Abstract
Shortly after his arrival in Houston, Grimmett met Marshall Brucer who was the newly appointed head of the medical division of the Oak Ridge Institute for Nuclear Studies. Brucer immediately recognized that Grimmett could help him with his program at ORINS and invited Grimmett to visit him. The visit was set for September 1949, and in August 1949, Grimmett revised the outline for the work of his department to include the use of cobalt-60 in radiotherapy by replacing the radium in one of his pneumatic radium units with 50 Ci of cobalt-60. When he got to Oak Ridge, he was promised 1,000 Ci and immediately recognized that the design of the machine had to change and immediately produced sketches for a new unit. He and Brucer agreed that a joint proposal between MDAH and ORINS was needed, and this would have to go to the AEC for approval. How this all finally worked out is described. It turned out that Oak Ridge National Laboratory could not deliver the 1,000 Ci of cobalt-60, and arrangement had to be made with the Canadian reactor at Chalk River to produce the cobalt causing further delay. The unit was constructed by GE and was ready in early 1951 and was shipped to ORINS for testing with a borrowed 200 Ci source. Grimmett was to go to ORINS in August 1951, but, he died suddenly on May 28, 1951. By September 1953, the new building for the MDAH was ready to receive the unit, and it was shipped to Houston. Patient treatments started in February 1954. It was used until 1963.
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Notes
- 1.
From 1938 to 1942 Dr. Aebersold (Ph.D., California, 1938) was associated with the physics and biophysics research at the Radiation Laboratory, University of California, under the direction of Dr. Ernest O Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron. During the war he worked on various phases of the atomic energy project in Berkley, California, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Los Alamos, New Mexico. In 1946 he became chief of the Isotopes Branch of the Manhattan District and then chief of the Isotopes Division of the Atomic Energy Commission, which had supplied by late 1949 radioactive isotopes to hundreds of research institutions, universities, and hospitals all over the world.
- 2.
The iridium-192 teletherapy unit at the Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge, England was the first teletherapy unit to use artificial radioactivity and was the first such unit to clinically treat patients [131, 132]. Freundlich was the medical physicist and J.S. Mitchell was the Director of the Department of Radio therapeutics. Iridium was used because, at the time, large sources of cobalt-60 were not available in England. It did not have as high gamma-ray energies as cobalt-60 (400 keV versus 1.25 MeV) nor as long a half-life (74 days versus 5.26 years) but high specific activities could be obtained after only a few months irradiation in the reactor. So there were two identical sources, one being in use in the unit treating patients, while the other was in the reactor and the sources were exchanged every four weeks. This unit had an output of 16r/min. at a source to skin distance of 8 cm and in performance was similar to an 8 gm radium teletherapy unit. In effect this was a unit very similar to the pre-war radium teletherapy units but with the radium replaced with radioactive iridium- 192, as suggested by Grimmett in 1937.The first patient treated by this iridium unit was in May 1950, over a year before the first cobalt-60 patient.
- 3.
Doctor Robert Shalek was the second Rice Physics Fellow in the department of physics at MDAH from 1950 to 1953. He spent a year at the Royal Cancer Hospital in London training under W.V. Mayneord returning to MDAH in 1954. He became chairman of the physics department in 1961 a position he held until 1984.
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Almond, P.R. (2013). The Cobalt Unit, 1949–1954. In: Cobalt Blues. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-4924-9_8
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