Monthly Archives: August 2022

CLOVER Living descendants of Henrietta Lacks a Halifax County resident known as the mother of modern medicine visited Clover on Sunday on what would have been the eve of Lacks 102nd birthday.

Lacks relatives honored her memory with a wreath-laying ceremony at her gravesite, followed by a traditional church service at St. Matthew Baptist Church, the place where Lacks was baptized.

It is more than an honor and a privilege to be in this same place, this same church where my great-grandmother and great-grandfather learned to worship the Lord, Veronica Robinson said with joyful reverence.

Lacks is best known for her immortal HeLa cells cells that were able to live and self-replicate after she died of cervical cancer on Oct. 4, 1951, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Henrietta Lacks descendants Bria Baptiste, Ava Flood, Jewel Carter, Victoria Baptiste, Alfred Carter Jr., Lacks only living son Lawrence Lacks Sr. and Veronica Robinson pose for the crowd Sunday as they prepare to lay the wreath on her grave in Clover.

Dr. George Otto Gey was able to culture Lacks cells to develop the HeLa cell line which continues to be utilized in medical research to this day.

Halifax County Board of Supervisors member Bryant Claiborne contextualized Lacks legacy for those in attendance.

Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine. But do you know whose cells he used? Claiborne queried.

Halifax County NAACP President Barbara Coleman-Brown framed Lacks legacy as a medical miracle.

Henrietta Lacks was unique, Coleman-Brown said. Her cells cannot be replicated. So, this was a gift from God. The congregation met her remarks with jubilant concurrence.

The Rev. Alfred Chandler delivers remarks at the laying of the wreath Sunday morning at the grave of Henrietta Lacks.

Coleman-Brown expressed gratitude that the Lacks family chose to celebrate their famous ancestors birthday right here in Halifax County.

For the first time, it is being celebrated in her hometown, she said.

Lacks grandson, Alfred Carter Jr., shared although he lives in Baltimore, This is home. I feel like its home.

Forced to perform without their organist, the St. Matthew Baptist Church choir sings hymns a capella, accompanied only by the rhythmic clapping of the congregation.

Carter revealed that his mother was Lacks youngest daughter in 1951 when Lacks died. His mother was only 2 years old at the time, and feeling like she missed the chance to know her famous parent she dedicated much time and effort to learning as much as she could about Lacks.

In order for you to go somewhere, you have to know where you come from, Carter said.

He humorously added, My mother used to drag me down here every summer.

Lacks legacy continues in more than one way. Representatives from the Hometown Initiative spoke about their mission to erect a statue in Lacks honor in South Boston, indicating that the group needs donations to continue their efforts.

Lacks family representative Shyrea Thompson promotes the Lacks Familys Cervical Cancer Awareness #TealTakeover initiative to end cervical cancer Sunday morning with descendants Bria Baptiste and Ava Flood.

Lacks family representative Shyrea Thompson spoke alongside descendants Bria Baptiste and Ava Flood to explain the #TealTakeover initiative of the HELA100 organization. This project will promote testing for cervical cancer among Black women with the ultimate intention to end the disease that claimed Lacks life.

In honor of Lacks and to promote the #TealTakeover initiative, her descendants who attended the Sunday event all wore the color teal.

The celebration of Lacks birthday will continue at 10 a.m. Monday with a fundraising event in support of the Hometown Initiative at Constitution Square in South Boston.

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Relatives of Henrietta Lacks visit Clover to honor her memory - YourGV.com

Sagitta, the Arrow, is the smallest of the constellations named by the ancient Greek chronicler Aratus (fourth century BCE). His account is brief: Theres further shot another Arrow/But this without a bow.

Despite its diminutive size, the arrow is hard to miss. Its stars are relatively bright, and it lies surrounded by the three most luminous stars in the summer sky, the aptly named Summer Triangle.

Most stargazers dont give Sagitta a second glance. Its not difficult to see why. The more prominent constellations nearby, not to mention the convoluted glow of the surrounding summer Milky Way, overshadow the pint-sized constellation.

