Acute radiation injury in man has been amply reviewed in the past decades (1-8). Information for those reviews was mainly derived from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki experience (3), from radiation accidents as a con- sequence of testing nuclear weapons and the application of nuclear energy (9-13) and from the intentional irradiation of patients, mostly for the treatment of malignancies and/or as conditioning for transplantation (14-20). Further, a large body of data derived from animal experimentation has led to cautious extrapolations to the human situation (14). An elaborate review dealing with...