Fundamentals of Dosimetry and Microdosimetry and the Relative Biological Effectiveness of Ionizing Radiations

Abstract

The effects of ionizing radiations have been explored in innumerable biological experiments, but they have also been inflicted — often with tragic negligence or irresponsibility — on human populations. The worldwide fascination with x-rays immediatedly after Röntgen’s discovery was motivated by optimistic expectations and permitted little attention to biological damage seen immediately, such as skin-lesions, or to the later occurrence of leukemias in radiologists. Several decades after their discovery x-rays were still widely assumed to have general positive effects and nearly universal medical applicability. A painful process of learning then led to the stepwise development of adequate radiation-protection procedures and to a more realistic assessment of the beneficial and detrimental potential of ionizing radiations. As a reaction to past industrial misuses of radio-isotopes and errors in their medical application one has, today, in many ways gone to the other extreme. Beyond this, it has become difficult, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to draw a rational balance between the uses and the misuses of nuclear energy.