We checked the performance of undoped EGO crystals under extremely high dose conditions (dosage up to 88 Mrad). The light outputs of the crystals drop by similar to 30% after receiving 10 Mrad of gamma-ray dose but remain stable throughout the rest of the test. The self-recovery behavior of BGO under 20 Mrad has also been studied. The reduced variation in light output from pre-radiated BGOs, together with a fixed recovery limit, indicate that a pre-radiation process may be helpful to stabilize the EGO performance in a low dose environment. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.