Some exist naturally, that’s the case of carbon-14 for example, which is used a lot by archeologists.
Otherwise we can make them with machines called particle accelerators, for example cyclotrons. Cyclotrons use magnets to accelerate electrical particles (electrons or protons) into a beam with very high energy. The particles are used to bombard a non-radioactive element, and that will make it radioactive. We call this bombarding a target to produce a radioisotope.
For example, a very commonly used radioisotope in medicine is fluorine-18. It is made from oxygen-18, so the cyclotron is actually transforming oxygen into fluorine!
I don’t do this personally but some of my colleagues do.
Afterwards, depending on what we what to do, we might need to add this radioactive element into a larger molecule. It’s a branch of chemistry called radiochemistry and that’s what I do.
Fluorine-18 on its own is not very useful for medical imaging. But when you add it to a special form of sugar (called deoxyglucose), you can make a radioactive molecule called 18-FDG, and that is used everyday to find cancers in patients.
Great answer Francis 🙂
I will just add that my favourite place that can make radioactive particles is know as a cyclotron. It makes something called technetium 99m which is used in medical scans. A cyclotron is a particle accelerator, a bit like the CERN accelerator in France/Switzerland. Amazing!
I’m just going to correct a small part of what I said above. Fluoride-18 on its own is actually used for imaging bones, so it is useful. But it is mostly used to make 18-FDG. Sorry about that.
Comments
Francis commented on :
I’m just going to correct a small part of what I said above. Fluoride-18 on its own is actually used for imaging bones, so it is useful. But it is mostly used to make 18-FDG. Sorry about that.
Paulito2005 commented on :
Interesting, but why does radioactive stuff molecules help to research more about cancer?