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William H. Beierwaltes, MD, a pioneer in nuclear medicine and a past president of the SNM, died on August 14 in Petoskey, MI. He is credited as being among the first to espouse a combination of surgery and radioiodine therapy in thyroid cancer with a well-codified treatment and follow-up regimen, as organizing one of the first university programs for training in nuclear medicine, and as being an innovator in the successful detection of cancer with radiolabeled antibodies. A dedicated educator, he was the author of the first widely circulated textbook in nuclear medicine and trained hundreds of physicians and physicists in the specialty.
Beierwaltes was born in Saginaw, MI, and entered the University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor in 1934. He received his undergraduate degree in 1938 and his medical degree in 1941. During his third year of medical school, he was asked to do an autopsy on a patient who had died from cancer of the thyroid. "From that day until the day I retired in 1994, thyroid cancer became my main obsession," he told JNM Newsline in 2000. His senior year thesis was on thyrotoxicosis (which he had witnessed first-hand with 2 family members), and, during his internship and residency at Cleveland City Hospital (OH), he was assigned a study of the use of antithyroid drug treatment of thyrotoxicosis. By the time he returned to UM to complete his residency, he had published the favorable results of this treatment in 27 patients.
As an instructor in internal medicine (19451947), Beierwaltes began to publish regularly on thyroid...