More than 50 years ago, on August 6 and 9, 1945, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were each visited by a single atomic bomb that caused massive destruction and huge loss of life. Thousands of survivors received various amounts of radiation. In October 1945, 2 months after the bombing, a Joint Committee for the Investigation of the Effects of the Atomic Bomb in Japan was established in the United States, and it recommended a long-term study of the sequelae of the bombings. Through the National Academy of Sciences, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was created in 1947. It was later succeeded by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation.

The author of this book, William J. Schull, joined the Commission in 1949 and was integrally associated with it for many years, working directly with the bombing survivors. He notes that a large body of literature on the results of many investigations has accrued but is contained mostly in specialized scientific publications and is not generally known because the technical language of this literature is so inaccessible and difficult to fathom. Believing that the knowledge gained on the biologic effects of radiation is interesting and important to other disciplines as well, Schull has undertaken the monumental task of reviewing the events, scientific results, and debates of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience that have evolved during the past 50 years. He has written this text in relatively nontechnical language that will be intelligible to a broad audience.

Schull describes the changes and additions to the investigational thrusts over the years, research that became feasible because of the improvement in follow-up strategies and established laboratory techniques and the advent of a methodology for molecular biology. In addition to fulfilling the Herculean task of estimating the radiation-absorbed dose in individual survivors and relating it to the incidence of leukemia and other malignant and benign neoplasms in children and adults, investigators scrutinized subsets of the irradiated population for other abnormalities. In prenatally exposed survivors, such factors as mental retardation, brain damage and abnormal development, ocular damage, chromosomal damage, and fertility abnormalities were assessed in relation to the stage of gestation at which the injury had occurred. Psychosocial and fertility aberrations in the postnatally irradiated survivors were addressed.

Because it is infused with quantitative data, much of which is presented in graphic and tabular form, this text is a valuable reference. Controversial scientific and societal issues are discussed, and the author often renders his own reasoned opinions in rebuttal.

Schull has succeeded in writing a readable book that the nonspecialist can comprehend.