ALDO E. A. MITTA

5 May 1922, Bs. Aires - 19 December 2001, Bs. Aires

Professor Aldo Emilio Antonio Mitta, died last December, in his home in Buenos Aires, Argentina (Lezica 4268, Buenos Aires 1202, Republica Argentina), at the age of 79, of cardiac arrest. His wife Maria Laura Ludovico de Mitta, together with daughter Marisa Liliana and son Jorge Aldo, along with Aldo's many friends, colleagues and former students are in sorrow for his untimely death. After graduation he earned a Ph.D. in Chemistry and was soon working for the Argentinian Atomic Energy Comission (CNEA) where he started as a junior scientist and grew up in his career as a leader of many groups and departments, such as the Division of Labelled Molecules. He went abroad for training at the Amersham establishment in the U.K. With the support of Norman Veall, an expert for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) during a technical assistance mission to Argentina, Aldo, colleagues and collaborators, laid the basis of Radiopharmacy in that country, in the early 1960's. In the laboratory he was always surrounded by colleagues and students, both grads and undergrads, developing their projects. The result of this activity is testified by the numerous CNEA publications covering the 3-T, 14-C, 125/131-I, and, lately, 99m-Tc-labelling procedures for the preparation of the full range of radiopharmaceuticals used in Nuclear Medicine for the last four decades. Of great concern to Aldo were the labelling efficiency and the quality control of the labelled molecules and of their preparations. In this respect he went on to organize his fellow latin-american radiopharmacologists into the Radiopharmacy Committee, under the aegis of ALASBIMN. Meetings of this committee have been taking place at every ALASBIMN meeting, for the discussion of the late developments both for the labelling, quality control and the radiopharmacology of radiolabelled preparations. Under the sponsorship of this committee a Handbook of Radiopharmacy Controls was published.

As a result of the febricitant activity developed by Dr. Mitta in his own country, he became an indispensable presence in ALASBIMN meetings, since its primordials in 1966, in Lima, Peru. Also, he was a frequent visitor to latin-american nuclear medicine services for the improvement of their radiopharmacy laboratories, many times as an expert for the IAEA. The establishment of radiopharmacy on a competent basis took place, for example in Brazil, in 1963, in São Paulo, where the first radiopharmacologists were trained by Dr. Mitta. In the same country, in Porto Alegre, 1965, the first radiopharmacy training course in latin-america had Aldo Mitta, Manuel Tubis, Leopoldo Anghileri and Eduardo Penna-Franca in the faculty.

Aldo was a man of full devotions, his family, his country, his work, his friends and last, but not least his patron saint, San Antonio.

We all join his family, friends and country in their sorrow for the loss of an irreplaceable man.

Eloy Julius Garcia
Retired Professor of Biophysics
UFRGS - Porto Alegre - RS - Brazil
ejgarcia@terra.com.br

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