Electron spin resonance (ESR) dose measurement in bone of Hiroshima A-bomb victim
Angela Kinoshita , Oswaldo Baffa , Sérgio Mascarenhas
Published: February 6, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192444
Abstract
Explosion of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki corresponds to the only historical moment when atomic bombs were used against civilians. This event triggered countless investigations into the effects and dosimetry of ionizing radiation. However, none of the investigations has used the victims’ bones as dosimeter. Here, we assess samples of bones obtained from fatal victims of the explosion by Electron Spin Resonance (ESR). In 1973, one of the authors of the present study (SM) traveled to Japan and conducted a preliminary experiment on the victims’ bone samples. The idea was to use the paramagnetism induced in bone after irradiation to measure the radiation dose. Technological advances involved in the construction of spectrometers, better knowledge of the paramagnetic center, and improvement in signal processing techniques have allowed us to resume the investigation. We obtained a reconstructed dose of 9.46 ± 3.4 Gy from the jawbone, which was compatible with the dose distribution in different locations as measured in non-biological materials such as wall bricks and roof tiles.
Citation: Kinoshita A, Baffa O, Mascarenhas S (2018) Electron spin resonance (ESR) dose measurement in bone of Hiroshima A-bomb victim. PLoS ONE 13(2): e0192444. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0192444
Editor: Sergey Sholom, Oklahoma State University Stillwater, UNITED STATES
Received: July 3, 2017; Accepted: January 11, 2018; Published: February 6, 2018
Copyright: © 2018 Kinoshita et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper.
Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work.
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
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