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The effect of 70 MeV pi mesons was studied to determine the effectivness of such beams aginst normal tissues in vivo. The end points included thymic weight loss, oocyte and bone marrow CFU-S survival and the induction of macroscopid lens opacities. The results indicate that pi mesons are not signifacantly more effective for these end-points than more conventional radiation sources such as 60Co gama rays, 220 kVp X rays, and 14 MeV X rays and electrons. Nor was there any detectable difference in RBE between the peak and plateau regions of the pi meson beam. The significance of these findings is discussed in relation of the the published pi meson RBE values of between 1 therefore 4 and 5 therefore 0.

Litters of 8- to 10-day-old nestling rats were protected against whole-body x-irradiation by cysteamine, AET, and deep hypothermia, singly, and by a combination of cysteamine pretreatment and deep hypothermia. The different treatments were randomized among littermates to minimize animal variation. A comparison of the LD50(30) values obtained for the different treatments gave a dose-reduction factor of 3.3 for the combined treatment, which was significantly greater than the factor for hypothermia alone, 2.6, or that for cysteamine alone, 1.4. Cysteamine therefore provided additional protection in the fully hypoxic (hypothermic) animal. Judged from the histological appearance of the gonads of the surviving male nestling rats, killed 30 days after irradiation, hypothermia afforded some protection to the germinal epithelium. Cysteamine, although injected when the testes were abdominal, had no demonstrable protective effect.

The assay method for corticotrophin, in which the involution of the thymus of the nestling rat is measured, can be applied successfully as a quick and simple screening test for biologically active corticosteroids. The sensitivity of the test is such that injection of a standard dose of cortisone acetate produces different results when made up in different media, or injected by different routes. A standard procedure for dispensing and injecting the steroids has therefore been adopted. Of the steroids investigated, it is noticeable that those possessing marked thymolytic activity are also steroids with therapeutic properties.