London - Exposure to acute, high doses of radiation can cause genetic changes which are passed on to future generations, researchers in Britain said yesterday.
A pilot study of mice reported in the science journal Nature showed that the grandchildren of animals exposed to short but extreme levels of radiation had a six-fold increase in the frequency of genetic mutations.
Dr Yuri Dubrova, of the University of Leicester, and scientists at the Medical Research Council Radiation and Genome Stability Unit in Harwell said their results could have implications for humans, even though people were more often exposed to chronic radiation.