Anoxia in radiobiology: oxygen in polystyrene petri dishes—A furthe experiment

After the letters by Chapman, Sturrock, Boag and Crookall (1968), and Boag (1969), reporting the release of oxygen from different plastics during deoxygenation, experiments in this laboratory have measured directly the oxygen concentrations in water contained in glass or polystyrene dishes during degassing (deoxygenation) with nitrogen. These results confirm that a radiobiologically significant amount of oxygen is contained in polystyrene dishes, from which it is free to diffuse into a hypoxic aqueous medium. The measurements of oxygen concentrations in aqueous pnase were made with oxygen cathode electrodes, from which currents were fed into multichannel amplifying and recording equipment used in the previous study by Baker and Town (1966) and described in more detail by Baker and Lindop (1970).