Pulmonary Deposition and Retention of Inhaled Aerosols

tendency to pulmonary collapse produced by oxygen breathing and acceleration combined. The second section considers problems of engineering space vehicles and space ecology or providing a satisfactory environment for man. As Konecci puts it, "Man is an essential part of space exploration; in fact, he is the reason for space exploration." Space ecology is really the crux of the whole thing. We can gain only limited extension of our capabilities by selecting adaptable astronauts for, as Schaeffer states in the preface, "The logical step to extend man's capacity to enter and manage new environments is to develop new tools." These tools must be useable and the vehicles habitable in very strange environments. The third section deals with medical and physiological aspects of flight and constitutes a special extension of the earlier chapters, and the final section concerns "perspectives" of biological computors and space-time perception. There is some unevenness in style but the authors speak authoritatively and the editor has succeeded in providing wide scope without being superficial. This monograph represents the first volume of a series now being written under the auspices of the United States Atomic Energy Commission's division of technical information on titles pertaining to selected industrial hygiene aspects of the United States atomic energy programs. This is a most authoritative and well-written monograph quite in keeping with the current surge of interest in pulmonary disease that has characterized the past several years. The work mainly emphasizes the many important variables, at the aerosol level, which operate from the time the patient finds himself in a contaminated atmosphere to the point of actual lung tissue damage. The relative importance of such variables as particle size of the aerosol, its shape and density, locus of deposition, and air flow characteristics are discussed in detail and one finds this most interesting and informative reading. The chapter dealing with pulmonary clearance is excellent. The role of the cilia and mucous blanket in upper respiratory tract clearance and the various elements of alveolar clearance of inhaled aerosoles are clearly reviewed. One of the most interesting chapters-experimental studies on pulmonary clearance-welds together much of the experimental data on this subject and includes the role of the pulmonary lymphatic system. The physician will find the chapter on diseased states resulting from various inhaled aerosoles to be of practical interest. The authors discuss such entities as pneumoconiosis, systemic poisons, radioactive hazards, airborne infection, and particulate …