However, the constellation is associated with a solemn ritual that we still practice. The rite is performed with religious fervor every four years but Im getting ahead of myself.

Where were we? Sagitta. Yes.

After the sky gets completely dark, look east and almost straight overhead for Vega, the brightest star of high summer, in the constellation Lyra. Deneb is down and to the left. It is the head star of the northern cross, also known as Cygnus, the Swan.

Completing the triangle to the right is the star Altair, easily recognizable because of the two fainter stars flanking it.

Sagitta is inside the triangle nearest to Altair. Its four brightest stars really do look like an arrow.

The two close stars on the right seem to form the notch that fits into the bowstring. Some early star maps reversed the direction of the arrow to represent the two-pointed projectile used by the Roman army.

Most of the stories about the constellation come down to us from the ancient Greeks and Romans. For example, Germanicus Julius Caesar describes the constellation as one of the arrows wielded by Cupid, the god of erotic love.

Germanicus is best known as the father of Caligula, the fourth Roman emperor of the Julian line, the grandfather of Nero, the fifth and last Julian emperor, and the older brother of Claudius, the third emperor.

The honorific title Germanicus was added to his name in 9 BCE because of his fathers victories against the tribes of Germany. Germanicus followed up his fathers successes with three successful German campaigns himself.

He was also something of a scholar. In 4 CE, he retold the set of constellation myths detailed in The Phenomena, written by Aratus, a Greek writer of the fourth century BCE.

(The work by Aratus was, in turn, a poetic interpretation of an earlier Greek work, now lost, by Eudoxus of Cnidus. The road these old stories travel can be long and winding.)

Germanicus reinterprets Aratuss work to satisfy the tastes of contemporary Romans. He described Sagitta as one of the love darts used by Cupid to make people fall in love, although lust might be a more appropriate term.

Even the gods were not immune to Cupids arrows. Intoxicated by Cupids love dart, Zeus, the king of the gods, fell in lust with Ganymede, a young shepherd.

It didnt help matters that Ganymede was a handsome young man. Homers Iliad describes him as the loveliest born of the race of mortals.

In the guise of an Eagle, Zeus swept down and kidnapped the unfortunate boy while he was placidly tending his sheep on Mount Ida.

Zeus offered the erstwhile shepherd several inducements to become the gods lover and wine pourer.

One of those perks was immortality. The lowly shepherd was to become a god.

Hera, Zeuss wife, was used to Zeuss frequent infidelities, but the offer of immortality was over the top. Hera had viewed Zeuss many lovers as rivals on many occasions, but the offer of eternal life turned the usual brief dalliance into a never-ending relationship.

And thus it was that Ganymede, used and abused by the gods, was transformed from shepherd to wine pourer to the constellation Aquarius, where he retains his immortality but little else.

The story seems to tell us to be wary of Cupids arrow, which bears the dubious gift of unadorned erotic passion. True love must bind erotic love with spiritual and emotional affinity.

In the writing of Pseudo-Eratosthenes (first century CE), Sagitta is the arrow that Apollo, the god of learning and the arts, used to slay the fierce, one-eyed Cyclops.

The tale turns on the fate of Asclepius, the son of Apollo and a mortal woman.

Asclepius developed extraordinary skills in medicine. He was so proficient in the healing arts that he could bring dead people back to life.

He became so good at raising the dead that Hades, the god of the Underworld, began to notice a dearth of wraiths entering his dark kingdom.

He asked Zeus to slay the ill-starred Asclepius. Without hesitation, Zeus dispatched the physician with one of his deadly thunderbolts.

Apollo could not control his rage. Zeus had murdered his son. He could not vent his anger on the more-powerful Zeus, so he directed his wrath at the Cyclops, who manufactured Zeuss thunderbolts. An arrow of great size did the trick.

As punishment for the loss of his thunderbolt supplier, Zeus sentenced Apollo to a years servitude as a shepherd in Thessaly. Before he left, Apollo hid the arrow in Hyperborea, a mythical paradise, a land beyond the North Wind, somewhere far north of Greece.

