Interview with Marshall Brucer

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incident that got media publicity with the usual no background His work in preparing the historical reviews for "Vignettes in Tri-linear chart of the elements to present (In V o l s . 98, 9 9 , Iodine and P-32 did not start as clinical agents - but became Plans for other volumes not nuclear medicine, is pathology, Re/Other developments in nuclear medicine that have gone to The problem of waste disposal from nuclear medicine Re/Cyclotron days - Hamilton - standard tests, no such thing as a specific organ

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Eistory of ORINS (ORAU) Mostly applied research Development of crystals Education and training AEC made it controversial - but did not inhibit research

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DISCUSSION WITH DR. KASHAIL BRUCER athis haw in 'IUcson, Arizona of the M , and then let m i ask saw sp zi fic questions. The subject was the sc-called Tucson Tritium trials last year. Well,sm people were alledged t o have had a piece of cake in the Tucson Unified District School kitchens that had 56,000 picocuries of tritium - cn it, and the Arizona AEC put the ccnpany out of business a t a tremendous cost .to everqrfxdy.that i s going to pay taxes, and I gave a deposition a t the bgMg of this mxk kangarw court that they ''No one had ever done m y work on tritium. " heard t h a t sanething hzd been done was when I asked about the work that was orig in d ly done on tritium at Los Alms in the early 1950's. They let me knm what was going on, The -le that were running that thought that t h i s was absolutely new. I think the first time they had These people had never heard about it. [This concerns his historical reviews prepared f q r "Vignettes of Nuclear Medicine"] meting of the British Association, which is the first the they had net in Binningham for 27 years. These things started a long tirrre ago. In 1913 a t the Birmingham When they met in Birmingham 27 years earlier i s when they started up t h i s idea of the "meta elements." H e describes isotopes, s-le isotopes, of course. H e describid isotopes completely in 1887, and it had been forgotten started up the business of his psit3ve beta rays, and Aston proves that the two lines that J. J. Thcnipson had seen in neon (neon 20 and neon 22) were really two different kinds of neons. They were b t h neon, and %&ton proved it, bu: n o w y

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kliev & him. Fajans had given the b&nning of his idea (his "pleiads"), which Soddy was about t o call isotopss, but Fajans [ KasXr Fajmsl cdled. then "pleiacls" ksuse he had already proved tha- there wasa dxintegration by alpha particles. %ere a l s o had to be disintegration by beta particles. this meeting.in that yezr. atcsnic weight.came out later in that year. So that both cam out of Then the idea of using the a t h c number and not the All of tnese occurred in one year. ?hat one year, I think, is the mst wonderful year in physics, or nuclear physics myway, and that was very, veq- iq mrt ant. Then fran then I go on t o Aston's mrk. Aston couldn't prove anything u n t i l after he got out of the army [World k r 1 1 . %en he did get out of the army and went back t o Cambridge, he developed the mass spectroscope. Then I go on t o the next step, the secondary era i n nuclear @ysics which i s the m r k by Urey who develop3 the x-ray isotopes (by this time, everybcdy believed i n isotops, i.e., stable isotopes). It was always a little bit of a cvriosity until Urey came out with a whole quart bottle full of them. Wenendous munts f o r an isotope. Then I go t o the radioactive isotopes. And frm there I go on t o 1934 and 1936-37. Tnis is when Robley Evans got ahold 'of radioiodine. O f course, there is a junp in there. It had Anyway, h e ' sthe one who started; his students frcrnMichigan got started ( t h i s ws.s W. H. Sullivan) a t Oak Ridge. began to build it up , and then one of 9Aliva.n then developed the chart of nuclides [isotopes, isobzrs, isotaresl . It is 1946 by this -'&re. Of course by t h i s time, the periodic table, which w a s M longer a periodic table, ncw i t ' s atri linear chart, like you see back there khhd you: That's when it got started. men it first came out, I think, Sullivan started out with 900 isotopes. a to h published - that picture. I think i t ' snm up to a hst 2,500. That is ahout

