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Honored by Fifth Annual Nuclear Pioneer Lecture 11Th Annual Meeting, Society of Nuclear Medicine @ i@ LORD RUTHERFORD 391 Honored by Fifth Annual Nuclear Pioneer Lecture 11th Annual Meeting, Society of Nuclear Medicine @‘@; 1/ I4@i .1 LORD RUTHERFORDOF NELSON,1871-1937 392 LORD RUTHERFORD Lord Rutherford of Nelson (1871-1937) There are a thousand threads in nuclear medicine: energy, form and sub stance; devices for measuring, calibrating and for just plain every day detecting; queer elements and sometimes even new elements. All these threads interweave through the science of the past two centuries. In our science, at one point they all come together. Around the turn of the century, the triumvirate of Becquerel, Crookes and Rutherford approached each other's work as though they disagreed—and some times they did, but never for long. Each was surrounded by a group of excep tional chemists and physicists unraveling a tangled web of impossible evidence. If it were necessary to pick one of these men ( and this can't be done), probably Rutherford would be selected as the originator of nuclear medicine. Many per sons that later became important were students of Rutherford—Soddy, Hevesy, Geiger. Or they were following the ideas of Rutherford—Lawrence, Fermi, Oliphant. Or they were students of these students—Hamilton, Low-Beer. Every thing in nuclear medicine ultimately finds its way back to Rutherford. NEW ZEALAND Rutherford was born near Nelson, New Zealand, on August 30, 1871. He went to Nelson College where he was known as a prodigy because of awards not just in mathematics, physics and chemistry, but also in Latin, French, English Literature and History. He went to the University at Christchurch and distin guished himself in the transmission of electrical waves through the atmosphere and devised an ingenious magnetic detector. Because of this work, and the fact that he was such an outstanding student, he was the second choice for an an cient (1851) scholarship to England. The first choice got married and so Ruther ford went to Cambridge. In the fall of 1895 he arrived at the Cavendish Labora tory and was making a reputation in wireless physics when Roentgen announced a new kind of light. CAVENDISH LABORATORY Professor J. J. Thomson, director of the Cavendish Laboratory, was akeady investigatingthe queer eventsthatWilliam Crookes demonstratedwith an elec tric current in a vacuum tube (well, it was almost a vacuum). Thomson had dis covered that air through which X rays passed became a conductor of electricity. He called in Rutherford to be his personal assistant. They had a fairly good idea of what was going on, Thomson said a portion of molecules traveled in one di rection and had a negative charge, another portion traveled in the opposite di rection with a positive charge; the pair when separated he called “ions―.Ruther ford's job was to learn everything about ions. It was a full year's work and in the meantime Becquerel (also Crookes and Sylvanus Thompson) had shown that uranium oxide and maybe some of the other very heavy metals did the same sort of thing, and so Rutherford shifted from X rays to uranium. FLVFH ANNUAL LECTURE—NUCLEAR PIONEER SERIES 393 We could follow the career of Rutherford year by year, until his death in 1937, discussing each major discovery. In 1897, ionization; in 1898, “non-deviable― and “deviable―rays from uranium which he renamed “alpha―and “beta―.With Owens at McGill, he discovered thoron; then the deflection of alpha particles, then thorium-X growing from thorium; in 1903, the exponential laws of decay and recovery; in 1903, helium in connection with radium; in 1904, the subject of geochronology. In 1905 he was primarily responsible for Boitwood's claim that lead was the end product of the radium disintegration series. But this can get awfully tedious, because there is often more than one and few years are without a major discovery. With some inevitable oversimplification, it is possible to summarize Ruther ford's career in four periods; Student, McGill, Manchester, Cambridge. From 1895 to 1898, he was a student of J. J. Thomson's. During this period he was primarily interested in electromagnetic phenomena and he probably preceded, or was at least contemporary with Marconi on questions of wireless transmission. MCGILL During 1898, the Curies were busy at work with polonium. At the same time, McGill University had an opening and was looking for a professor of physics. Rutherford was anxious to get married to a New Zealand girl and needed money and so applied for the position. With the enthusiastic backing of J. J. Thomson he got the job, but first “finished―his work on the rays from uranium. In September of 1898 he went to Montreal where he changed from student to professor over night. Rutherford was only 27 years of age. At McGill he met Robert Bowie Owens, another new professor (of Electrical Engineering). Rutherford got Owens to run down some trouble with the electrical measurements of thorium oxide. This material worked something like uranium but sometimes it behaved and some times it didn't. Owens did run down the trouble. The temperamental behavior of thorium oxide was due to drafts. This was a naive piece of stupidity to every body except Rutherford and Owens, there was a gaseous emanation that came offof the thorium.