Radioisotopes in Medicine

Synopsis

Radioisotopes in Medicine is a booklet provided by the United States Atomic Energy Commission to help you understand the pivotal roles of nuclear energy in common man's life. This book is written by Earl W. Phelan is Professor of Chemistry at Tusculum College, Greeneville, Tennessee. From 1952 to 1965, he served as Staff Assistant in the Laboratory Director’s Office at Argonne National Laboratory, where his duties included editing the Argonne Reviews and supplying information to students.

Excerpts:

The history of the use of radioisotopes for medical purposes is filled with names of Nobel Prize winners. It is inspiring to read how great minds attacked puzzling phenomena, worked out the theoretical and practical implications of what they observed, and were rewarded by the highest honor in science.

For example, in 1895 a German physicist, Wilhelm Konrad Roentgen, noticed that certain crystals became luminescent when they were in the vicinity of a highly evacuated electric-discharge tube. Objects placed between the tube and the crystals screened out some of the invisible radiation that caused this effect, and he observed that the greater the density of the object so placed, the greater the screening effect. He called this new radiation X rays, because x was the standard algebraic symbol for an unknown quantity. His discovery won him the first Nobel Prize in physics in 1901.

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