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
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.
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