ABSTRACT
Radionuclides with physical half-lives of no more than a few hours have become widely used in nuclear medicine because of their many unique advantages. The development and design of a new generator involves many problems, of which the most important is the selection of a proper parent-daughter system, i.e., the system that can supply the highest amount of daughter having the highest quality in the shortest possible time. The chemical problems are the most numerous and start with the isolation of the parent from the target material or its fission contaminants. The eluates from the generator are basically pharmaceutical, which has to comply with all the regulations of the Pharmacopeia. The growth of nuclear medicine in the late 1960s and early 1970s was due in great part to the development of generators that made possible the use of short-lived radionuclides. The column of the generator is made with chromatographic-grade alumina, which binds cadmium but does not bind silver.
