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
All energy sources radiate energy, usually in electromagnetic waves.
Some of those waves are at very large wavelengths – like radio waves that can measure nearly a meter. Visible light and microwaves radiate at much smaller wavelength, maybe a mm or smaller, but still harmless. It’s can’t really penetrate and disrupt the small delicate stuff inside the cells in our bodies
What you are thinking about whenever you say “radioactivity” is usually X-rays and Gamma rays. Those radiate at a wavelength that is SOOOO tiny that the waves are hardly larger than individual atoms or the smallest molecules.
This means that these waves can penetrate your body and cells, and interfere directly with the DNA in your cells. This can cause them to break, destroy, or mutate. Breaking up cells is bad because they cannot process and regenerate. Mutating is also bad because most cells will just die, but a few will mutate in a way that forms cancerous cells that can take over your body.
Your DNA is like the instructions for a LEGO set. Imagine if some of the parts in the instructions changed color or moved over by a stud. Your final Lego set would come out wrong.
Radiation alters your DNA, a little bit may cause a mutation, a lot will make the DNA useless not work anymore. Cells stop functioning, can’t reproduce, and end up dieing.
SciFi writers didn’t assume that gamma rays would make Bruce Banner into the Hulk, or that a radioactive spider bite would turn Peter Parker into Spiderman. It’s called a MacGuffin. The story gets interesting once hulk or Spider-Man exist, so the writers need a way to bring them into existence. In doesn’t really matter what that way is.
Post WW2 few people knew what atomic power or radioactivity was, but they knew it was powerful, so it worked in a literary sense as a MacGuffin.
If the stories had been written 100 years earlier it might have been electricity (like Frankenstein) or vampire magic.
If they had been written 2 millennia before it might have been a blessing (or a curse) from the Gods.
radiation shreds the strands of DNA causing cells to be unable to function and rot away creating wounds that cant heal. what usually kills at high dose is internal bleeding from the intestines dissolving. The bone marrow which makes blood and the immune system are also very sensitive. And having no immune system plus wounds that cant heal isnt very good. At lower doses it can also turn cells into cancer. Sunburns are radiation burns and increase the risk of cancer.
UV, beta and alpha have low penetration and are stopped by clothes. As long as you dont eat the source there not that dangerous. X, gamma and neutrons penetrate deep. Neutrons also turn the things they hit radioactive but are only made by reactors.
Imagine your DNA is like a Lego set.
Imagine a radioactive particle like an alpha/beta particle is a bowling ball.
Throw the bowling ball at the Lego set, and it gets smashed up.
Now you want to rebuild the Lego set, but you don’t have the instructions, so different colour bricks end up in different places than the original position in the set. This is known as a mutation which can be deadly.
Or the Lego set can be completely obliterated and you can’t rebuild it. This is cell death. This is how certain types of cancer are treated, they’re bombarded with beta particles, and it rips the cancerous tissues to shreds.
>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.
It’s a comic book and it made for a compelling origin story.
I’m probably wrong here as I’m not anything close to someone who specializes in anything like this. But radiation was explained to me as “thousands and thousands of microscopic bullets shooting through you constantly”
Lot of smart answers here but I will attempt an actual ELI5 version.
Irradiated atoms are crazy and are going nuts all over the place. They are going crazy enough and are small enough with enough power to blast away portions of your DNA.
The DNA recipe still gets put into the oven and makes whatever it was trying to make but its like baking a cake without one of the ingredients so it comes out wrong aka cancer/mutation.
Imagine something that is radioactive as shooting bullets that can hit your DNA in every direction.
In some cases it can turn you into a human-spider hybrid and in other cases it can turn you into a giant green monster when you get angry.
Ionising radiation is any form of radiation that creates ions (charged chemical molecules) in the target material. It can do this because it is energetic charged particles (alpha and beta radiation, or proton beams), or because it is energetic and disrupts chemical bonds or atoms (neutrons, x-rays and gamma rays). Alpha and beta particles have low penetrability, and neutrons, x-rays and gamma rays are penetrating radiation.
All cells are a very controlled chemical environment – they have cell walls and transport mechanisms to ensure that the internal cell environment maintains specific conditions. Ionizing radiation affecting the cell causes changes in these conditions by introducing energy, and this energy creates ions – charged chemical fragments. Now, there are lots of ions in the cell, but these are controlled and react in specific ways. The ions created by radiation are highly reactive, and can occur in places where they are not expected.
Sometimes those changes or ions directly affect large and complex molecules like DNA or the molecules that manipulate DNA in the cell – breaking strands or making changes to the sequence of base pairs. This might prevent the DNA (and thus the cell) from operating correctly or replicating. Or it might impact a regulation function, causing the cell operation to change or run out of control – this is what causes cancer.
Sometimes the ions created by the radiation forms highly reactive chemical fragments called free radicals – if the cell cannot provide something to react with the free radical (an antioxidant), it can trigger a chain reaction in the cell, eventually damaging a critical molecule.
If enough damage occur to the cell, it will die. This is the goal of radiotherapy – using penetrating and targeted radiation to kill the cells in a cancerous tumour. This is done by targeting the tumour from multiple directions and by moving the beams – this ensures that the tumour gets a damaging dose of radiation, while the surrounding tissue which is still exposed to the radiation gets a more limited dose.
For more limited exposures, ionizing radiation causes mutations in the DNA of the cell – this could kill the cell, it could make the cell cancerous, or it could introduce a mutation that might be damaging or it might be beneficial. These beneficial mutations are part of how evolution works, along with DNA replication errors. It is this mutagenic effect that leads imaginative writers to posit hulk-forming gamma ray exposure, radioactive spider-bites, or radioactive waste-induced radar-sense along with physical blindness.
Imagine a jenga tower with a few blocks removed. Thats your dna.
Ionizing radiation is like a small ball flying at fast speed at that tower. (And its actually a repeating wall of balls but lets keep it simple)
Now alpha radiation is like a ball bearing,heavy going quite fast, but not from far distances before it hits the ground. However if it hits, its gunna smash up the tower, the tower may still stand but it could fall to bits. But either way the jenga tower is going to be in half. The tower is your dna in a cell and it probably wont live afterwards.
Beta radiation is like a pellet gun much faster but smaller. Each pellet may knock out a block, but it may take a few hits to take the tower down…but it could be hit just right and fall. But that one block may have also been super critical to the tower being a tower.
Gamma radiation is like a really high powered laser or really fast small bullet. It will hit and burn through a block on the tower and keep going. Being exposed for long enough puts enough holes in so many blocks the whole tower is Swiss cheese and it collapses.
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