Insectopedia (4 page)

In outline, it’s quite simple. The international nuclear regulatory agencies—principally the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the U.N. Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation—calculate the dangers of radioactivity to human health using a threshold. Although many scientists admit that the mechanisms of radiation damage to cells are poorly understood, that the composition of emissions from nuclear installations vary substantially, and that different bodies (not to mention different organs and different cells
at different points in their development) respond to contamination in quite distinct ways, the threshold establishes a universal tolerance level below which emissions are considered safe. In the tense days following the disaster at Chernobyl, it was the logic of a fixed threshold that allowed government experts to reassure their nervous publics that the dangers were negligible.

The ICRP derives its threshold from a linear curve extrapolated from rates of genetic (reproductive) irregularities, cancer, and leukemia among the survivors of large-scale nuclear events. Since those calculations began, the prime data set has been drawn from survivors of the 1945 bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial radiation dosage at those sites was extremely large and distributed in a short period. The resulting curve emphasizes the effects of exposure to artificial radioactivity at high values. Low-level radiation, such as that emitted over long time periods by normally operating nuclear power plants, appears relatively, if not entirely, insignificant, its effects falling within the range of the “natural” background radiation emitted from elements present in the earth’s crust. The assumption is that large doses produce large effects; small doses, small effects.

A number of scientists unaffiliated with the nuclear industry and frequently in alliance with citizens’ groups from areas close to nuclear plants describe an alternative curve. Following work carried out in the 1970s by the Canadian physicist Abram Petkau, they argue that the effects of radiation are best captured not by the official linear curve, in which a double quantity produces a double effect, but by a “supralinear” curve, which registers far higher effects at low doses. In the supralinear curve, there is no safe minimum dose above zero.
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These researchers often begin with epidemiology, carrying out their own population surveys downwind or downstream of nuclear installations, looking for statistically significant correlations between localized clusters of disease and sites of low-level radiation emissions. Working from the assumption of a causal relationship between emissions and sickness—an assumption reinforced not only by the epidemic proportions of some of these clusters but also by the secrecy of the industry—their focus is on the identification of the mechanisms by which low dosage disrupts biological function.

For example, Chris Busby, a British physical chemist and anti-nuclear
campaigner, emphasizes two critical but overlooked variables: cell development and the random behavior of artificial radioactivity.
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Under normal conditions, Busby argues, a cell (any cell) is hit by radiation approximately once a year. If the cell is in its normal quiescent mode, it is fairly robust. However, during times of active replication—a repair mode that can be triggered by various forms of stress—the same cell is highly susceptible to radiation. At those moments, it exhibits considerable genomic instability, and two radioactive “hits” produce a far greater effect than just one.

Moreover, Busby says, the ingestion of radioactive materials through food and water has effects quite distinct from those of external exposure. Certain types of internal radiation associated with, for instance, drinking contaminated milk can produce multiple hits on an individual cell within hours. If a cell receives a second hit of artificial radiation while it is in active replication mode, he claims, it is up to 100 times more likely to mutate.

In Busby’s second-event theory, the level of vulnerability of a cell to radiation is a function of its state of development at a given moment. And this vulnerability is further exacerbated by the random, discontinuous
waves characteristic of artificial radiation. Cornelia explained the randomness of artificial radiation to me using the analogy of bullets: it doesn’t matter how many are fired, whom they’re fired by, or even when and where they’re fired; you need only be hit by one at the wrong time and in the wrong place to suffer its effect. The ICRP linear curve assumes a constant distribution of particles and a predictable effect. If, as many argue, those are invalid assumptions, the levels of environmental susceptibility to the effects of radioactive contamination are likely to be dramatically elevated—indeed, they are likely sufficient to explain the epidemiological evidence of elevated mortality in human, animal, and plant populations in sites subject to more or less routine radioactive emissions.

Low-level-radiation campaigners would no doubt have predicted the experts’ response to Cornelia’s articles in the
Tages-Anzeiger Magazin.
Reiterating the official position that the fallout from Chernobyl was too small to induce mutations, scientists stated simply that the explanation must lie elsewhere. Cornelia’s methodology, they argued, did not adequately control for alternative causal factors, such as pesticides and parasites. She offered no comparative baseline, no reference habitat free of contaminants in which a normal rate of variation for the species could be measured. In fact, they pointed out (ignoring the limited character of her claims), she offered no numbers at all, either for dosage or for incidence of deformities.
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The scientists dismissed her evidence, rebuffed her appeals to their expertise, and retreated without explanation from the occasional unguarded expressions of interest. It was a scenario she would witness repeatedly: “I showed my bugs and flies to all the professors with whom I had previously worked. I even brought the director of the Zoological Institute, a professor of genetics, a little tube of deformed living flies. He didn’t bother to look at it, and said an investigation would cost too much time and money. He said that since it had already been confirmed that small doses of radiation would not cause any morphological damage, the expense was in no way justifiable.”
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From the outside, of course, it seems almost too obvious: her amateur status, her gender, the sensitivity of the issue, the closed character of the industry. Always the same questions: What qualified her to attribute causality to the deformities she found? What qualified her to distinguish mutations induced by radiation from the naturally occurring variation
expected in any given population? What qualified her to develop her own methodology? What qualified her to feed the hysteria of a public made paranoid by Chernobyl? What qualified her to contradict those who were qualified? How could she live with the rash of abortions her reports had provoked among women in Ticino?

