Radiation hormesis: its historical foundations as a biological hypothesis

This paper represents the first systematic effort to describe the historica l foundations of radiation hormesis. Spanning the years from 1898 to the ea rly 1940's the paper constructs and assesses the early history of such rese arch and evaluates how advances in related scientific fields affected the c ourse of hermetic related research. The present effort was designed to not only address this gap in current knowledge, but to offer a toxicological ba sis for how the concept of hormetic dose-response relationships may affect the nature of the bioassay and its role in the risk assessment process.