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Ncw d 1 of t h i s is in the volm that i s underway? [Vignettes in BRUCER: Tnis is 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, and 1 0 4 is when I s t a r t on the p-32. I finally get mund t o P-32! Ifl naU y get into the place here it's k m - inq clinical, because the icdi-ie stuff w z s not very clinical a t first. It was dcal research, but not clinical. ?he P-32 starts out right. Well, John Lawrence begins t o give t h i s as a therapeutic agent, and it becanes very clinical. It's very interesting that the P-32 is no longer clinical. nuclide, but the icdine i s still in,& they can't get r i d of it. They are doing their best t o get r i d of it, but they can't get r i d of it because it is still the trea-t of choice for hyper-thyroidism, which incidentally is not cancer. It's a beautiful story because now t l 0 4 w i l l be the P-32 story, and ncw I'll go through the P-32 t o where it becms a real clinical i t e m until 1950, and then this big thing starts up. The whole b l d volm business falls apart w i t h P-32 and chromium takes over. mere's going to be a b u t three m r e issues in here. I get to 110-112, I'll finally get up t o technetium. It is still research, It's practically lost all of its usefulness asa clinical By the time . The "RIA' business starts out with Burson in 1950 and Yall cw got i n on it and the Burson-Yallaw work on insulin of a l l things. find ly ms an amino reaction that they finally get around to raking into a definite test for thyroid. and left nuclear n&i.che. Diabstic prababifities. That It very rapidly became a t e s t for any damn thing It doesn't belong there. It belongs i n pathology and it has -'a test system. amin0 acid tests are c'Lirect& not t o nuclear rredicine but directed t o pthologists. As I heard l z s t week mst of their advertising for theFo

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things *at have cane inzo being by st-g out in nuclear medicine and branching into sane other field. mre on how things got f m original research into nuclear medicine; and then they kind of faded, but where they went,I had not studied. 250 disposable t e s t tubes are contaminated with iodine-125. m u n t s ; but,of course,you get 210 picocuries per test, and you already have the nan mie range with idine-125. ibt away? They throw stuff down the sink. That's z fact that I hadn't really focused on. I've been focusing They didn't fade ccmpletely. They had l e f t and gone to another They j u s t were not in the right house. The fact that we are using about ( I ' m talking abut one little This means about These are picocurie Then you are going out of the picocurie rmge. You aze ncw in What do they do with that after they thrm But now they've got a contaminated big worry r i g h t now, so this requires doing something. T\;ow the i&e-125 ' as much cobalt-57, and they've got about 20 test tulxs each week that zre conThey haven't got enough ram to store it. They've got to get r i dQ of it. ?Ais waste dis-sal problm has becane a very serious thing.sv - STANNARD: It sure hzs, and every t h they close a 6isposzl =ea, that makes it that much worse. Again, shceI ' m going t o focus primxrily on reseach, I willF3

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describe these problens as problems ard leave them there. One thin? I wanted particularly to & you dmut, Marshall, was pur recollections of the cyclotron days - the early and middle 3 0 ' s before the mc1ea.r reactor came i?. I ' v e been rather surprised a t +he munt of work that joe Hamilton and his qoup and s m others did with isotopes thzt came off cycle trom. I knew there wzs saw, but 1.didn ' t realize h m mch there was. BRUCER: .. Every time they produced a new radionuclide in Berkeley, the f i r s t prson td get hold of it was obviously Joe Hamilton. H e got ahold of it and there that he was sticking, and then he m u l d k i l l them all and do a very sophisticated, but still h i s routine, study of the distribution, the old DAR [Differential Abstn. Patel- approach a d by very, very standard technique. thing he proved was that there was no such thing as a specific organ for any H e stuck ten mice. H e must have had thousands of mice I think the first thing wt every place - scerretimes there was a lot mre in one orpn than there H e proved thzt definitely, and that was a remarkable discovery. Everyin another organ, but there was still a ratio - a difference between each'one - for example, the bone emitters, which I think Joe Hamilton is responsible for saying that scgne were ' m e seekers'. .(stannard: Yes,I think so.) I remznber he was very enphatic alxxlt that one t h when Iret him in 1940's - very emphatic. .'Ihese zren ' t bone seekers, it just means there is a little bit mre that goes to the bne, but everything aces eve w lace - everything will go t o bone, but not as much. s131NNARD: probably the better t e r m tnwld be bone hanger-upprs. BRUCER: .&:.fact, I think there are things we zre finally getting around t o with our scanners. %ey have gotten tothe place where they are exceedingly senIF sensitivity and to hell with resolution; p u had t o get sensitivity. After w e There was a the when the whole history of scanning w z s fighting for

