RADIUM SUBSTITUTE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 21 March 1939, Page 6

RADIUM SUBSTITUTE

ADVANTAGES IN TREATMENT. SIGNIFICANT DISCOVERY. Artificial radium is being experimented with for medical and scientific research purposes. The work is being carried out under the auspices of the Radium Beam Therapy Research Board, representing the Medical Research Council and the Department, of Scientific and Industrial Research jointly. On the board are some of the most distinguished scientists and doctors in Britain including Viscount Dawson, of Penn, Sir William Bragg, Sir Cuthbert Wallace, Sir Holburt Waring, Professor A. S. Eve and Professor G. E. Gask. The result of these experiments will, it is expected, revolutionise therapeutic treatment. One highly significant discovery has already been ihatle. The use of artificial radium makes possible hew forms of treatment which are impossible with real radium. One of these is its internal application in the form of an injection Or as capsules swallowed by the l patient. RADIUM’S LONG LIFE. Radium cannot be used in this way. It has a life of something like 1690 years and ultimately would rot the bones of the patient. The activity of artificial radium, on the other hand, is half gone in 15 hours. Only one-fourth remains after 30 hours, and one-eighth after 45 hours. ' Unlike radium, radio-sodium, as it is called, can be injected into the body without fear of complications. The artificial radium is being made in the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge and at Liverpool University from common salt. This is being done by bombarding the atom. The experiments with the therapeutic uses of artificial radium have been carried out at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, in London, where Professor F. L. Hopwood and a small staff of trained assistants have been engaged on this research work now for some 18 months. TREATMENT FOR DISEASES. Generally speaking, the uses _to which this synthetim material is being submitted are the same as those of real radium. For the most part they aie malignant conditions of goitre, arthritis, skin diseases, certain forms of rheumatism, cancer, and even thyroid complaints. Research into the biological effects of radiation is also being carried out at the Radium Institute in London, in association with the Royal Cancer Hospital, the Marie Curie Hospital and the Strangeways Research Laboratory at Cambridge. It has been discovered that an extraordinary variation is displayed by living cells as regards susceptibility to radiation. It has been shown, for instance, that the irradiation needed to kill an adult fruit-fly is several thousand times that needed to kill its eggs. The apparent conclusion is that an animal at one stage could be killed by a milligramme of some drug, where at a later stage it would be killed only when that drug amounted to several grammes. £5OOO A GRAMME.

Radio-sodium, or artificial radium, enjoys a number of advantages over the natural variety. For one thing, as these experiments develop, it will prove considerable cheaper to produce. The price of radium is at present £5OOO a gramme.

Not only radium but a large variety of chemical elements can now be made radio-active; in fact, every one contained in the human body. Phosphorus, for instance, concentrates in bone tissues, so treatment with artificial radiophosphorus will be a possibility of the immediate future.