Robley D. Evans (physicist)

Robley Dunglison Evans (born May 18, 1907 in University Place , Nebraska , † December 31, 1995 in Paradise Valley (Arizona) ) was an American nuclear physicist and pioneer of nuclear medicine .

Evans studied physics at Caltech with a bachelor's degree in 1928, a master's degree in 1929 and his doctorate in 1932 with Robert A. Millikan . In his dissertation he dealt with background radiation from the earth, which appeared as a disturbance when observing cosmic rays. He became assistant professor in 1934 and professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1945 , where he retired in 1972. He was then a consultant at MIT and the Mayo Clinic.

He dealt with the radium exposure of former workers ( Radium Girls ) who applied radioactive luminous paint to the dials of watches (and moistened the brushes with their lips), and as a result of the careless use of radium in various medicines in the UNITED STATES. Evans examined in detail how radium affects the body and his research led to the establishment of a maximum healthy radium absorption by the body (he stated in 1941 as a tenth of a millionth of a gram of radium). He began his research as a National Research Fellow in Berkeley and built the Radioactivity Center at MIT. He developed a method to determine the radium uptake in the body via gamma radiation ( meter arc method , Evans method). His laboratory also developed the first isotope of radioactive iodine for medical use in both research and radioiodine therapy .

In order to investigate the long-term effects of radium exposure, the Center for Human Radiobiology was set up by the Atomic Energy Commission at the Argonne National Laboratory on his initiative .

He wrote a textbook on nuclear physics and in 1934 he set up one of the world's first academic courses in nuclear physics at MIT. In 1938 he was responsible for building a cyclotron at MIT (Markle Cyclotron), which primarily served biological and medical purposes and went into operation in 1939. It first produced iodine-130, which, with a half-life of twelve hours, was much more medically useful than iodine-128 with a half-life of 25 minutes (today iodine-131 is used with an even longer half-life of 8 days).

From 1946 to 1969 he was chairman of a committee of the National Research Council on the transport of radioactive materials, which created basic standards.

He also wrote a bestseller book on academic teaching (You and Your Students).

He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1945) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 1990 he received the Enrico Fermi Prize . He received the Presidential Certificate of Merit, Theobald Smith Medal and Award in Medicine from the AAAS, the Hull Award and Gold Medal from the American Medical Association, the Silvanus Thompson Medal from the British Institute of Radiology, the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Health Physics Society, and the William D. Coolidge Award from the American Association of Physicists in Medicine.

Fonts

• The Atomic Nucleus, McGraw Hill 1955
• You and Your Students,

Web links

• Obituary at MIT 1996