Medicine: Biggest Chunk

For the treatment of cancer, technical men have devised huge and intricate electrical X-ray machines, but few have been able to approximate the pure, short gamma ray of earthborn radium. The trouble with radium is that there is not very much of it.

Last week energetic Dr. Douglas Quick, consulting radiologist and cancer specialist at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital, had a triumph to announce for his hospital. The Belgian Union Minière du Haut Katanga, which controls most of the world’s limited supply of radium, had promised the hospital a five-year loan of the biggest chunk of radium (50 grams—about 1/10 lb.)* ever amassed. Estimated value: $1,000,000.

Before Radiologist Quick can use the prize, Roosevelt will have to build a machine to handle it. Plans, already drawn by Physicist Gioacchino Failla, call for a derrick-like supporting apparatus in an underground chamber and a 3½-ton bucket of lead, mercury and steel to hold the radium and direct its energy in converging rays on deep-seated cancers. When the machine is finished some time next year, the hospital will ship the empty bucket to Belgium and have it loaded. Then the radium will be brought back to Manhattan and put to work.

*Second biggest: 30 grams in Belgium’s Louvain Cancer Institute.