Life Exposed: Biological Citizens After Chernobyl

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“They are alive. The workers know that they didn’t die. But they don’t know how they survived.” These words were spoken to me by a biochemist in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 1996, a decade after the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. This scientist, along with colleagues at the country’s Academy of Medical Sciences, pioneered a way of analyzing the tooth enamel of Chernobyl cleanup workers and evacuees for clues to past levels of radiation exposure. Affected populations included roughly 600,000 cleanup workers and 5 million people either resettled from contaminated territories or continuing to live there. Their actual doses were uncertain or unknown owing to a lack of monitoring, and this made long-term research on Chernobyl’s health effects difficult, but not impossible. Tooth enamel, scrubbed of organic rot and crushed into microfine mineral components, provides a reliable measurement of an absorbed dose. More than four thousand samples were gathered in an established countrywide tooth acquisition network. Dr. Vadim Chumak and his colleagues, supported partly by the U.S. Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute, worked tirelessly, analyzing the dosimetric signals of the prepared samples so that a large-scale epidemiological study could soon take place. At least that was the plan.

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