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<div><font face="Arial" size="+1" color="#000000">Seminar on<br>
Modern Optics and Spectroscopy<br>
<br>
<br>
Daniel Murnick,<br>
Rutgers University<br>
<br>
<i>Counting carbon 14 atoms for health improvement<br>
<br>
</i>March 13, 2007<br>
<br>
12:00 - 1:00 p.m.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="+1" color="#000000">Grier Room
34-401<br>
<br>
</font></div>
<div><font face="Times New Roman" size="+1" color="#000000">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.</font></div>
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