APRIL 1960 RADIATION –?“With the new measurement of the mean lethal dose for reproductive function of mammalian cells, it is now possible to explain the relatively low mean lethal dose of 400 to 500 roentgens for the entire body. Such a dose leaves only about 0.5 per cent of the body’s reproducing cells still able to multiply. Death, however, will not be immediate. The cells have each absorbed an almost infinitesimal amount of radiation energy. Though they have suffered an appreciable amount of chromosomal damage, their enzymatic machinery is, by and large, still active. Each such cell continues to perform its physiological functions in reasonably normal fashion until the time comes for it to reproduce. But at the next division, or at the next one or two divisions, reproduction will fail. –Theodore T. Puck”
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