Radiation biology lost a giant of the field earlier this year. Professor Albrecht M. Kellerer died on July 31, 2022, at the age of 86.
For radiation biologists who started their careers in the 1960s, it was standard practice to introduce themselves to the field by reading the second edition of a textbook written by D.E. Lea, Actions of Radiation on Living Cells, published in 1955. At that time, the basic concept of radiation's action on living cells involved random hits of ionization on sensitive cellular targets. The target and the hit could be singular or multiple, with the dose-effect relationship potentially described by either the single-hit multi-target model or the multi-hit single-target model.
In 1972, Dr. Kellerer, together with Dr. H.H. Rossi, published an epoch-making paper, titled “The Theory of Dual Radiation Action,” in the current topics section of the journal Radiation Research Quarterly. The paper was based on...