Abstract
The life spans of mice surviving acute radiation injury are shorter than those of unirradiated mice. This fact has led to the popular hypothesis that radiation life shortening represents an acceleration of natural processes. If it is true that radiation aging and spontaneous share certain basic mechanisms, then in a given species a certain dose of whole-body irradiation should be, as far as effects are concerned, equivalent to a certain dose of time. This time-radiation equivalence factor should be constant throughout the life of the individual. Such conversion constants for radiation life shortening have been estimated by Jones (1) and by Failla and McClement (2). More recently, however, it has been shown by Kohn and Guttman (3), Lindop and Rotblat (4), and Mole (5) that the radiation life-shortening phenomenon is more pronounced in mice irradiated early in life than in mice irradiated at an older age. This variation with age and the lack of a simple additive relationship between radiation life shortening and the mortality due to spontaneous have been taken as evidence against the time-radiation equivalence hypothesis (5). The following investigation was carried out in order to test the compatibility of these apparently contradictory premises and to try to clarify the relationship between age at irradiation and degree of life shortening which is implicit in the timeradiation equivalence hypothesis.
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