I recently had to spend the night in the hospital. I didn't really feel that sick, but I had had some strange symptoms earlier and they wanted to do some tests to try to understand what had happened. I left the next day having had a very bad night's sleep and a huge barrage of tests. Though they were efficient and thorough, no one really knew what had caused my symptoms two days prior. I think this happens a lot in medicine. That is, they see some symptoms and they do their best to explain them. Then for all their best efforts and the latest technology, no one really knows. I feel blessed that no one suggested treating me for their best guess of what the problem might be.
In an earlier part of my career I did R&D in nuclear medicine, specifically gamma imaging. This is not taking pictures of gamma rays, but rather using gamma rays to take pictures inside of your body. Technetium-99m is a common radionuclide used in such imaging. As it turns out, most of the technetium used in medicine is harvested from a device called a cow as a by-product of another radionuclide called molybdenum-99. Our question this month is how does molybdenum-99 become technetium-99m? Hope you don't glow in the dark.
Reply to Butch Shadwell at b.shadwell@ieee.org (email), 904-410-9751 (fax), 904-410-9750 (v), 3308 Queen Palm Dr., Jacksonville, FL 32250-2328. (http://www.shadtechserv.com) The names of correct respondents may be mentioned in the solution column.
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While lying in the hospital bad I starting thinking of my days of doing applied research in nuclear medicine. Then I knew what the next BTC would be, how does molybdenum-99 become technetium-99m?
This was not a very difficult problem if you happened to know that molybdenum-99 was an unstable radionuclide and that it would usually have a beta decay to technetium-99m. Atomic number 42 becomes number 43. The molybdenum has a half life of about 2.8 days and the resulting technetium has a half life of about 6 hours before it has a gamma emission and changes to the more stable isomer of technetium-99. These two forms of technetium-99 are called isomers because they are identical in every way except that the arrangement of neutrons and protons in the nucleus is in a meta-stable configuration. After a gamma event the nucleus is in a lower energy state where it may eventually have a beta decay and turn into Ruthenium-99. But I bet you already knew that.
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