Hyperborea was a land of perpetual sunshine, but that was not its main selling point as a hiding place. What made it a paradise was that it was the only place in heaven or on earth that was beyond the reach of the gods.

After Zeus released Apollo from his servitude, he retrieved the arrow. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, carried it through the air and placed it in the sky for us to see to this very day.

The most common story, told by the Roman poet Hyginus in the first century BCE, has to do with that star of myth, legend, and Disney movie, the fabulous Hercules.

Hercules was the defender of the long-suffering Prometheus among his many brave deeds.

When the king of the gods, Jupiter, took over the universe, he gave Prometheus the task of creating human beings and equipping them with the tools they would need to survive on earth.

Prometheus belonged to the defeated race, called the Titans, whom Zeus and the other gods had overthrown to take over the universe. In retrospect, Zeus must have regretted giving the job to a vanquished enemy.

Without asking Zeus, Prometheus gave humans a most precious but potentially dangerous gift. He stole fire from the heavens and taught humans how to use it.

Jupiter was so angry that he took the fire back to the heavens. Prometheus had learned to love his creations so much that he risked Jupiters vengeful wrath and stole it back.

Hyginus tells the story of the theft this way:

Thus, when the other gods were away, he came to Jupiters flame, and hiding a small part of it in a fennel-stalk, he seemed not to run, but to fly, joyfully shaking the fennel-stalk, so that the enclosed air might not extinguish the flame with its vapors in the narrow space.

Jupiter was so enraged by the second theft of fire that he devised a cruel and horrific punishment. He chained poor Prometheus to a rock, and every day he sent a vulture to eat the liver of his screaming victim.

Every night, the liver grew back. Every day the vulture returned. Prometheus had nothing to look forward to but eternal agony.

Luckily, Hercules came to the rescue. The hero was the son of Zeus and a mortal woman. He owed, I suppose, great loyalty to his father, but his human side pitied the agonized Titan and honored him as the father of humanity. Consequently, Hercules freed Prometheus and killed the vulture with an arrow from his mighty bow.

Of course, you can see Sagitta as four tiny stars in the smallest of the constellations. However, the story of Hercules and Prometheus reminds us that the constellation is also an emblem of those characteristics that make us most human compassion, loyalty, generosity, and honor.

Four decades back, I built my largest telescope. As is the custom of many young telescope builders, I gave the telescope a name Prometheus because, like the ancient hero, it steals fire from the sky.

But I am not the only person who honors the memory of Prometheus. As Hyginus wrote over two millennia ago,

And so, to this day, following the practice of Prometheus, the custom was established that runners in athletic contests would run brandishing a torch.

And so, to this day, the Olympic torch burns brightly every four years, and humanity again becomes the guardian of the Promethean flame.

Tom Burns is the former director of the Perkins Observatory in Delaware.

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Sagitta constellation is often overlooked - Delaware Gazette

What happens after death? Scientists say that physical death is the end of life. Religions believe that our souls are immortal, but where we go depends on what we have done in life. In the midst of all this, there are some who They claim to return from the other side to tell about it,

In TIC Toc, the unbelievable testimony of a woman who claimed to be dead for a while caught the attention of netizens. Over the course of two videos, the old woman remembers him near death experienceWhich started when he had a severe allergic reaction in his bathroom:

,I felt strange, but very strange. I went to the bathroom and it was a monster, it was all swollen; I said this is a terrible attack, from an allergyUnknown woman called back.My husband immediately took me to the hospital, I came and died. I couldnt speak because my throat was swollen all around, He added.

This is where his testimony moves from the accidental to the supernatural. As she explains, she had to go into cardiac arrest because of an allergic reaction that doctors couldnt save: I was dead for a few minutesHowever, in those few minutes, Grandma claims to have experienced it all her life, down to the smallest detail.

,I left my body, I swam, I went out the window, the woman continued, her eyes replaying an impossible landscape. What she claimed was the Grand Canyon, a geographical mark AmericaThe woman claimed to have gonea series of incredible experiences, between them meeting ones own great-grandmother,a Hungarian; Sorry an Austrian, she wouldnt want me to get confused, which he had not seen since childhood.

