Those who fear the effects of radiation always focus on cancer. But the most frightening and serious consequences of radiation are genetic.
Cancer is just one small bleak reflection, a flash of cold light from a facet of the iceberg of genetic damage to life on Earth constructed from human folly, power-lust and stupidity.
Cancer is a genetic disease expressed at the cellular level. But genetic effects are transmitted across the generations.
It was Herman Joseph Muller, an American scientist, who discovered the most serious effects of ionizing radiation – hereditary defects in the descendants of exposed parents – in the 1920s. He exposed fruit flies – drosophila – to X-rays and found malformations and other disorders in the following generations.