'To want more nuclear power rather than less is insane'

In a tiny apartment in a grim Minsk tower block, a scientist garlanded with honours, a member of five academies of science, a prodigy once given his own university to run at the age of 34, places another jar of hamster foetuses on a cheap coffee table.

He holds the jar up to the light, where the skeletal structures are clearly visible through the flesh. He points out those with no eyes, or no brain, or under-developed brains, or no skull-bones. Dozens, strangely, have a cleft lip and palate. There are 200 in all, none of which appear to be normal.

The foetuses' mothers, he explains, had been injected with proportionate, comparatively "quite low" doses of caesium-137 (C137), a radioactive element which featured in vast amounts in the Chernobyl fallout. C137 has a nuclear half-life (the time it takes for half of it to radioactively decay away) of 30.07 years. Hamsters were chosen, he says, because they have a genetic print similar to humans and "because they're easier to feed, not as smelly as mice and you can keep them on the balcony". His wife, Galina, smiles fondly and murmurs wryly, "and he has lots more of them".

This, then, is what remains of Prof Yuri Bandazhevsky's professional and personal world. Within Belarus, colleagues who once lionised him now shun him. He is unemployable but has no permission to leave. In 2001, he was arrested at his medical institute in Gomel and jailed for eight years with hard labour, on trumped-up bribery charges. Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience, but by the time he was released, in 2004, his health had been severely affected. His real crime was to go public on the effects of C137, after noting an alarming increase in heart and birth defects among children after Chernobyl.

The medical university he founded in Gomel in 1990 was in the heart of the most contaminated area and was therefore a natural laboratory for research into the effects of radiation.

"We proved that C137 is very dangerous - and most dangerous as an energetic killer of the body," he says. "The problem with C137 is you have no symptoms. So you just get some infection and you die and everyone will say you died from an infection. But, in fact, the immune system has been so weakened that you cannot fight it."

His thesis is that even low-level radiation is dangerous and that up to 24 years before Chernobyl, large parts of the world, including Europe, were already being contaminated with fallout from nuclear tests by China, the US, the Soviet Union and France. Russia, he adds, "was a nuclear dump". Pre-Chernobyl radiation maps, provided by French colleagues, bear this out. Chernobyl simply heaped on the agony and distributed it more widely.

The Chernobyl Forum report - which ascribed much of the population's morbidity to poverty, lifestyle diseases and mental health problems rather than radiation - is "an insult", he says.

"Can you imagine how the Belarussian people who live in those areas must feel, reading that? . . . Calling them drunkards, saying they don't want to work, that they're only waiting around for handouts. They are hard-working people. I'm not sure that any of those people who signed that report spent enough time trying to understand what is going on in that area. But I was there. My family was there. I saw the people, I worked with the people. I know the physical and psychological problems. I saw people not only dying from thyroid cancer, I saw other young people . . . So many of the doctors who worked on that research are dead."

He goes to a bookcase, laden with medals, and fishes out a small hardback book called Clinical and Experimental Aspects of the Effect of Incorporated Radionuclides Upon the Organism, by Yuri Bandazhevsky et al, dated Gomel 1995. The foreword was written by the Belarussian minister for health.

Another foreword, by AS Shaginyan, vice-president of the International Academy of Engineering and the Belarussian Academy of Engineering, takes a swipe at the scientists who skirted the issues in the early days and are now writing from their ivory towers.

"Regretfully," he writes, "the problems of the disaster have been and still remain the subject of political commercialism and career promotion. Even the belated manuscript by the Academician LA Ilyin, The Realities and Myths of Chernobyl, resembles an essay created in a cosy and quiet Moscow library room and written for self-exemption and self-redemption rather than to achieve a profound scientific result . . . The present manuscript is the first kernel of the objective scientific information on the radionuclides effect upon the organism."

Bandazhevsky's wife, Galina, also a scientist, is among the 15 contributors to the five-year study. But she too has paid a high personal price for her work, having had both her thyroid and her womb removed, due to cancers her husband attributes to the disaster.

Bandazhevsky looks at the growing nuclear bandwagon with horror.

"To want more nuclear power rather than less is insane," he says. "I wish I could show those people what I see in mortuaries here and the horror of what my experiments show."

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