Professor Tom Wheldon, who died of cancer on June 4th aged 56, was credited with a major contribution to cancer treatment. He devised a new method of joining radioactive isotopes to tumour-seeking drugs - thus ensuring tumours effectively destroy themselves.
It was in 1983, as a medical physicist and radiation biologist, that he moved from Hammersmith hospital's medical research council cyclotron unit to head Glasgow University's radio biology unit, then based at Belvidere hospital.
He began at the unit with two technicians. Under his leadership it moved to the Cancer Research Campaign Beatson Laboratories in Bearsden and - by now he was head of the Glasgow Institute's radiation biology department - it expanded to employ 12 research workers.
He wrote two books and more than 150 papers. He also demonstrated that the p53 gene (one of those associated with some cancers, including that of the breast) is in that group particularly sensitive to radiotherapy. But this apparent good news was paradoxically counterbalanced by his significant finding that the p53 gene resulted in "apoptosis" - the lack of a cell's normal ability to destroy itself.
He was born in Glasgow, and educated at the local secondary school in Shettlestone. He started at Strathclyde University, reading engineering, but then discovered the delights of physics and mathematics. He graduated in these subjects in 1968. At Strathclyde he met his lifelong companion and support, Liz McLafferty.
After graduating, he joined Glasgow's Institute of Radiotherapeutics and Oncology as a medical physicist in the department of medical physics and bio-engineering.
In 1968 he took his Ph.D, married Liz and moved to London and Hammersmith's cyclotron unit. At Hammersmith the cyclotron - an "atom smasher" - is used for experimental treatment of cancer and for the production of radioactive compounds used in scanning to show up brain function. The unit there is also renowned for its work on radiation biology and it was this in particular that interested him. Then came Glasgow.
In 1999 he was diagnosed as suffering from a cancer of the colon that had already spread to the liver. It was incurable by surgery. He suggested that his own method of treatment should be tried, but it was insufficiently effective. During this final period, he continued to write papers and lecture and was awarded a personal chair by Glasgow University.
He received many honours, including the Institute of Physical Sciences in Medicine's Founders' prize and the Douglas Lea lectureship, and the British Institute of Radiology's Roentgen prize. He was awarded honorary membership of the Royal College of Radiologists.
He is survived by his wife.
Thomas Edward Wheldon: born 1944; died, June 2000