,life happens to you Your choice starts at an incredible pace, in a movie in full swing and you see everything, assured the grandmother, repeating one of the common descriptions told by those who claim to have returned from the dead. Once in her body, the old woman had only a simple reflection to leave. was: everything you do is importantstupid things too,

Hundreds of stories circulate on the Internet and orally about near-death experiences. Hearing and reading these stories over and over again in the common imagination has ended up shaping a narrative that usually consists of the following elements: the presence of a flashing light, the sensation of leaving ones body, or a state of maximum relaxation.

but, Are these experiences real, or are they imaginary? Apparently, a scientific study managed to conclude that this chain of events is not a hallucination, but can be organized by the brain itself. research published in the journal Annals of the New York Academy of SciencesentitledGuidelines and standards for the study of death and remembered experiences of death, includes a review of all scientific literature published on the subject to date.

Based on this, the researchers reasoned that when the heart stops, brain cells are not irreversibly damaged within minutes of lack of oxygen, but rather They may be running for an extra timeso the memories that people bring back from these experiences They will still be the fruit of a brain in performance, even if that persontalk of death,,

,Few studies have explored what happens when we die in an objective and scientific manner, but our findings provide an interesting thread that may explain awareness of the phenomenon in humans and avenues for future research. can pave., Understand Sam Parnialead author of the study and director of critical care and resuscitation research at the New York School of Medicine.

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Grandma Came Back From The Dead And Told What She Saw - Nation World News

Can you imagine what its like to be a junior doctor? The gruelling shifts, the lack of sleep, the terror that, as you take the plunge from lecture hall to hospital ward, youre responsible for the lives and deaths of others? Austin Duffy would like to help you try.

The oncologists third novel, The Night Interns, draws on his own exposure to the process more than 20 years ago which, he says, is just imprinted in my head so vividly compared to other more recent stages of my career, where Ive gone through a lot more dramatic stuff and had all sorts of intense experiences. But theres obviously something about that initial year.

Part of that something, as he describes it, is that while newly qualified medics have theoretical knowledge, they are suddenly confronted with the reality of trying to put it into practice, pitched into the unfamiliar surroundings and hierarchies of the hospital environment: You cover these vast hospitals at night, and youre wandering around with people who youre in college with; you know them, they know you, and youve got each other to help you along, but its not like theyre in any better situation. Its that moment where youve got a real foot in both camps: youre not quite a fully-fledged doctor, even though you are on paper, and youre not quite a total civilian, either. And on the medical side, youre at the very bottom of the totem pole.

In The Night Interns, which revolves around a trio of junior doctors, Duffy tries to capture the vulnerability and the isolation that he remembers despite the fact, he says, that he had a pretty good internship. The result is a tense, claustrophobic narrative, filled with strip-lit corridors, bleeping pagers, absent consultants and catastrophically ill patients, its sharply observed details set against a backdrop of the protagonists unstable emotions. In short, Duffy followed one imperative as he wrote the book: I wanted the reader to be on call.

Duffys imagination was fired by the description of young men caught up in a system over which they have no control

A clue to the intensity he wanted to achieve comes via a novel that, incongruous as it may seem, inspired him: the French writer Hubert Mingarellis A Meal in Winter, which follows three German soldiers working at a concentration camp who come across a Jewish escapee in the surrounding forest. Duffys imagination was fired by the description of young men caught up in a system over which they have no control although, he is at pains to point out, hes drawing no comparisons between the two situations: Ones a murderous regime, the others trying to help people and trying to make people better, but there was something about that dynamic that made me think, Oh my God, this reminds me of being an intern.

Duffys days of being at the bottom of the totem pole are long behind him. Nowadays, he works as a consultant at the Mater and is an associate professor at UCD; he specialises in immunotherapy and spends much of his time setting up clinical trials to enable patients quicker and better access to new and experimental drugs, a process that he ruefully notes is slower than it should be in Ireland. Im not a real scientist, he tells me, not at all. I can speak the lingo, and sort of fake it but last year he was honoured by the National University of Ireland for his exceptional research into the treatment of liver cancer.