But beyond the scientific community—and, it is important to say, among the few scientists already sympathetic to the anti-nuclear movement—the response was far from entirely hostile. She made radio appearances and received large quantities of encouraging mail. After the first article, the opposition German Social Democratic Party called for an investigation into the local effects of Chernobyl. After the second, the Swiss government, forced to respond to public pressure, agreed to sponsor a doctoral dissertation on the health of heteropterans across the federal territory.

Nonetheless, the antagonism of the scientists unsettled her, and perhaps we should remember just how controversial nuclear power was in Europe following Chernobyl. The Swiss anti-nuclear movement was vocal and politically effective, and Cornelia’s bombshells exploded in the media just as activists were canvassing for the 150,000 signatures required to enforce a third referendum on the restriction of the industry. The first two votes (in 1979 and 1984) had been narrowly defeated, but this one, held in September 1990, would result in a ten-year moratorium on the construction of new reactors. It was impossible to intervene in this issue and remain innocent. Yet Cornelia appears to have thought of herself still as within the fold of science, if not openly acknowledged as a lay expert then at the least as a fellow traveler contributing through her skills as an artist. Perhaps she was a little too independent for the supporting role expected of the scientific illustrator, but wasn’t she nonetheless a collegial participant in a common project of investigation and understanding?

She finds a cicada with a grotesque stump growing from one knee and takes it to a former professor. “Years before,” she wrote, “I had collected insects with him for the fauna courses at the university. I had learned from him how to set up a professional collection of insects. It was his schooling that had made me the meticulous scientific illustrator I had become.” The professor admits he has never seen this kind of deformity before but dismisses its significance and scolds her like a
child for the articles in the
Tages-Anzeiger.
Don’t think you are a scientist just because you have drawn pictures for me and my colleagues, he tells her.
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The closed ranks shocked her. The reactions bore the marks of an expulsion. It was a decisive moment, and again it seems that—to use her word—she was “possessed,” taken over by a visceral conviction of vision, of seeing something invisible to others, seeing the minatory sicknesses of these invisible insects. Remembering those turbulent months, she wrote, “I knew a task had found me.”
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I don’t want to write a hero story. But let me tell you what she did. In Sweden, she was amazed to discover that no one was investigating the effects of Chernobyl on animals and plants. Returning to Switzerland, she reviewed the criticism of her first article. If, as the scientists insisted, low doses of radionuclides were not producing these disturbances, there should be none around the famously clean Swiss nuclear plants. Unsure of what to expect, she traveled to the cantons of Aargau and Solothurn and hiked around their five nuclear installations. The deformed bugs she found at every turn were the subject of her second article in
Tages-Anzeiger Magazin
, a focus of even more controversy than the first. “I believe,” she wrote in her conclusion, “we must pursue [the causes of these disturbances] with the best and most sophisticated methods at our disposal, and with a level of funding I cannot afford. With my illustrations I can only point out changes. I make them visible. With this work I allow myself to point to a crisis in the investigation of the effects of artificial low-level radiation, and further to call for scientific clarification at a broader level. I cannot go further with the means at my disposal. But more detailed investigations are both possible and necessary.”
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The garden bug is from Küssaberg, in Germany, close to the Leibstadt nuclear power plant in Aargau. The entire neck plate is distorted; the bulging blister on its left includes an unusual black growth. Cornelia’s painting is delicate but meticulous. In color—many shades of gold—and at full size (this one is seventeen by twelve inches; some are far larger), it is strikingly beautiful.

The composition, unsparing, is typical. On featureless white backgrounds, she emphasizes the insects’ architectural properties, their structure and monumentality as well as their decorative surface. The poses are formal and explicitly contrived. She repositions legs and wings to expose deformity; often, for the same reason, she leaves out limbs or body segments or just sketches them in outline.

Leaving behind scientific illustration, which, she explains, relies on nineteenth-century techniques of “light and shadow,” she adopted the color perspective pioneered by Cézanne and the cubists, creating spatial effects through relations between colors (employing contrasts of intensity,
temperature, and value) and—like Goethe, Rudolph Steiner, and Josef Albers—attending to the subjective and relational nature of color perception. Light and shadow, she says, is “historical”: it captures one particular moment, freezing light and, with it, time; color perspective, on the contrary, is timeless, outside time. Then she shows me how, as she paints, she shifts the position of the insect under her microscope so that the finished image is a composite of several angles, again calling up the cubists and their multifaceted renderings of simultaneity.