My Experience Irradiating Bugs

On Saturday night, I was watching "Myth Busters" with my grandson. This week, they were trying to bust the myth that cockroaches would be the only thing living after a nuclear war. To test this, they put four different bugs, including fruit flies and roaches, into four containers each and had them irradiated with the cobalt source at Pacific Northwest Laboratories. The doses to the cubes were 100 rads, 1000 rads and 10,000 rads (I seem to remember). The final containers were controls with no radiation.

The Myth Busters then checked to see how many insects lived in each situation over a 30 day period. Unfortunately, I was called away before the end so I did not see if the cockroaches beat out other bugs for survival, but it did bring to mind the first time I ever worked with radiation, which was in an after school course in genetics when I was in high school. This was part of an effort to catch up to the Russians, who seemed to be ahead of us in science at the time, having been the first into space with the launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957.

This was the spring of 1958 and there was a lot less information on the affects of radiation, although it was common knowledge that at certain levels it could cause mutations in offspring.

I don't know how he got it, but our instructor had a cobalt source for us to use in radiating fruit flies so we could see what kinds of mutations it caused. I suppose that the NRC regulations, if that agency even existed then, weren't as strict in those days.

The problem was that genetically pure fruit flies cost money. Since he did not know exactly how much radiation the fruit flies could take without dying, and didn't want to sacrifice the more costly ones, he asked those of us in the class to catch any fruit flies we saw at home and bring them in so we could experiment on them.

I told my mother, Marion MacLeod, and asked her to try to catch any she saw.

Now my mother was the type who would think nothing of handling the bugs and snakes my Dad's boy scout troop was always bringing into the house. But imagine my Dad's bewilderment when he came into the kitchen one day and my mother excitedly exclaimed, "Oh, Jim, there's a fruit fly, there's fruit fly, what am I going to do with it?"

My Dad's response was to take his middle finger and gallantly save her by squashing the offending bug.

Well, that was one less fly for our experiment, which never-the-less was very fascinating.

It wasn't until about 25 years later that I decided to go into training as a nuclear medicine technologist, but I think my fascination with medicine and the uses of radiation started with that class.