His day job, then, doesnt sound like it would leave either much clock-time or headspace for writing fiction not to mention the fact that he also has a young family, is a keen runner and plays the saxophone. But Duffy disagrees: indeed, he sees his career as a huge advantage, and not just because it pays the mortgage. At work, he does something that he loves, and that stimulates him, and he even finds the time pressure a spur to keep at it, writing before he leaves his house in Howth every morning, then on the Dart, with maybe a quick diversion to a coffee shop if hes running ahead of schedule. If he has to take one of his children to football practice in the evening, he sits in the car with his laptop. Im very focused: when I sit to write, Im not really looking out the window, he says, which must be a terrific understatement. Does he feel impatient, I wonder, when he sees writers talking about their perfect writing set-up or the difficulty of carving time out for work? Listen, everyones got their own way, he replies, with immense tact.

He began to write when he was working in New York, living in hospital accommodation, basically a box with no internet or TV. With few personal commitments, he saw an advert for a weekly class at the writers studio, having long nursed the ambition and dibbed and dabbed throughout his 20s, including some forays into the usual awful, sentimental crap stuff.

I was very sceptical about creative writing classes, he recalls. But I figured I needed something external to just sort of get me going. And it worked perfectly, you know, it really did, it got me reading all these different writers that I would never have read. I met some people, and it was serious and good. And from that moment, Ive basically written every day.

Beyond the necessity of compartmentalising his timetable, I ask him, does he see links between his work as a doctor and his writing life?

He met his wife, artist Naomi Taitz, in New York and the couple subsequently moved to Washington before returning to Ireland in 2017, a year after the publication of his first novel, This Living and Immortal Thing, which centred on an ex-pat Irish research oncologist searching for a breakthrough. His second, Ten Days, followed last year and was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and the McKitterick Prize.

Beyond the necessity of compartmentalising his timetable, I ask him, does he see links between his work as a doctor and his writing life? Is it, in fact, an ingrained cultural misunderstanding that we separate the arts and the sciences so forcefully? I dont think theres a sharp dividing line at all, he replies. Obviously, there are different techniques involved. But youre kind of trying to get at the same thing in both. In science and medicine, youre trying to get to a sort of an objective truth: does drug x work, or does it not? Youre doing an experiment basically, youre trying to find out why is x causing y? Youre getting at that through experimentation and a different methodology than you would use, obviously, in art, but in art, youre also looking for some form of truth.

I ask him a cheeky question. The Night Interns features some truly horrible medical professionals at the top of the tree. How has he guarded against becoming one himself if indeed he has? He bursts out laughing. I wouldnt survive for very long! I think those people, like the villain in the piece, you dont see many of them around anymore. I think that is a genuine cultural change of the last 20 or 30 years. Im sure theres still things that go on. But I do think consultants, in general, are nicer. Im obviously going to say that, right?

Duffy points to the rates of personnel leaving the healthcare system for countries such as Australia

The Night Interns is not a novel of the pandemic, but it arrives at an interesting time, when the public has been made even more aware than previously of the strain on medical professionals: the images of nurses and doctors in heavy-duty protective gear for hours on end, working tirelessly to get to grips with an unfolding public health emergency, will take a long time to fade from the memory.

One of the questions the novel raises about the internship system is whether putting junior staff through such punishing initiations really correlates to whether they will become good doctors; Duffy points to the rates of personnel leaving the healthcare system for countries such as Australia, and although hes cautious about comparing one country against another, he also thinks it can be instructive. Burnout is a major concern, he says and was even before Covid hit.

Our strength is our people, and not just doctors or nurses, but all of the interactions that you get within the Irish health system.

Encountering the trainee doctors and nurses on his return from America, he says, their calibre really hit him: Theyre just fabulous. And The Night Interns will leave its readers in no doubt that they need protecting and preserving.

