SAMPLE OF RADIO-COBALT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXXII, 31 January 1939, Page 6

SAMPLE OF RADIO-COBALT

GIFT FROM AMERICAN SCIENTISTS ANIMAL HEALTH EXPERIMENTS fUnited Press Association! WELLINGTON, This Day. Illustrating once more the great courtesy of American scientists and their spirit of international co-opera-tion, the gift of a sample of radiocobalt has been received by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research from the United States for animal health experiments. It is known that in some parts of New Zealand the administration of extremely small quantities of cobalt will pre-1 vent the onset of diseases of the bush 1 sickness type in shefp. Radio-cobalt is an example of the i artificial transmutation of the matter dreamed of by the alchemists of old and achieved by scientists during the last few years. It has all the chemical properties of the metal cobalt, from which it is indistinguishable by any known chemical methods, yet it was produced from iron, a chemical clement with entirely different properties. by bombarding the iron with certain rays of high voltage from an electrical machine called a cyclotron. Such transmutations were first produced by Lord Rutherford who, however, effected the transmution of matter by radiations from radium and until just before his death lacked the expensive equipment to effect transmutation or. a larger scale. Incidentally it has been found possible to produce gold from platinum by these machines though the process at present is uneconomic.