Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Katherine A. Lathrop, a pioneering researcher in nuclear medicine and a member of a University of Chicago team that developed an isotope widely used to locate and diagnose cancers, died on March 10 at a nursing home in Las Cruces, N.M. She was 89.

The cause was advanced dementia, her family said.

A versatile scientist with degrees in biology, chemistry and physics, Ms. Lathrop was named a professor of radiology at Chicago, where she taught for four decades, without having received a doctorate.

In 1945 and 1946, she participated in the Manhattan Project as a junior chemist in the metallurgical laboratory in Chicago, studying the effects of radioactive materials on animals. Later, as part of a research effort led by Dr. Paul V. Harper, she investigated the qualities of technetium, a radioactive element discovered in the 1930’s.

Ms. Lathrop and the Chicago team experimented with an isotope, technetium 99m, by injecting it into a patient’s bloodstream and then tracing its path through the brain, heart, kidney, liver and other organs.

A scan of the isotope, also called a radionuclide or radiotracer, yielded images to help diagnose and record the size and growth of cancers and other tumors. Dr. Harper’s team also found technetium was less radioactive and had a shorter half-life than many other isotopes, and was therefore less dangerous to patients. A scanning system for technetium was perfected in 1963 and was used to perform a successful brain scan. The isotope remains in clinical use worldwide and is often used to scan bones.

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