do we _need_ radiation?

[king@reasoning.com]

Life has a real knack for "making virtue out of necessity", or coming to depend
on the conditions that prevail.  Better people than i have hypothesized that we
all _need_ small amounts of ionizing radiation.  But we don't know...


It would be expensive, but maybe not outrageously so, to raise mice with
exposure to radiation restricted to about a percent of the norm.  

The cages would need to be in the sorts of caves that are used for nutrino
telescopes, of course, and their grain would need to be grown indoors with CO2
obtained by burning coal [which has essentially no C14, being hundreds of
half-lives old].  Potassium would be a problem, but mice need little enough
that isotope separation is not out of the question, and of course it can be
recycled from urine and feces once you have an initial stock.  The plants must
be grown hydroponically.



This is an obvious experiment.  Does anyone know if it's been done?


-dk