Correspondence

Abstract

One of the most important effects of radiation at the cellular level is impairmant of a cell's ability to originate a clone of like cells, in conditions in which the unirradiated cell would do so. It is convenient to call this the lethal effect of radiation on cells, and it is convenient to express the dose-effect relationship as a survival curve, the fraction of the population which retains its clone-forming ability after any given dose being plotted, on a logarithmic scale, against the dose.