A Brief History Of Radiation Therapy


In October in 1895, Wilhelm Rӧntgen was working on an electron tube that shot electrons from one electrode to another, when he noticed a powerful and invisible leakage that penetrated layers of blackened cardboard producing a white glow on a barium screen that had accidentally been left on a bench in the room. Rӧntgen placed his wife, Anna’s, hand between the source of the rays and a photographic plate, and observed a silhouette of her finger bones and her wedding ring on the plate – he had found a form of energy that could pass through tissues selectively. He called this form of light X-rays.

In 1896 Henri Becquerel, a French chemist, discovered that certain materials autonomously emitted their own invisible rays with similar properties to Rӧntgen’s X-rays. In Paris friends of Becquerel’s, Pierre and Marie Curie, began a search for even more powerful sources of X-rays, using Pierre’s invention, the electrometer, with which Marie had shown that minute amounts of radiation emitted from uranium ores could be quantified by measuring miniscule doses of energy.

Eventually, they discovered a waste ore called pitchblende, which showed the signs of a new element many times more radioactive than uranium. They distilled the boggy sludge to obtain a pure form of this potent radioactive source – it laid on the far edge of the periodic table and was named ‘radium’ after the Greek word for light.

Radium’s potency gave rise to the knowledge a new property of X-rays: they could not only carry energy through biological tissues, but they could deposit energy within tissues. It was this new property which lead to the peeling of blackened layers from Curie’s hands; the permanent scar left on Pierre’s chest from a vial stored in his waistcoat pocket; the swollen and blistered lips and nails falling out as a consequence of giving magical demonstrations at a public fayre; the permanent damage done to Marie Curie’s bone marrow leaving her with anaemia.

It was eventually discovered that radium was attacking DNA, causing apoptosis (controlled cell death) or - more often - the entrance of the cell into G0. But more importantly for the therapeutic use of X-rays, it was realised that X-rays most rapidly kill the most rapidly proliferating cells – the nails, lips, blood and skin amongst these. In 1896, Emile Grubb, a twenty-one-year-old medical student had the idea to use X-rays to treat cancer – the uncontrollable proliferation of cells was to be controlled by the Curies’ discovery.

Today, radiotherapy is still being used to kill a range of cancers, though with the drawback of being relatively ineffective against cancers that have already metastasised.

I hope you found this article interesting.

By Louis Lane.

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