I am writing this here in a very hot Germany, the nuclear medicine community is meeting at the EANM congress. The meeting has been a huge success over 6000 attendees but in other ways it has become very impersonal the rooms can be so large you can often feel lost. Especially in a very good session on radiopharmaceutical development and authorisation there were 100 of us and 5900 empty chairs which was sad as it was a very good session.

My main problem is the conference centre is just vast it may take 20 minutes to get between two different rooms. There was a very good exhibition where you could look at mock ups of very expensive looking PET/CTs and PET/MRs all seemed to be bathed in blue light. I am not sure they will have blue light in reality, though one manufacturer will let you have mood lighting. Of course the highlight of the exhibition was the BNMS stand where Charlotte Weston our CEO talked to lots of nuclear medicine staff from around the world including many really keen young nuclear medicine people.

Our celebration of European Nuclear Medicine has been tinged with sadness. The same meeting brought confirmation of the closure of the Grove centre by GE Healthcare. There are specific issues about the loss of Cr-51 EDTA and we will need to work on this over the next few months. There is a wider story. The centre was set up 78 years ago to provide thorium needed for the luminescent dials of military aircraft. Then as the Radiochemical Centre during the 1950s and 1960s the Radiochemical Centre was the great innovator in world nuclear medicine. In the 1970s and 1980s it became a world leader in world nuclear medicine. It did not matter if it was the UK, Israel or Cuba nuclear medicine departments all had Amersham generators and Amertech kits. In the 1980s, under its new name Amersham, it was privatised, the first privatisation of Mrs Thatcher’s government. It continued to be the great world leader but more recently other companies seem to have taken on that leadership role. When the Grove Centre closes so will end 78 years of radionuclide production on the Amersham site. We will be 100% dependent on imported Mo-99/Tc-99m generators. We must hope our politicians do not mess up Brexit. We also must feel for those dedicated scientists and engineers whose jobs are at risk, some of whom are members of the BNMS

We must look on the bright side though so we are looking forward to seeing you all in Dublin and you can start to submit those abstracts for the Spring meeting in Oxford.

Dr John Buscombe

BNMS President