John Seth Laughlin

John Seth Laughlin, world-renowned medical physicist and leader in the application of radiation for cancer diagnosis and therapy, died from complications of acute myelogenous leukemia on 11 December 2004 in New York City.

Laughlin was born in Canton, Missouri, on 26 January 1918. He received an AB from Willamette University in Salem, Oregon, in 1940 and an MS from Haverford College in Pennsylvania two years later. He received his PhD in 1947 from the University of Illinois, where he studied with Donald Kerst, inventor of the betatron. He subsequently joined the faculty of radiology as an assistant professor. Together with scientists in Kerst’s lab, Laughlin developed the betatron’s first medical applications for cancer treatment.

In 1952 the New York City–based Memorial Hospital (later the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center) recruited Laughlin as its new chairman of the department of medical physics. He served in that post until his retirement in 1989. He conducted seminal work on the use of electrons from betatrons for the treatment of cancer and led original research in calorimetry, radiation dosimetry, and radiation protection. The original betatron at Memorial was transferred to the Smithsonian Institution in 1977.

Laughlin became chief of Memorial’s laboratory of biophysics in 1955; he remained in that post until his retirement. In 1966 he was one of the first investigators to install a cyclotron in a medical research center to produce short-lived radionuclides; that process was the predecessor of positron emission tomography scanning, which is used today in nuclear medicine.

Laughlin was vice president of the cancer center from 1966 to 1972 and, from 1980 until his retirement, was a professor of radiology at Cornell University Medical College. He was an emeritus member of the Sloan-Kettering center. During his career, he published more than 200 papers on biophysics and medical physics topics.

An active participant in a number of organizations, Laughlin was a founder and president, from 1964 to 1965, of the American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM). He also led several societies: the Health Physics Society (1960–61), International Organization of Medical Physics (1969–72), and Radiation Research Society (1970–71). He chaired the Medical Advisory Committee of the New York City Department of Health from 1960 through 1978 and, in 1992, was vice president of the Radiological Society of North America. Laughlin was the editor-in-chief of Medical Physics (1988–96), a consultant to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission and Los Alamos National Laboratory, and a fellow of many organizations.

Among his many honors were AAPM’s William D. Coolidge Award (1974), the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the Health Physics Society (1982), the Aebersold Award of the Society of Nuclear Medicine (1984), the Gold Medal of the American College of Radiology (1988), the Marvin M. D. Williams Professional Achievement Award of the American College of Medical Physics (1992), and the Gold Medal of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (1993).

Laughlin was very proud of his Scottish heritage and was known for appearing at parties dressed in a red tartan vest. He was an inveterate music lover: He and his wife, Eunice, enjoyed the Wednesday evening subscription series at the Metropolitan Opera and subscribed to the Rockefeller University concert series. He loved to coax unwary visitors into playing squash and wicked croquet games in his backyard.