11 Facts About Charles Pecher

Charles Pecher was a Belgian pioneer in nuclear medicine.

The groundbreaking work of Pecher was forgotten for decades due to the classification of information linked to the Manhattan project.

Charles Pecher became assistant of professor Pierre Rylant at the Universite libre de Bruxelles, where he specialized in biophysics.

Charles Pecher pioneered in fundamental neurophysiology through his evidence of random processes in the nervous system.

On 1 August 1939, Charles Pecher married fellow researcher Jacqueline Van Halteren and the couple traveled to the US the following month.

Charles Pecher first worked at Harvard University with Edwin Cohn and George Kistiakowsky.

Charles Pecher saw himself faced with a choice between his patriotic duty and his scientific calling, with the complicating factor of American pressure to remain in work in a domain whose military relevance was fully recognized, with all the secrecy that this entails.

In 1940, Pecher was appointed Research Fellow in the Radiation Laboratory of Ernest O Lawrence at the University of California, Berkeley, where he produced radioisotopes in the cyclotron under the supervision of John H Lawrence and used them as radioactive tracers.

Charles Pecher predicted and then demonstrated that strontium, which belongs to the same group in the periodic table, was absorbed by the human body in a manner similar to calcium.

Charles Pecher demonstrated using two cows the Sr-89 transfer to milk.

The groundbreaking work of Charles Pecher was forgotten for decades due to the classification of information linked to the Manhattan project and the American nuclear weapons program.