History
The concept was introduced in the 1950s, at a time when the deployment of nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors spurred research on the biological effects of artificial radiaoctivity. It had been noticed that those effects depended both on the type and energy spectrum of the radiation, and on the kind of living tissue. The first systematic experiments to determine the RBE were conducted in that decade.
Read more about this topic: Relative Biological Effectiveness
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