Use of therapeutic radionuclides in medicine.

The purpose of this paper is to follow the course of historical development in the use of radiopharmaceuticals as a therapeutic tool in nuclear medicine. This chapter is designed to point out the different phases of the development of therapeutic nuclear medicine, pointing out the events which most shaped its history along the way. Those events included the discovery of radioactivity, the development of the cyclotron and nuclear reactor as a method of delivering high specific activity radioactive sources, and a few significant therapeutic radionuclides such as 131I and 32P. The most significant therapeutic radionuclide was radium, which is treated very extensively in this paper from an historical viewpoint. It is only recently that attention of the nuclear medicine community turned to new therapeutic agents, such as bone pain palliation agents, monoclonal antibodies, and others. It may be that the next growth phase of nuclear medicine will revolve around therapy with these radionuclides.