Citas Petryna -g-

- Biological Citizenship: The Science and Politics of Chernobyl-Exposed Populations-

"Dr. Guskova, who oversees the Russian compensation system for workers of nuclear installations, including Chernobyl, is a well-known critic of Ukraine's compensation system. She told me that the Ukrainians were inflating their numbers of exposed persons, that their so-called invalids "didn't want to recover." She saw the illnesses of this group as a "struggle for power and material resources related to the disaster."

In response to her former colleague's indictment, Dr. Angelina Ceanu, a neuro-physiologist and physician to Chernobyl victims in Kyiv told me, "It is inconceivable that an organism of any kind is passive to its own destruction." Her response was based on evidence from experiments conducted by the Soviet radiobiologist V. L. Komarov. In one experiment conducted in the late 1950s, he observed that sleeping rats, without provocation, woke up when exposed to small amounts of ionizing radiation."