Chernobyl is still current and even more so after her series became one of the best ratings in IMDB history. Tourism continues to grow in the region and with it questions about the current state of the flora and fauna that live there. In 33 years, the exclusion zone has gone from being the scene of one of the worst catastrophes to being called the Radioactive Biosphere Reserve because of the diversity of animals and plants that now roam freely.

But even if that’s the case today, in 1986 plants were the ones that responded best to radioactivity, adapted to it, and fought cancer much better than animals.

3 years. It was time that the surviving Ukrainian flora had to adapt to the new radioactive context. The plants that survived the explosion were plants beyond 10 km2 near the reactor. In fact, there was a pine forest in that distance, and it was eventually named the “red forest” because it absorbed the energy emitted by the reactor on the night of the disaster.

Why did they survive? According to BBC biochemist Stuart Thompson, plants, unlike animals, have the ability to adapt to the most extreme conditions, among other things, because they cannot move from the ground. Therefore, instead of having a defined and organized cell structure, they have a cell structure that is constantly changing and can form new cells when necessary. And that’s what they do in the context of genetic change.

Cancer does not spread. While radioactivity and harmful particles kill animal cells and tissues, plants have the ability to replace damaged structures and create new cells of the particular type they need. They also learn to work around cancerous tissue and not spread cancer cells to the rest of the plant. The latter is due to the rigidity of plant tissues, which are often not connected to each other.

In this way, even if a plant cell undergoes mutations (genetic changes) in its sequence, it does not need to affect the remaining cells, as they do not reproduce arbitrarily as in animals.

specific DNA. Another factor that makes radioactivity so dangerous is its power to directly penetrate the DNA of cells and alter them, causing irreparable damage. Unlike animals, plants can resort to the chemical mechanisms they use when Earth’s natural radioactivity is higher. So they use this genetic information to protect their DNA and increase their survival rate relative to animals.

3,940 cancer deaths. In this case, it is precisely the cellular organizational structure of animals that makes radioactivity deadly. Unlike plants, animal cells are very sensitive to radiation, and mutations occur at low doses that lead to tumors. The fact that all of our cells are interconnected and organized into tissue means that when a cell’s arrangement changes, it is forced to copy this information and transmit it to the rest of the body.

The rapid spread of cancer cells, which occurs as a result of a radioactive environment like Chernobyl, leaves about 4,000 deaths from cancer, according to data compiled by the World Health Organization after examining civilians who were directly or indirectly exposed to such particles. Although WHO data has been questioned on different occasions, it is thus far the only official figure of 31 deaths given by the USSR thirty years ago.

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