The Night Interns, by Austin Duffy, is published by Granta Books

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The gruelling shifts, the lack of sleep, the terror that you're responsible for people's lives - The Irish Times

This pigment-producing molecule displays some almost unfathomable properties in other species

Could the melanin found in our bodies and in foods like mushrooms help to mitigate the increasingly dire quantities of radiation we are exposed to daily?

Over the course of the past decade, one of the most interesting concepts I have run into while scouring the biomedical literature is the possibility thatmelanins biological role in the human body may extend far beyond simply protecting us against UV radiation.

In fact,one recent and highly controversial paperproposes that melanin is responsible for generating the majority of the bodys energy, effectively challenging the ATP-focused and glucose-centric view of cellular bioenergetics that has dominated biology for the past half century.

Research is now emerging indicating that melanin may function in a manner analogous to energy harvesting pigments such as chlorophyll. While melanins proposed ability to convert sunlight into metabolic energy has amazing implications (one of which is thetaxonomical reclassification of our species from heterotrophic to photoheterotrophic), what may have even more spectacular implications is the prospect that melanin may actually both protect us against ionizing radiationandtransform some of it into metabolically useful energy.

Radioisotopes are increasingly accumulating in the environment, food chain, and our bodies, as a result of nuclear weapons testing,routine releases from the nuclear industry,fracking,coal-fired powerindustriesand more recently, global fallout from the Chernobyl andFukushima meltdowns.Add in the unavoidable onslaught of radiation exposures from medical use,cell phone communications and WiFi technology, andair travel, and you can virtually guarantee your body burden of radiation exposure is significant and represents a health risk.

For these reasons reducing radiotoxicity and/or enhancing detoxification mechanisms should be a universal concern.

Melanin is, indeed, one of the most interesting biomolecules yet identified.The first known organic semiconductor, it is capable of absorbing a wide range of the electromagnetic spectrum (which is why it appears black), most notably, converting and dissipating potentially harmful ultraviolet radiation into heat. It serves a wide range of physiological roles, including free radical scavenging, toxicant chelation, DNA protection, to name but a few. It is also believed to have been one of the essentialingredients for life on this planet. Beyond itspotential in converting sunlight into metabolic energy, it may also convert ionizing gamma radiation into useful energy. Outside the realm of comic book heroes, who would have ever thought such a thing possible?

The first time I found this possibility in the scientific literature was a 2001 Russian report on the discovery of a melanin-rich species of fungi colonizing and apparently thriving within the walls of the still hot Chernobyl meltdown reactor site.In 2004, the same observation was made for the surrounding soils of the Chernobyl site.We also know that, based on a 2008 report, pyomelanin-producing bacteria have been found in thriving colonies within uranium-contaminated soils. There is also a 1961 study that found, amazingly, melanin-rich fungi from soils of a Nevada nuclear test site survived radiation exposure doses of up to 6400 Grays (about 2,000 times a human lethal dose).Clearly, something about melanin in these species not only enables them to survive radiation exposures that are normally lethal to most forms of life, but actually attracts them to it. Could the fungi actually be using melanin to feast on the free lunch of anthropogenic radioactivity ?

Remarkably, back in 2007, a study published in PLoS titled, Ionizing Radiation Changes the Electronic Properties of Melanin and Enhances the Growth of Melanized Fungi, revealed that fungal cellsmanifested increased growthrelative to non-melanized cells after exposure to ionizing radiation. In other words, the fungi grew better after being exposed to radiation. The irradiated melanin from these fungi also changed its electronic properties, which the authors noted, raised intriguing questions about a potential role for melanin in energy capture and utilization.

For more on this groundbreaking study, take a look at a 2007 report in theMIT Technology Reviewtitled,Eating Radiation: A New Form of Energy?

The question arises, could the consumption of melanin from fungi protect those higher on the food chain (like humans) from radiation exposure?

This question appears to have been answered affirmatively by a 2012 study published in the journalToxicology and Applied Pharmacology, titled, Melanin, a promising radioprotector: mechanisms of actions in a mice model, which found that when melanin isolated from the fungus Gliocephalotrichum simplex was administered at a dose of 50 mg/kg body weight in BALB/c mice before exposure to 6-7 Grays of gamma radiation, it increased their 30-day survival by 100 percent. The study also noted that melanin up to a dosage of 100 mg/kg (i.p.) did not cause adverse effects on the health of the mice.