(Later Rutherfordfound the same thing with uranium). Rutherford worked out his own mathematics on a number of experiments to discover radioactive growth and decay. By September of 1899, Rutherford thought he had solved the problem of emanation (he hadn't, but it was a good start) and in another month thought he had explained how these emanations caused what he then called “excitedradio activity―. The Curies had already published a paper on the radioactivity “in duced― by radium but they knew nothing of Rutherford's work and he knew nothing of theirs. The activity had so short a life that the presence of a separate element was unsuspected unless you did the kind of experiment that Rutherford had invented. During the summer of 1900, Rutherford returned to New Zealand to get married. By the time he returned to McGill, a young (23 years old) laboratory instructor in chemistry had been hired and was looking for a research problem. 394 LORDRUTHERFORD This was Frederick Soddy. Rutherford got him to look more carefully into the radium and thorium gases that were being formed. From 1898 to 1907, Rutherford was primarily concerned with the very intri cate phenomena of radioactive changes in the naturally occurring radioactive elements. It was during this period that the trend of study of radioactivity was bent towards electrical measurements. J. J. Thomson was an “electrical―physicist and he chose Rutherford as a student because Rutherford could make electrical measurements. Becquerel was a chemist but he chose Pierre Curie as a colleague because Curie was an “electrical―physicist. Sir William Crookes was a chemist, who felt much more at home with photographic measurements, but he recognized the quantitation that the “electrical―physicists were capable of. Probably be cause of the insistence by all three that measurements be quantitative as well as qualitative, the whole field of radioactivity, unlike roentgenology, was directed away from photography towards electrical phenomena. MAN@HE5TER During the next few years the idea of a “transmutation―became fairly well accepted. During the early months of 1907, the professor of physics at the Uni versity of Manchester in England was anxious to retire. Professor Rutherford from McGill was selected to replace him. From 1907 to 1919, Rutherford was Professor of Physics at Manchester. By the time he arrived, he found already established a young German Ph.D. named Hans Geiger who was supposed to be neither teacher nor student, but only do research. Rutherford always had something that had to be done and so Geiger was given the job of developing an ionization method for measuring alpha particles. The chamber had already been worked out in Canada but not in the sense that it was a practical device (practical to a physics laboratory, the prac ticality in medicine comes much later). In 1908 the theory of transmutation was so obvious, though still undeveloped, that Rutherford received the Nobel prize for Chemistry. (It is all right for a physicist to receive the Nobel prize in Chemistry because Becquerel, who was very definitely a chemist, had received the Nobel prize in Physics in 1903.) During 1912, when Soddy had already given a name to and proved the theoretical necessity for “isotopes―,a Danish visiting physicist came to Ruther ford's laboratory at Manchester as a part of his year of study abroad. In those days study abroad was considered necessary for a Ph.D. degree. Niels Bohr was dissatisfied with the atom-model that Rutherford had developed and so he im proved it. We now call this the Bohr atom, but it's really the Bohr modification of the Rutherford atom. (When you really get down to it, it's really the Bohr re modification of the Rutherford modification of the Thomson atom. And Thomson gives credit to Crookes, who gives credit to others before him.) George Hevesy was working in Rutherford's laboratory at the same time and here a separate thread in tracer techniques shifts from transmutation physics to chemistry and finally to biochemistry tracers and finally to a portion of nuclear medicine. Rutherford was knighted in 1914; his war work was on the transmission of sound under water, but he continued to work with the high energy alpha par FIFTH ANNUAL LECTURE—NUCLEAR PIONEER SERIES tides from radium with the idea that he could produce a disintegration of nitrogen nuclei.
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