MEDICINE GAINED A NEW WAY TO SEE

Author: By Richard Saltus, Globe Staff

Date: Monday, November 6, 1995
Page: 29
Section: HEALTH AND SCIENCE

And like the cold fusion claim six years ago of a process that promised an inexhaustible source of cheap energy, the announcement of the discovery of ''X-rays" flashed around the world within days and sent scientists everywhere racing into their labs to try to duplicate the feat.

But unlike cold fusion, X-rays proved to be real.

Their discovery would introduce "the central theme of 20th century medical technology -- the total visibility of living human organisms," wrote historian Nancy Wright recently.

It was not until January 1896, two months after his discovery, that Professor Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen pronounced Ren'ken, disclosed his find of a mysterious kind of light, invisible but penetrating, that passed through solid materials. But when he did, the news traveled with lightning speed.

"It was extraordinary at a time when there were no faxes or e-mail or Internet, that in seven or eight days, news had spread all over the world from a small, obscure laboratory in the

middle of Germany," says Dr. Joseph Ferrucci, chief of radiology at Boston City Hospital and president of the American Roentgen Ray Society.

Within a year, 49 books or pamphlets and 1,044 papers on X-rays had been published -- remarkable numbers even in today's age of rapid publishing and instant books.

Roentgen called them "X-rays" because their nature was so puzzling, but others were soon calling them Roentgen rays, and he won the very first Nobel prize for physics in 1901.

A hundred years later, refinements of X-ray technology -- and many newer imaging methods -- are still reshaping medicine and revising knowledge of the body's workings.

X-rays have had a profound impact outside medicine as well. They are as near as your TV set, as a byproduct of the electron beams that create the picture; they make air travel safer by inspecting baggage for weapons and bombs; industries use them to find flaws in metal parts; and scientific labs use them to determine the crystal structure of molecules that might become new drugs or other useful substances.

But most people still associate them primarily with medicine, and not surprisingly. An estimated 200 million medical X-rays and 100 million dental X-rays are taken annually in the United States. And it was medical use that seemed, in 1896, to be the obvious playing field for the new rays.

Doctors grasped the implications almost instantly: Here was an unexpected new tool for finding bullets and other foreign objects in wounds and for diagnosing broken bones.

But it was also a little creepy. Many people, peering into their own
insides, found it a morbid experience, as if previewing an early death.

Even Roentgen's famous X-ray image of his wife's hand, which he conceived as a sort of tribute, "actually frightened her terribly," according to a Roentgen biographer. It seemed to her a premonition of death.

Such qualms didn't stop enthusiasts from focusing X-rays on all things animal, vegetable or mineral. They made "shadow pictures" of lizards and frogs, they X-rayed objects inside boxes and pockets, but mainly they focused the rays on the human body, in serious research as well as for fun, and they did it with abandon.

In the wild and unregulated aftermath of Roentgen's dramatic discovery, any application of X-rays that could be imagined was tried. They were used to treat skin conditions, pneumonia, carbuncles and cancers, to remove unwanted hair from women's faces, to create skeletal "portraits" -- even to search for the human soul.

The straight-laced Victorians were not without some fears about the rays' powers: An advertisement offered lead underwear to protect against X-ray- equipped voyeurs, and someone introduced state legislation banning X-rays in opera glasses.

But to the early experimenters, the "new light" appeared at first to be utterly harmless -- an assumption that soon would prove to be tragically mistaken and would create a generation of "X-ray martyrs to science."

The man who touched off this frenzy, Wilhelm Roentgen, was born in Lennep in the Rhine province of Germany, the only child of a German textile merchant and his Dutch-born first cousin. He turned to physics after studying engineering and proved to be a sober and methodical researcher. Viewed by some as a genius at devising experiments, he had made some important findings in studying crystals, gases and polarized light.

When he was 43, Roentgen and his wife, Bertha, moved to the University of Wurzburg, in Bavaria, and in 1894 he joined many others studying a hot topic of the time -- so-called "cathode rays." These were colorful flashes of energy created inside sealed glass tubes, virtually emptied of air, when electricity was applied to metal electrodes in the tubes.

The cathode rays were later found to be streams of charged particles, electrons. Scientists in many countries were intrigued by the ability of cathode rays to escape through the tubes' glass walls and travel a very short distance in air.

Alex Pang, a historian of science at the University of California in Davis, notes that the equipment Roentgen was using "was basically off-the-shelf stuff that was in virtually every well-equipped laboratory."

On Friday, Nov. 8, 1895, Roentgen fired up a cathode ray-producing tube for another round of experiments. This time, he had completely enclosed it in black cardboard to mask the distracting flashes inside the tube.

When he switched on the current, Roentgen suddenly noticed a faint glow more than a yard away -- much too far to be caused by the cathode rays, which, in any case, couldn't pass through the carboard. Mystified, he struck a match. The glow was coming from a small phosphorescent screen lying on a nearby table.

The explanation was inescapable. A mysterious, invisible light was illuminating the distant screen. What could it be?

In disbelief and growing excitement, Roentgen repeated the experiment over and over. He soon found that the rays passed easily through a playing card, a book, a thin sheet of aluminum -- but not a small lead disk.

Then, as he held the lead disk in the path of the rays with his thumb and finger, he saw on a phosphorescent screen behind it an outline of the bones in his hand. It was something no one had ever imagined.

"I have discovered something interesting, but I don't know whether or not my observations are correct," was all that Roentgen would say to a friend during the next seven weeks as he worked night and day to confirm what he had seen.

During those weeks, he said later, "I was as if in a state of shock." Outwardly, he was grumpy and uncommunicative, sitting in silence at dinner with his wife, sometimes taking his food into the lab and even sleeping there.

Finally, on Dec. 22, 1895, he took Bertha into the lab and showed her the work that would soon thrust him into the scientific and popular limelight. Then he made the first X-ray photograph of a person -- or part of a person -- sending the beam through her hand as it rested on a photographic plate.

Roentgen, a shy, by-the-book scientist, held no press conference, uttered no word of his find. Just before the end of the year, he handed a brief write- up of his findings to the president of the Physical-Medical Society of Wurzburg, a local scientific organization, and requested rapid publication in its journal.

In addition, he sent his report -- titled "A New Kind of Rays" -- to several colleagues, along with prints of several X-ray photos. On his way to the mail box, according to his biographers, Roentgen muttered to his wife, ''Now the devil will have to be paid."

He had foreseen the journalistic feeding frenzy, the inevitable claims that others had discovered X-rays before him (there were a number of these) and the endless requests for talks and public appearances.

In fact, other scientists had been creating X-rays in similar experiments for several years, but only Roentgen identified them. An accidental X-ray photograph had even been made at the University of Pennsylvania -- but recognized only in retrospect.

In fact, theorists had predicted the existence of X-rays -- penetrating energy of very short wavelengths. Roentgen's brilliance was in seizing on a chance observation and recognizing what it meant -- for which he won the Nobel.

But it was not long before Herr Doktor Roentgen leaped off the bandwagon he had created. A physicist through and through, he scorned dilettantes and had no interest in going outside his field to explore medical uses of the X-ray. Less than two years after his discovery, he published his final observations on X-rays and turned to other problems.

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