Seminar on
Modern Optics and Spectroscopy


Daniel Murnick , Rutgers University

Counting carbon 14 atoms for health improvement

March 13 , 2007

12:00 noon - 1:00 p.m. Grier Room 34-401


Abstract:

Carbon 14 (radiocarbon) is an ideal organic tracer having an extremely low natural abundance in living systems, near 1 ppt, and a long lifetime, 5730 years, ideal for clinical and laboratory tracer experiments.  Until recently all quantitation of 14C content has been by scintillation detection of the low energy beta particle emitted in its decay.  Beta detection provides good specificity to 14C but relatively low sensitivity as there is only one decay per minute for each 3.5 billion 14C atoms present. At present there is great interest in the drug development community for pharmacokinetic information on new drug entities using non therapeutic microdoses of labeled drugs, which require much higher analysis sensitivity than is possible with scintillation counting .  This talk describes a laser based technique for counting 14C atoms.  The technique involves the development and application of  intra-cavity optogalvanic spectroscopy.

TUESDAYS, 12:00-1:00, GRIER ROOM (34-401)
Refreshments served following the seminar

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Co-sponsored by the George R. Harrison Spectroscopy Laboratory,
the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and
the School of Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.