From the wikipedia page on Louis Slotin: Louis Slotin was exposed to “a lethal dose (around 2100 rems, or 21 Sv) of neutron and gamma radiation.”
It also says “Slotin experienced a sour taste in his mouth and an intense burning sensation in his left hand,” and “As soon as Slotin left the building, he vomited, a common reaction from exposure to extremely intense ionizing radiation.”
My (feeble) understanding of radiation is that it damages the DNA in cells, which then can’t reproduce properly. How does radiation have such immediate effects such as “a sour taste” and vomiting? What causes these?
Well, that article mentions the nausea and vomiting, but doesn’t really say why.
What about radiation makes your tongue think “that taste funny” and your stomach to say “that it, I’m getting rid of this stuff.” How do they even know anything happened?
The cell lining your gut and mouth reproduce incredibly quickly. They are being shed and replaced constantly. That’s a major reason why wounds in the mouth heal so fast. As you note, radiation stops cells from reproducing. So as the cells try to divide and fail to do so, they die. The dead cells then digest themselves, and the digestion products produce a sour taste. The vomiting is caused because the cells of the gut have died. That damages the ability of the gut to regulate water flow in and out of the gut. The body assumes that water imbalance is caused by a bacterial infection, and responds by initiating nausea and vomiting to expel the material.
This is so sad. I never knew how radiation poisoning worked.
Would it be possible, assuming future technology, to do anything to prevent this kind of death? Would you basically need to transplant your brain into a whole new body? Would that even work or do brain cells die too?
Is there any way to suck out the radiation after the fact, or has the damage already been done and death is just an eventuality?
Slotin apparently absorbed enough ionizing radiation to kill cells outright. DNA is not the only substance in the cell that can be damaged by radiation; if enough cellular machinery is disrupted the cell can’t recover and will die. Plain old heat does the same thing, killing cells by breaking chemical bonds which wrecks proteins and cell membranes. So Slotin could have had cells actively dying within minutes of his radiation dose. As for the sour taste in his mouth - that could have been from stimulation of taste buds or smell receptors as they got cooked, or heck it could have been from something randomly firing in his brain.
Let’s not forget a possible psychosomatic response to a dawning realization that he was a walking dead man. I know that kind of mental shock would make me want to puke.
Also, the higher the dose of radiation received, the more quickly the vomiting starts. Onset of vomiting can be used as a rough indicator of dose received. At high doses, the whole body is affected, including the central nervous system. In the case of one criticality accident at Los Alamos, the Cecil Kelley case, the person exposed was dead within 48 hours.
When I said that the epidermal cells divide incredibly quickly, I meant it. The generation time is a little less than 24 hours, slightly quicker in the mouth than in the gut. Assuming Slotin’s symptoms appeared within 20 minutes, well, there are a couple of million cells produced in the mouth in 20 minutes, and tens of millions in the gut.
Because they are very different types of burns. Heat burns cause damage by destroying the structure of proteins and rupturing cell membranes. In contrast classic radiation burns are caused by damage to the machinery the cell uses to divide. So you would only expect symptoms to show when large numbers of cells have tried to divide and failed. So it is surprising that symptoms can be expressed so fast if you don’t realise how fast cells are dividing in the gut.
No, that isn’t true. Nausea and vomiting are common symptoms of even mild radiation exposure. They indicate an unhealthy exposure, but they sure don’t indicate death. Heck, a lot of patients undergoing radiation therapy for cancer experience nausea and vomiting. They don’t usually die.
Nope, at this level of exposure, you are dead. All the DNA in the body has been scrambled. That includes the brain tissue. No matter what you do, no part of the body remains viable.
The only way you could correct the problem would be to suck out the nucleus of each cell individually and replace it. That might be possible at some distant future date, but at the moment it’s just fantasy.