E. Bombardieri and S. Frangos: Nuclear medicine: fusing the ideas of Democritus and Hippocrates. Anniversary book of 25 years of the EANM

Excerpt

In his foreword, Patrick Bourget, EANM President for 2011–2012, starts with the statement that “It was indeed a fantastic idea of our founding fathers to merge, into the EANM, the two European societies which existed side by side in 1986”. I completely agree with him, because the seed sown 25 years ago has become one of the most gorgeous and flourishing plants in the field of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging in the world. Today EANM attracts thousands of young and young at heart professionals, living in a great present and with a perspective of the future much wider than their chronological and professional ages might indicate. Our 25th Congress in Milan, with the active presence of more than 5,000 colleagues from all over the world, provided clear evidence of the central position of EANM in a universe where diagnostic imaging and diagnosis without images, therapy and preclinical research coexist and develop together. In the same universe, sciences including physics, informatics, biology, chemistry, pharmacy and others have founded their own hospitable houses, being considered not children of a lesser god, but sons of the same father. As suggested by Savvas Frangos in his preface, we are descendants of Democritus and Hippocrates, and have developed culturally from the meeting of their minds 2,400 years ago. And in the international scenario of nuclear medicine societies, EANM draws energy from roots that include Curie, Becquerel, Fermi, Planck, Hevesy, Warburg, Einstein and many other great scientists who can be put in the gallery of our ancestors together with Aristotle and Leonardo. These parents bore and raised a European science that as well as representing a technique strongly based on methodology, also represents a humanistic culture with tradition, passion and imagination, that is impossible to find with such deep roots elsewhere in the world. Therefore, all people working in nuclear medicine, and not only Europeans, should be grateful to K.E. Britton, B. Nosslin, H.A.E. Schmidt and P.J. Ell who signed the founding document of EANM in 1986. Similarly, we should be deeply grateful to all the protagonists of European or national histories, who are remembered in this book, but impossible to list individually. …