From nuclear medicine to molecular imaging in 40 years
The history of nuclear medicine as a clinical discipline roughly maps on to my lifetime, and that of radiology as a whole on to the lives of my older relatives.
My grandmother’s birth (1898) coincides with the Curies’ first isolation of radium, and my mother’s (1936) with the first human studies with cyclotron-produced radionuclides, sodium-24 and phosphorus-32. The Society of Nuclear Medicine (SNM) was born in 1954, four years before me, and technetium-99m generators – the key to nuclear medicine becoming routinely accessible to patients – emerged when I was two.
The first commercial gamma cameras and experimental PET scanners (1968), technetium-99m radiopharmaceutical kits (1970s) and [18F]fluorodeoxyglucose (1976) all arrived during my school days. I entered the field of nuclear medicine in 1987, as it approached a watershed of philosophical change; I will leave in 2026, affording a retrospective view spanning almost 40 years.
In that time, alongside technological evolution, nuclear medicine has found a new identity and meaning: molecular imaging. It is a change so profound that major international professional bodies changed the name of their subject from ‘nuclear medicine’ to ‘nuclear medicine and molecular imaging’: the SNM became SNMMI and The European Association of Nuclear Medicine Journal (EJNM) became EJNMMI. This article is a personal perspective on that shift.
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