In the study conclusion, the authors stated: The observed mitigative effects of melanin in the present study gain a lot of significance especially in nuclear emergencies but need to be validated in humans by more detailed experiments. Prior to these confirmations and based on current investigations, it can be concluded that during such emergencies,diets rich in melanin may be beneficial to overcome radiation toxicity in humans.

Another study published in 2012 inCancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticalstitled, Compton Scattering by Internal Shields Based on Melanin-Containing Mushrooms Provides Protection of Gastrointestinal Tract from Ionizing Radiation, confirmed the remarkable radioprotective properties of the melanized mushrooms was actually melanin-specific and due to other well-known therapeutic compounds within the fungi.

As succinctly summarized on theSmall Things Considered website: The authors fed mice a mushroom used in East Asian cuisine, called Judas ear, tree, or jelly ear (Auricularia auricula-judae) an hour before giving them a powerful 9 Gy dose with the beta emitter Cesium137. For perspective, anything over ~0.1 Gy is considered a dangerously high dose for humans. All the control mice died in 13 days while ~90 percent of the mushroom-fed ones survived. Mice fed a white mushroom (porcini) died almost as fast as the controls, but those fed white mushrooms supplemented with melanin also survived.

So, how does melanin perform this trick?

One clue was provided by a study published in 2011 inBioelectrochemistrytitled, Gamma radiation interacts with melanin to alter its oxidationreduction potential and results in electric current production, where ionizing radiation was found to alter melanins oxidation-reduction potential.

Unlike most other biomolecules, which experience a destructive form of oxidative damage as a result of radiation exposure, melanin remained structurally and functionally intact, appearing capable of producing a continuous electric current. This current, theoretically, could be used to produce chemical/metabolic energy in living systems. This would explain the increased growth rate, even under low nutrient conditions, in certain kinds of gamma irradiated fungi.

So, you may be wondering, what is a good source of supplemental melanin for those interested in its radioprotective and radiotrophic (radiation eating) properties? I believe chaga (Inonotus obliquus) is one of the most promising candidates. Not only is it one of the nutritionally dense mushrooms, containing an immense amount of melanin, but it was known by the Siberians as the gift from God and the mushroom of immortality, by the Japanese as the diamond of the forest, and by the Chinese as the king of plants. There is also an increasingly compelling body of scientific information demonstrating its health benefits for conditions as serious as cancer.

It should be noted that there is a profound toxicological difference between the type of radiation exposures that come from the outside in, e.g. being irradiated at a distance by radioactive material outside of us, and from the inside out, e.g. low-dose radioisotope uptake. The latter can be orders of magnitude more dangerous, as radioisotopes like uranium-238, cesium-137, and plutonium-239, can be taken into the tissues and remain there for a lifetime, wreaking havoc on a moment-to-moment basis.

Due to a phenomenon known as thephotoelectric effect, low-dose radionuclides like uranium-238, which are technically weak emitters of alpha radiation, can be tens of thousands times more damaging to our DNA than present-day radiological risk assessment models account for.

We bring this up in order to properly qualify the aforementioned information, as it could be highly misleading to those who interpret it to mean that one can simply supplement with an edible melanin product to reduce and even benefit from radiation exposure. Nothing can effectively reduce the radiotoxicity of incorporated radionuclides beyond removing them from the body.

That said, apple pectin, was successfully used post-Chernobyl to dramatically reduce the bodily burden of absorbed radionuclides in thousands of Russian children. Moreover, once we grasp the genocidal implications of the widespread contamination of the biosphere with the routine and accidental releases of radio-toxicants that maintain their toxicity for thousands, and in some cases, millions of years (e.g plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years and Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4.4 billion years), we realize the solution (if there is one) is to phase out and try to mitigate the planet-wide fallout from the nuclear industrys activities over the course of the 75 years.

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Melanin: The Holy Grail of Radioprotective Food Compounds - The Epoch Times