Rosalind Yalow and her colleague Solomon Benson were nuclear medicine and internal medicine physicians at Bronx Municipal Hospital in New Yolk. Rosalind Yallow received the Nobel Prize for developing the radioimmunoassay in the 1950s. Yalow and Benson employed Iodine 125 in their assay after years of failure attempting to employ Iodine 131 as the tracer.
William Myers at the Ohio State University introduced several radioisotopes including Iodine 125 and Cobalt 60. He was able to convince Benson and Yalow to switch to Iodine 125 as a tracer leading to their success.
Dr Myers and Charles Doan who was the Dean at Ohio State University College of Medicine introduced the first treatments of an overactive thyroid gland with Iodine 131.
Drs Myers and Doan also assisted in the production of the first to commercial Nuclear Medicine camera as initially developed by Paul Anger. This production was contracted to Nuclear Chicago which was acquired by Searle and then by Siemens in the late 70s. Their original camera is now in the Smithsonian Institute.
Michel Ter-Pogossian, the father of PET, using filtered back projection mathematics introduced his PET scanner and enabled many companies such as General Electric, Siemens and others to copy the CT technology originally developed by EMI without regard to patents leading to the the rapid advance in CT imaging.
Both computed tomography and immunoassay which were among the greatest medical developments in the second half of the 20th century had their roots in Nuclear Medicine.
Dedicated to Drs Mark Tetaleman and Ernest Mazzaferri. Mark who was the chief of Nuclear Medicine at OSU met an untimely death when he was murdered while attending a meeting in Atlanta, Georgia. Ernest Mazzaferri was an endocrinologist and Chairman of the Department of Internal Medicine at OSU. Ernie was an ardent supporter of Nuclear Medicine and world recognized for the treatment of thyroid cancer.
