The previous post was about the shameful and dark underside of nuclear research on human beings. This one and the follow-ups will discuss some of the useful medical advances that our understanding of radiation have made possible.
I don't know how much the unethical human radiation experiments contributed (if any) to modern medicine. What I do know is that entirely new methods for imaging and treating disease are now available that were not available prior to the nuclear age. There is a lot of genius involved with using radiation to make people well.
Nuclear Medicine broadly falls into two categories; I will be discussing each one in separate posts of their own. Those categories are Imaging and Therapy. Both are interesting fields - they are at the intersection of radiation and biology, only this time for the good of mankind.
Nuclear Imaging - a PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan.
Nuclear Therapy - an early linear accelerator for radiation therapy on an inoperable cancer.
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