Abstract

The Atom in Medicine: Revolutionizing Research

The words "isotope" and "radioactivity" became a part of the vocabulary of the average intelligent person only in the aftermath of Hiroshima. But ten years earlier biochemists and other biologists had already began to use radioactive isotopes as tools in their investigations of the chemical processes constantly taking place in living matter. By the time that nuclear fission was discovered and a small group of physicists, all refugees from the totalitarianism of the Right, had seen dimly in this phenomenon the possibility of the atomic bomb, medical researchers were laying the groundwork for the use of radioisotopes in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. The radioisotopes they used came mostly from the operation of the cyclotron, the atom-smashing machine invented by E.O. Lawrence of the University of California.