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It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Edward J. Hoff man, PhD, on July 1 at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center. Ed died after a short and courageous battle with cancer, characteristically working right up to the moment of his death. Ed was a loyal mentor, respected colleague, and, most important, a true friend to many of us in the nuclear medicine community.
Ed was born in St. Louis, MO, on New Year's day, 1942. Although he is known throughout the world for his contributions to nuclear medicine instrumentation and physics, his formal training was actually in chemistry. He obtained his bachelors degree from St. Louis University in 1963 and went to graduate school at Washington University, where he studied a range of nuclear structures under Dr. Demetrios Sarantites. It was there that Ed met Carolyn (at that time an undergraduate majoring in political science). They married in 1971, and she remained his best friend and constant companion during his journey through life. It was also here that he met Michael Phelps, starting a friendship and professional collaboration that was to last 9 39 years and prove pivotal to the development of PET. Ed graduated with his PhD in nuclear chemistry in 1970.
After a short postdoctoral interlude in Philadelphia, PA, Ed was reunited with Mike in 1972 at Washington University. They sought to take advantage of the availability of short-lived positron-emitting isotopes generated by the cyclotrons introduced into the medical school by Michel Ter Pogossian and the labeled compounds incorporating these isotopes being produced by Michael Welch. Mike Phelps and Ed formed a small group that included Henry Huang and Nizar Mullani. The group worked day and night on a shoestring budget to develop a series of prototype tomographic PET scanners from which today's clinical systems are directly descended. The results of their first prototype PET system were published in The Journal of Nuclear Medicine (JNM) in 1975 (1), followed just 1 year later by a paper characterizing the performance of a whole-body human scanner and showing the first human images (2)-an astonishing rate of progress by any measure. The ECAT scanner, the predecessor of the first commercial PET scanners, was described in JNM in...