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m e getting large amwnts of nuclides,when we got very sensitive crystzls, the whole thing &an@. and sensitivity didn't mtter much. w've got abut as gocd resolution as w can get witha large crystal. tkw w e are going t o sensitivity, and now with the newest wide-field scanners that are just caning out (the 9 1 tube Raytheon Scanners), the sensitivity is remarkable, W e were fighting for mre resolution, better resoluyion, Nodwe are back t o the place again where and we are going back again t o resolution. to sensitivity - back and forth. there w a s always in every liver scan activity in the bone marrow. R j u s t don't see it because we don't take a long enough picture. have the sensitivity to get it, but now SJJANNARD: Very gcxd pint. I n Rochester we had a cyclotron. This is back and forth - resolution One of the things I've pointed out is that can find it. We are always finding Right in the middle of the war. Whipple's Iron business is probably really mre imprtant than the P-32 business, but it never was wrtant fran.the stand pint of a physician pact icing medicine. It was a research pmblem that Mi at ely was a-Tlicable to ran-radioactive iron studies. The radioactive iron studies were -the i qx r tant the first thing that hit medicine, but wzs not as .i@rtant as the ioiine. sine became exceedingly in px tant ; then the P-32 worked upbut very rapidly left clinical mrdicine; but the iron beczm a part of smethinq that wcxi never really in clinical Mcine, Zxlt it was definitely a research problem.that was very ktpr - tant. I think that goes nun ber3. s+mNNmD: Ifelt that even though i t ' s a - little afield frm the history of internal emitter toxicology, i t ' s an interesting story 'and so iq mrt wt that I I think that would have to go dcyn as Number 3 . The P-32 was obviously

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RRUER : I t ' s a very imp r tant stud)., yes. d e the stuff for him in Berkeley. I understand he got h i s iron-59 from John Lawrence. And that was a t Berkeley when Kan-en was a t Berkeley. mat of the washington university cyclotron ? hapPenea in nuclear medicine. I have never connected the St. Louis cyclotron with anything that SllANNARD: There m u s t not be very much. [Note: See book1 Another zrea I wanted to ask you about was i f you could reminisce about the history of the oak Ridge Institute of N~clewrStudies, Medical Division, and what you view as their major contributions to the field, not just of nuclear rredicine, but research, particularly research with internal emitters. mum: I think the mst important thing we did was strictly applied research, and that was getting t h e medical spectrmter going. Eel1 and Harris d Wancis. These are ones that start& up and publicized the idea that you had t o be able to rreasure the spectrum of radioiodine so that you This was a l l made by P. R. auld select.and rneascs.only a material that care directly fm the thycoid gland and then w a s reported by the instrument. I think t h e business of setting up our thyroid standards - stzndards for thyroid up'cake and the rrrethod of calibrating the mounts of activity inside the b d y using the rredical spctrmter - I think that was exceedingly in pr tant. application of it and publicized the idea that the Mcal people had to look a t pure, specific energies of g m emitters. Nobody used …