New Scientist - USA (2019-06-15)

32 | New Scientist | 15 June 2019

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FOR Japanese children, Godzilla

is the ultimate scary adult: fierce,

honourable, clumsy and a bit out

of control. For their grandparents,

he’s the irradiated embodiment

of wartime tragedy, a bad memory

come to life. For the rest of us,

I suppose, he’s “just” a nuclear-

powered dinosaur.

Godzilla is also a pay cheque.

Films featuring the epic creature,

almost all by the Japanese studio

Toho, have been produced since

1954, a cinematic franchise record.

The current release, Godzilla: King

of the monsters, is the 35th, and

the third to be produced entirely

within the Hollywood system.

Its human stars play the

shattered Russell family. Millie

Bobby Brown from TV hit Stranger

Things is Madison, whose brother

Andrew was killed during a 2014

kaiju (monster) attack on San

Francisco. Her dad Mark is literally

living with wolves; her mum

Emma prefers kaiju to people.

Terroristic eco-warriors are out

to awaken Godzilla’s subterranean

cousins in an effort to bring the

planet “back into balance” – and

Emma is inclined to help them.

Newsreel images of ruined San

Francisco make her point: in five

short years it has turned to jungle,

accelerated by ionising radiation

spilling from Godzilla’s insides.

Why do movies, stretching back

to the giant ants of Them!, assume

that excess radiation promotes

growth? The evidence has always

pointed the other way. Ionising

radiation weakens and breaks up

DNA, damaging cells enough to

kill them, or cause them to mutate

in ways that, somehow or other,

lead to the grave. In humans,

epidemiological studies show

that even low doses of radiation

increase the risk of cancer.

Still, human nature being what

it is, whenever a new kind of ray

is detected, we speculate about

its magical properties. Radium, a

radioactive metal, was discovered

by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898,

Beast from the east Godzilla, Japan’s enduring big screen monster, is back.

Simon Ings runs his Geiger counter over a creature shaped by hopes and

fears in the nuclear age

“ For some, Godzilla

is the irradiated

embodiment of

wartime tragedy, a

living bad memory”

Simon Ings is a novelist and

science writer and a culture

editor at New Scientist.

Follow him on Instagram

@simon_ings

Film

Godzilla: King of

the monsters

Dir. Michael Dougherty

Simon also

recommends...

Films

Godzilla

Toho

The 1954 original Godzilla

inspired Steven Spielberg to

make monster movies.

Annihilation

Paramount

The 2018 movie, directed by

Alex Garland, replaces Earth's

biome with something

creepily extraterrestrial.

and though it eventually killed

her, it still found its way into the

food chain thanks to products like

Hippman-Blach bakery’s Radium

Bread (made with radium-laced

water, which was supposed to

cure everything from arthritis

to impotence to wrinkles).

Is there more to this

accelerated-growth idea than

magical thinking? “Hormesis”

is the controversial notion that

things that are dangerous in high

doses might be beneficial to

human health at lower levels.

Some lab studies have shown the

effect in action. Whether there is

radiation hormesis, however, is

a big question – and a timely one.

China’s space programme has

studied the ability of plants to

develop and thrive in conditions

of microgravity and exposure

to cosmic radiation in space.

Since 1987, 66 mutant varieties

have been cultivated through its

space-breeding efforts.

So far, so workaday: “atomic

gardening” has been around

since the 1950s, exposing plants

to radioactive sources (typically

cobalt-60) to generate mutations,

and over 2000 new varieties of

agriculturally useful plants have

been created this way.

The Chinese results, however,

are a bit weird. Plants positively

mutated during space flight have

grown faster than their irradiated

Earth-grown counterparts. Space-

bred mutations do better than

their “atomically gardened”

controls, and no one is sure why.

Is there something magical

about cosmic rays? Probably

not, though if I were Godzilla

(traditionally Earth’s first line

of defence against alien attack)

I would watch my back. ❚

WA

RN

ER

BR

OS

Godzilla: an amphibious

dinosaur with a nuclear

reactor for a stomach

The movie column