After World War II, many German scientists came to the United States. Among them was Dr. Ulrich Henschke, a medical physicist who joined Ohio State University. Together, he and Dr. Myers developed brachytherapy techniques using hollow wires that could be inserted directly into tumors and subsequently loaded with Dr. Myers' radioactive isotope seeds to deliver radiation within the tumors.
Dr. Myers and Dr. Henschke also built the first apparatus for administering cobalt-60 teletherapy to cancer patients. Dr. Myers obtained the first cobalt-60 for therapeutic purposes from the nuclear reactor at Oak Ridge Laboratories in Tennessee and famously transported the original cobalt-60 in the trunk of his car. Cobalt-60 went on to become the primary radiation source for cancer therapy worldwide, as it was more readily available and less expensive than radium.
During his travels, Dr. Myers came across Hal Anger at the Donner Laboratory in California, where Anger had developed a camera capable of imaging radiation emitted during radioactive decay. Dr. Myers convinced Dr. Doan, the Dean at Ohio State, that such an instrument could be extremely important for nuclear medicine, which until then relied on scanners with far more limited applications.
At Dr. Myers urging a company named Nuclear Chicago was commissioned to build the first commercial nuclear medicine camera based on Hal Anger's design. Following numerous improvements over the ensuing 65 years, this type of camera remains the workhorse instrument of most nuclear medicine imaging. The original camera, built for Ohio State for $25,000 contract, is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution.
Eventually, medical interest in cyclotrons declined, and shifted to reactor-produced isotopes, which are neutron-rich and decay by emitting an electron-sized particle originating from a neutron-called beta particle-along with energy and a neutrino.
Dr. Myers did not participate in the initial assessments of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he served as an invited observer and radiation safety officer during subsequent atomic bomb tests. He was the founding member of the Society of Nuclear Medicine and a recipient of its most prestigious awards.
During his military service in WWII, Dr. Myers was involved in recovering the antibiotic penicillin, from the filtered urine of patients who had received the antibiotic, and purifying it for reuse. At that time, penicillin was scarce and restricted to military use. After the war, when penicillin became available to civilians, he and wife Florence, were the first to use it in Columbus, and they co-authored a case report describing the successful treatment of a patients with osteomyelitis.
The above was authored by John Olsen, M.D. former chief of the Division of Nuclear Medicine, Department of Radiology at the Ohio State University.
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