Certain individuals cannot tolerate 'conventional' doses of radiation therapy. This is known to be true of patients with ataxia-telangiectasia and ligase IV deficiency. Although in vitro testing may not correlate completely with clinical radiosensitivity, fibroblasts and lymphoblasts from patients with both of these disorders have been clearly shown to be radiosensitive. Using a colony survival assay (CSA) to test lymphoblastoid cells after irradiation with 1 Gy, a variety of other genetic disorders have been identified as strong candidates for clinical radiosensitivity, such as Nijmegen breakage syndrome, Mre 11 deficiency, and Fanconi's anemia. These data are presented and considered as a starting-point for the inherited basis of human radiosensitivity.