Death of Michel Ter-Pogossian (June 19, 1996)

Armenian American medical physicist Michel Ter-Pogossian is considered one of the creators of positron emission tomography (PET) and is often referred to as the “father of PET.”  

He was born on April 21, 1925, in Berlin. He was the only child of survivors of the Armenian Genocide. His family later moved to France, where Ter-Pogossian grew up. He attended the University of Paris, receiving his bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1943. He subsequently studied at the Institute of Radium under Irène Joliot-Curie, the daughter of Pierre and Marie Curie, graduating in 1946. He was active in the French Resistance during World War II.  

Ter-Pogossian moved to the United States in 1946 to complete his studies and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis as a graduate student. He simultaneously worked in the physics department as a research assistant. He received his master’s degree in 1948 and his Ph.D. in nuclear physics in 1950.  

He joined the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University and the faculty of the university’s School of Medicine in 1950 as an instructor in radiation physics. He was named professor of radiation physics in 1961, professor of biophysics in physiology in 1964, and professor of radiation sciences in 1973. Ter-Pogossian served as director of the division of radiation sciences at the Mallinckrodt Institute between 1963 and 1991. After resigning from administrative duties in 1990, he devoted all his time to research. He became emeritus professor in 1995.  

Ter-Pogossian’s research helped transform medical imaging and contributed to major advances in radiation therapy, and brachytherapy. In 1951, he developed a pioneering scanner that detected radioactivity concentrations in living material.  

He was a pioneer in the use of cyclotron-produced radioactive tracers, and he is best known for his work on the positron emission tomography (PET). His research began in the 1950s with a series of experiments that made PET a practical diagnostic tool by the 1970s. The first PET unit was created in 1974 by the group led by Ter-Pogossian.  

He died on June 19, 1996, in Paris, while on a vacation.