Medicine: Peacetime Bomb

An elderly housewife with a large cancer in her gullet was wheeled into a basement room in the London, Ont. Victoria Hospital last week. A big lead-cased machine, like an upended cement mixer, was swung into position over her. There was a hissing of air ducts; a small window in the big machine opened for a few minutes, then snapped shut. The patient had received one of the first series of treatments by the first “Cobalt Bomb,” medical science’s newest weapon against cancer.

The cobalt bomb was developed by Canadian atomic scientists and is the strongest radioactive source ever used for a peacetime purpose in any country. Wafers of cobalt the size of a 25¢ piece were put in the Canadian atomic pile at Chalk River, Ont. and left there for two years to be bombarded with neutrons and made highly radioactive. Then 24 wafers of the radioactive product (Cobalt 60) became the charge for London’s cobalt bomb; the others were sent to Saskatchewan for another cobalt bomb, which was in operation at Saskatoon last week. More cobalt is being “cooked” for the first U.S. units.

The cobalt bomb is 25 times as powerful as the world’s biggest radium units (one at Manhattan’s Roosevelt Hospital, the other in Belgium), and yet so compact that its rays are easily focused on a small area of the patient’s body. And Cobalt 60 is cheap: $17,200 for London’s healing metal, whereas the radium equivalent could cost $25 million.