Medical Physics Seminar – Monday, September 18, 2017
Radium Beam Therapy and High Voltage X-Rays. The Eigthtieth Anniversary of a Forgotten Paper
Dr. Peter R. Almond, PhD, FAAPM, FACMP (hosted by Dr. Larry DeWerd)
Research Professor, MD Anderson Cancer Research Center, Houston, Texas - USA
The search for megavoltage radiation oncology treatment machines: the L.G. Grimmett story 80 years ago Leonard George Grimmett, a British medical physicist, visited the University of Wisconsin, on his 34th birthday, September 12, 1937. He was there to see the pressurized electrostatic generator developed by R.G. Herb. The visit came between two papers he published in Nature. January 9, 1937 ‘Radium Beam Therapy and High-Voltage X-Rays’ and February 19, 1938 ‘Nuclear Physics and Medicine.’ Grimmett’s professional interest was in designing and using radium beam therapy units. He had come to realize that radium treatment units would never be successful and in the two papers he showed how artificial radioactivity and improved accelerators would find their place in radiotherapy, replacing radium teletherapy units. In February 1949 he joined the staff at M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston and in the 27 months before his untimely death in 1951 he designed and built the first 1000-curie Cobalt-60 unit in the USA and made arrangements for the installation one of the earliest betatrons in a US hospital.