Saul Hertz

Saul Hertz ( born April 20, 1905 in Cleveland ( Ohio), † July 28, 1950 in Boston ) was an American physician, a pioneer of radioiodine therapy.

Hertz was the son of a Jewish immigrant from Russia and broker. He studied at the University of Michigan ( BA ) and Harvard Medical School, where in 1929 he received his MD degree. After that, a specialist training ( internship, residency ) joined in Cleveland at Mount Sinai Hospital. 1931 to 1943 he was head of the department thyroid (Thyroid Clinic and Hospital ) at the Massachusetts General Hospital. From 1943 he was involved in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Navy and the Manhattan Project in research on the biological and medical applications of nuclear physics. 1946 to 1950 he was instructor at Harvard Medical School and in 1946 he was the founder of the Radioactive Isotope Research Institute in Boston.

1937 Hertz started with animal experiments with radioactive iodine together with the physicist Arthur Roberts of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT ), which demonstrated the tracer properties of radioactive iodine. From 1941 he was also experiments on humans begin after the cyclotron at MIT was completed in 1940, were performed with the iodine -130 and -131 produced. January 1941 was the first successful treatment of a patient with Graves' disease at the Massachusetts General Hospital. 1946 followed to the publication, which included 29 cases. You helped to make this a standard treatment in the United States.

Hertz also dealt with other aspects of early nuclear medicine and also examined the treatment of thyroid cancer with radioactive isotopes.