RADIATION AND DISEASE

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21296, 24 September 1932, Page 7 (Supplement)

RADIATION AND DISEASE

CLINICAL PRACTICE Dr. J. G. Stephens read a paper to members of the physiology and experimental biology section of the Science Congress held in Sydney recently on " Radiation and Living Matter," with special reference to the effects of radiation on cancerous and allied growths. At present, said Dr. Stephens, the problem of the structure of radiation presented difficulties from which the physicist had been unable to extricate himself. As far as knowledge went, the universe consisted of a collection of protons, electrons, and photons. It was the juggling of these that concerned the radiologist. When it was remembered that ho had to deal with 92 different sorts of atoms, and about a billion different sizes of photons, the complexity of his problems became manifest. X-ray photons were probably the most expensive of all to produce, and cost about £200,000,000 an ounce.

It had been calculated that the photons of visible light cost £17,000,000 an ounce. The sun was radiating into space 4,000,000 tons of photons a second. Thus, when a radiologist applied X-rays or radium in the treatment of disease, he was not giving the living tissues any unique experience. All living organisms were being continually bombarded with photons. The wonder was that physiologists had for so long failed to orient themselves to these radiational influences that were so constantly at work. Dealing with the methods of applying X-rays and radium in clinical practice, Dr. Stephens showed how it was possible to take best advantage of the high radiosensitivity of malignant growths and their slow recovery from radiation damage by employing a technique in which the growth was maintained saturated with radiation for a period of some weeks. A patient was shown in whom this method had produced a complete cure of a cancer of the cheek where ordinary dosage methods had failed. Radiational methods, concluded Dr. Stephens, found application in the treatment not only of malignant disease, but of numerous diseases of the nervous system and of the blood-governing organs. NEW HOPES OF AVIATORS If the claims of a German inventor can be substantiated, it may be possible before long to fly from Britain to New York across 3,000 miles of the Atlantic, in about twelve hours. The new Junkers plane, upon which engineers have been at work for more than two years, is designed to have a speed of between 300 and 400 miles an hour when six miles above the surface of the earth. One great problem facing aircraft designers is that the air grows rapidly rarer and thinner for every hundred feet above the surface. In a rare atmosphere it is difficult to obtain high speeds since the propeller has so little to grip. That is why in the Schneider Trophy race pilots always fly low. So confident are the German's that they have solved this and other problems of great speed at high altitudes that Captain Hamm has already gone to the Berlin works to prepare for a flight from Berlin to New York, which he hopes to accomplish in a little more than twelve hours. At heights such as six miles the. air is too rare to support life, and the pilot sits in a hermeticallysealed compartment supplied with oxygen. So great, too, is the cold, that his.clothes and even the knobs and levers of the machine are warmed by electricity. AVALANCHES TO ORDER Avalanches were made to order the other day in the Swiss Alps. Cameramen recorded their path of destruction in slowmotion pictures during a remarkable series of tests conducted by the University of Karlsruhe, Germany. Experiments revealed the true causes of snowslides, and suggested ways to reduce their teriftk toll of life and property. In the first •scientific attempt ever made to control the slides, which cost the lives of eighty to a hundred persons in the Alps each year, Professor Paulcke established an observatory high on the famous Jungfrau peak. Here he discovered that a year's snowfall accumulates in a many-tiered mass like a layer cake. The " icing," water from sun-melted snow, seeps down from the surface and runs r.long between the layers, a fact confirmed by sprinkling brightcoloured dyes on the surface and tracing the tell-tale streaks through the drifts. This seeping water makes it easy for the top layer to slip off completely and sweep all before it.