Good reasons to study technetium chemistry

Abstract

A hole remained in the periodic table where element 43 should have been until 1937, when the invention of the cyclotron facilitated the discovery of technetium as the first and lightest artificially produced element. At the ACS meeting, Alfred P. Sattelberger of Argonne National Laboratory described a decade’s worth of new research on this “hot element.” Working with Kenneth R. Czerwinski, Frederic Poineau, and their students at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Sattelberger has produced some 40 research papers on various aspects of technetium chemistry, including one recently that discussed how technetium’s nuclear makeup causes it to be radioactive (J. Chem. Educ. 2017, DOI: 10.1021/acs.jchemed.6b00343). “There are three good reasons to study technetium,” Sattelberger said. First, researchers need to know how Tc compares with its next-door neighbors regarding its synthetic and structural chemistry. Second, the radioisotope 99mTc, with a half-life of six hours, is a workhorse in diagnostic medicine