Fundamentals in Physics

Almost immediately after its discovery by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898, radium was used to treat cancer. For years, plesiocurietherapy and interstitial therapy were performed using radium and its daughter element radon. With the advent of nuclear reactors, many new isotopes became available in the 1950s: needles of cobalt 60 (Myers 1948) tantalum-182 wires, gold 198, and iridium 192 (Sinclair 1952; Myers et al. 1953; Henschke et al. 1953). They gradually replaced radium. Now, artificially produced radionuclides such as caesium 137, iridium 192 and more recently iodine 125 and ruthenium 106 have largely supplanted radium.