning). This is the sort of radiation exposure we usually think of when we think of mutations or death from radiation.
1 Radiation is not ionized it is ionizing. To use your example non ionizing = spoon, ionizing = deadly knife.
Think of our DNA like a set of instructions written in 3 letter words (ATGC). All instructions for everything in the body from structure, functions and processes are coded in sentences of these 3 letter words. Ionizing radiation is strong enough to smudge some of these letters, our body can repair some to perfection, with others our body will take a guess as to what it said and others will be too far gone and need to be destroyed.
After prolonged exposure to ionizing some of the instructions will be changed while other will be unreadable.
There are several types of mutation, to keep it simple some are silent and will not be felt while other cause changes/ mutations. Some mutations can be beneficial while others detrimental. In this case the writers assume Bruce experienced mostly good mutations except being green.
But gamma radiation has so much energy that it simply destroys DNA.
Fundamentally, the dangerous ionizing radiation is actually tiny bits of the atom breaking off with incredible speed and flying in all directions.
These tiny particles are moving fast enough that they can blast chunks of your DNA apart if they strike it. Sometimes your body can repair the DNA, sometimes it can’t. Sometimes it comes back together in an altered state. The more this happens, the more your Cancer risk goes up. If enough of these particles bombard you, all at once, they can do so much damage that whole organs die.
I am a boat.
Radiation is the waves*.
When waves hit things, the impact delivers energy based on how long the wave is.
Long/smooth waves rock the boat, short/choppy waves can sink the boat.
Radio waves are longest, and therefore harmless. Gamma waves are some of the shortest. They deliver so much energy that they actually pierce the boat.
If enough gamma waves pierce the boat, eventually one will knock out (ionize) the atoms in something essential, like parts of the rudder or motor.
Now the boat is a mutant. It can’t sail properly because the waves damaged its DNA.
I guess in this context, you could say that Hulk won the lottery: Instead of damaging essential parts, the waves just knocked out his boat’s brakes. Now he’s faster than the other boats… but also he cant stop lol.
The thing with Hulk, I think, is that his character
was created back before any of this stuff was generally understood.
During those years, people were looking at therapeutic uses for radiation. Theorizing that deleting DNA could unlock hidden potential.
But no, it really just kills you…
*I’m omitting wave/particle duality. Nobody correct me, it’ll just make it more confusing.
Latest Answers