THEODOSIUS DOBZHANSKY was graduated from Kiev University and is now a professor at the Rockefeller University. He has done research in genetics and biological evolution on every continent except Antarctica. Among his distinguished published works are Radiation, Genes, and Man, Heredity and the Nature of Man, Mankind Evolving, and Evolution, Genetics, and Man. Mr. Dobzhansky received the Daniel G. Elliot Prize and Medal and the Kimber Genetics Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1958, and the National Medal of Science awarded by the President of the United States, in 1965.
The Genetic Effects of Radiation
THE MACHINERY OF INHERITANCE
Introduction
There is nothing new under the sun, says the Bible. Nor is the sun itself new, we might add. As long as life has existed on earth, it has been exposed to radiation from the sun, so that life and radiation are old acquaintances and have learned to live together.
We are accustomed to looking upon sunlight as something good, useful, and desirable, and certainly we could not live long without it. The energy of sunlight warms the earth, produces the winds that tend to equalize earth’s temperatures, evaporates the oceans and produces rain and fresh water. Most important of all, it supplies what is needed for green plants to convert carbon dioxide and water into food and oxygen, making it possible for all animal life (including ourselves) to live.
Yet sunlight has its dangers, too. Lizards avoid the direct rays of the noonday sun on the desert, and we ourselves take precautions against sunburn and sunstroke.
The same division into good and bad is to be found in connection with other forms of radiation—forms of which mankind has only recently become aware. Such radiations, produced by radioactivity in the soil and reaching us from outer space, have also been with us from the beginning of time. They are more energetic than sunlight, however, and can do more damage, and because our senses do not detect them, we have not learned to take precautions against them.
To be sure, energetic radiation is present in nature in only very small amounts and is not, therefore, much of a danger. Man, however, has the capacity of imitating nature. Long ago in dim prehistory, for instance, he learned to manufacture a kind of sunlight by setting wood and other fuels on fire. This involved a new kind of good and bad. A whole new technology became possible, on the one hand, and, on the other, the chance of death by burning was also possible. The good in this case far outweighs the evil.