The great advances in radiation measurements

The title of this banquet talk was selected to entertain conferees with recollections of major advances in dosimetry that have stimulated appetites for scientific progress. Recalling over fifty years of use of dosimetric instruments and concepts in the 1950-2000 era leads to an appreciation of many advances in solid state dosimetry, which others here know well and pursue vigorously. This author has been mainly a user, admirer, and interpreter of the fundamental methods of dose measurement. These advances have allowed ease of application in radiation protection and medical physics, for determining current routine and accidental exposures to workers, and for precise radiotherapeutic dose delivery. In more recent years, advances in identifying means of locating selective depositions of energy in various materials are providing ways of retrospectively assessing doses to tissue that were deposited many years ago. These methods also will allow development of quantitative theories of radiation damage once the lesions of interest are identified through further advances in molecular genetics. Yet, reflections on the past fifty years lead to increasing appreciation of the enormous achievements of our predecessors in the 1900-1950 period. Therefore, this presentation emphasises methods used by the author and some of his data interpretations during his 52 year career, with somc examination of the earlier origin of some of these methods.