DOSIMETRIC AND PROTECTIVE CONSIDERATIONS FOR RADIOACTIVE IODINE*

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Abstract
I AM deeply appreciative of the honor done me by your society in asking that I give the guest lecture at your annual meeting. In a very real sense however, the honor is more properly assigned to you. I am here only because you are seeking to discharge your highest duties as physicians by looking for counsel on the hazards of the new, exciting, and largely uncharted regions that are revealed by the application of radioisotopes to medical problems. I am here not as an expert with all the answers, but as a colleague whose prior experience perhaps qualifies me to indicate the areas in which more knowledge is necessary if the patient's best interests are to be protected, and to indicate the reasons for and methods of protecting ourselves and our assistants from the dangers of these new tools. The problems we shall discuss today are new ones in the sense that the medical profession as a whole has had little reason to concern itself with them. To those of us who have been interested in radiobiology and radiotherapeutics, they are very old and vexing problems. Your interest in radioiodine for therapeutic purposes, unhappily for you and happily for us, means that you inherit the problems of the radiobiologist and radiotherapist, since you will be practicing radiotherapy. Your interest in radioiodine for tracer studies necessitates an interest, if only by exclusion, in radiobiology since it is of importance to demonstrate that the systems which you will study are not affected by their absorption of radiant energy.