Radiation risks: Raiders of the lost archive

Abstract

he town of Ozersk, deep in Russia's remote southern Urals, hides the relics of a massive secret experiment. From the early 1950s to the end of the cold war, nearly 250,000 animals were systematically irradiated. Some were blasted with α-, βor γ-radiation. Others were fed radioactive particles. Some of the doses were high enough to kill the animals outright; others were so low that they seemed harmless. After the animals-mice, rats, dogs, pigs and a few monkeys-died, scientists dissected out their tissues to see what damage the radioactivity had wrought. They fixed thin slices of lung, heart, liver, brain and other organs in paraffin blocks, to be sliced and examined under the microscope. Some organs, they pickled in jars of formalin. Fearful of a nuclear attack by the United States, the Soviet Union wanted to understand how radiation damages tissues and causes diseases such as cancer. Concerns about home-grown accidents, such as the 1957 disaster at the Mayak nuclear plant close to Ozersk, were another motivation. Throughout their experiments, the scientists carefully preserved the tissues and meticulously recorded their findings. Similar archives of irradiated tissue were built up in the United States, Europe and Japan, where nearly half a billion animals were sacrificed to the cause. But when the cold war came to an end, the collections fell into disrepair. Now, these archives have become important to a new generation of radiobiologists, who want to explore the effects of the extremely low doses of radiation-below 100 millisieverts-that people receive during medical procedures such as computed-tomography diagnostic scans, and by living close to the damaged Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan. The old collections provide a resource that could not be recreated

Radiation pathology: From thorotrast to the future beyond radioresistance

“…Such a scale of animal experiments will never be possible for both funding and ethical reasons. Even though those archives are old and paraffin embedded, they are available for genetic and proteomics analyses . In order to make the archive valuable for the next generation, we need demonstrate its usefulness ourselves and keep it in an appropriate condition until new technology and knowledge about low dose radiation effects are developed.…”

“…Even though those archives are old and paraffin embedded, they are available for genetic and proteomics analyses. 48 In order to make the archive valuable for the next generation, we need demonstrate its usefulness ourselves and keep it in an appropriate condition until new technology and knowledge about low dose radiation effects are developed. From our Thorotrast studies, it is clear that histological diagnosis is pivotal to elucidate molecular mechanisms of radiation effects.…”

Actinide bioimaging in tissues: Comparison of emulsion and solid track autoradiography techniques with the iQID camera

“…They have been increasingly applied for research in targeted alpha radiotherapy [25–28], with derivation of absorbed dose estimates [27]. In the frame of internal contamination with actinides, re-analysis of archival tissues is important to answer new questions that could not be addressed with techniques from the past [29, 30]. This was elegantly shown by Hare and co-workers, where laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma mass-spectrometry enabled generation of quantitative cartographies of plutonium, thorium and uranium isotopes in tissue sections from former nuclear workers [31].…”

The Effects of Radiation and Dose-Fractionation on Cancer and Non-Tumor Disease Development

“…This dataset, which is currently hosted at Northwestern University (), is publically available, and presents a unique opportunity to explore the effects of radiation on animals (at a scale no longer considered feasible by today’s standards) in a controlled environment and under experimental conditions with a radiation source that is no longer available. Although some recent studies examining the Janus database [13] have aimed to re-discover and preserve this and other large scale radiation experiments [14,15], this manuscript is a result of a new effort to re-visit and analyze the data on mice exposed to total doses in the range of clinical exposures either acutely or in 60 fractions. Previous studies using this database either focused on the tumorigenic effects of radiation [16,17], or examined pathologies at lower total doses of radiation, comparing frequencies of disease between groups of control and irradiated animals [18].…”