John H. Lawrence

John Hundale Lawrence (born January 7, 1904 in Canton (South Dakota) , † September 7, 1991 in Berkeley (California) ) was an American nuclear medicine doctor.

Live and act

John H. Lawrence was the brother of the physicist Ernest Orlando Lawrence . He graduated from the University of South Dakota and received his doctorate (MD) in medicine from Harvard Medical School . Harvey Cushing was one of his teachers .

He worked at the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory . There he succeeded in 1935 in Berkeley (when he was doing research there as a visiting scientist, he was an instructor at Yale University at the time ) to prove the effectiveness of the treatment of leukemia in mice with radioactive phosphorus, produced on the cyclotron developed by his brother. He moved entirely to Berkeley, where at Christmas 1936 he treated a 28-year-old patient with leukemia by injecting radioactive phosphorus (the first such treatment in humans). This subsequently also became a standard procedure for polycythemia vera . This caught the attention of philanthropist William Donner of Philadelphia (whose son died of cancer) who founded the Donner Laboratory in Berkeley, which opened in 1942 and of which Lawrence was director until 1970.

In 1937 he discovered that neutron radiation (but not X-rays) was effective in combating a form of rodent cancer (a sarcoma), and he and his brother proposed that neutron radiation should be tested for cancer therapy. This also helped get the first Berkeley cyclotron approved for medical use.

During the Second World War he worked in aviation medicine. A by-product was the discovery of anesthetic effects from ventilation with xenon gas.

In Berkeley he organized a department for medical physics and biophysics and was a professor there. In 1948 he became an associate director of the Radiation Laboratory. At the 184 inch cyclotron, completed in Berkeley in 1947, he and his group also investigated the effects of protons in tissue and treatments on cancer patients began in 1954.

In 1955 he was one of the organizers of the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva.

In 1957 he was a Guggenheim Fellow in Physics. In 1983 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize , the Caldwell Medal of the American Roentgen Ray Society and the Pasteur Medal of the Pasteur Institute . He has honorary doctorates from the University of South Dakota, the University of Bordeaux and the Catholic University of America. In 1970 he became president of the Society of Nuclear Medicine.

He also received a medal from Pope Pius XII for treating Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac against polycythemia vera.

Web links

• Obituary in Berkeley

Remarks

1. ↑ The harmful effects of neutron radiation were only discovered two years earlier in 1935, in particular through studies by John and Paul Aebersold