DO 114 (Revised) .04 It shall be the policy of the Department to provide the fullest possible public information concerning the work of advisory committees. SECTION 5. EFFECT ON OTHER ORDERS: This order supersedes Department Order No.114 of May 5, 1950. hewis LStrauss Secretary of Commerce FEDERAL RADIATION COUNCIL July 6, 1960 Dear Senator Anderson: We have received the copy of your request to Dr. Allen V. Astin, Director of the National Bureau of Standards, for information concerning the relationship between Bureau of Standards employees and the National Committee on Radiation Protection and Measurements. As I expressed in my testimony before the recent hearings of your Committee, "Radiation Protection Criteria and Standards: Their Basis and Use," it is the feeling of the Federal Radiation Council that the existence of a strong and independent National Committee on Radiation Protection and Measurements is a very important factor in the field of radiation protection. The Federal Radiation Council is anxious to see the NCRP continue its important work. The question of membership of Government agency employees on the NCRP is currently under consideration by the agencies with membership on the Council. We will be glad to inform the Joint Committee if the Federal Radiation Council takes any action which might affect such membership or the role of the NCRP. Sincerely yours, Arthur S. Flemming The Honorable Clinton P. Anderson Chairman, Joint Committee on Atomic Energy Washington 25, D. C. APPENDIX 11 RELATIVE BIOLOGICAL EFFECTIVENESS* Statement prepared by V. P. Bond and J. L. Bateman Medical Research Center Brookhaven National Laboratory Upton, L. I., N. Y. repared for hearings of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, Congress of the United States, May 24 June 3, 1960. Supported by the U. S. Atomic Energy Commission 58454 0-60- -45 Introduction Relative biological effectiveness (RBB) has been the subject of a number of publications, and material on the subject is sufficient in quantity to allow a large volume to be written. However, it is possible to present in relatively short summary for the points considered to be most pertinent to the present hearings. In the present report the defini tion of RBB, its determination, its theoretical importance, the difficul ties involved in its use, and values for health physics purposes are dis – cussed. The report will be limited basically to a consideration of work that bears more directly on mammalian RBE values, and it will not be possible to review the extensive and fundamental work that has been done with micro organisms and plants. exposure. Definition of RBB It is generally recognized that absorbed dose is the single most important parameter determining the degree of biological effect from radiation This quantity indicates the total amount of energy absorbed per unit weight from the impinging radiation, and is expressed in tems of units of rads, where 1 rad 100 ergs/gram. However it is also well known that, with different types of radiation (e.g. gamma vs neutron), or for the same type of radiation delivered at different energies, with all other physical and biological conditions identical insofar as is known, different quanti ties of absorbed dose are required to produce the same degree of a given biological effect. This is equivalent in pharmacology to the fact that similar drugs may require different dosages for the same degree of effect, and this difference is termed the "relative potency" of the two drugs. Simi |