by Alan Hustak, The Montreal Gazette , Saturday 27 September, 2003
Lucas Yamamoto, who died at the Royal Victoria Hospital on Sept. 18 at the age of 75, was a leading Canadian neurological scientist and a key figure in the development of radioactive brain scanners.
Yamamoto brought the first Positron Emission Tomography (PET) brain scanner to Canada in 1975 in the back of a blue van he drove through a blinding snowstorm from Long Island, N.Y., to Montreal.
"He was a specialist, one of the few in the world who started the field of Positron Emission Tomography to find out what is going on inside the brain," Dr. Mirko Diksic, directorof the cyclotron facility at the Montreal Neurological Institute, told The Gazette.
"He was very generous to work with, very willing to discuss and to share his knowledge with others," Diksic said. "He was interested in literature, fine arts and food. He liked to travel and to meet people."
Lucas Yasokazu Yamamoto was born in Shibetsu Hokkaido, Japan. on Jan. 19, 1928. He was the youngest of five children in a confectioner’s family. He obtained his medical degree from Hokkaido University in 1952 and interned at the Catholic Hospital in Tokyo. He continued his studies at the Georgetown Medical Centre in Washington, D.C.
He met Jeanine Zollner, a nurse from Nova Scotia who was working at the Washington, D.C., Children’s Hospital and they were married in 1958. They had three children, two daughters and a son.
Yamamoto spent three years as a resident at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in Long Island, N.Y., where he worked with nuclear beam reactors. He emigrated to Canada in 1961 to join the Montreal Neurological Institute as an assistant professor.
"He came at an opportune time," said William Feindel, professor emeritus and former director of the Institute. "We had just started a project using what we called the Saskatoon Contour Radioactive Scanner as a diagnostic tool. Yamamoto was one of the few people around at the time well versed in radiation."
"He was a hard worker and had a great sense of curiosity. He was a driving force in getting the Position Emission Tomography system going using radioactive tracers."
Today, the instruments are invaluable in the detection of cancer.
He became a Canadian citizen in 1967, and because of his contacts in Japan, the Montreal Neurological Institute was able to acquire North America’s first miniature cyclotron, a machine needed to produce the radioactivity required in PET scans.
"It was always entertaining traveling with him," recalled colleague Christopher Thompson, who designed the first PET camera made in Canada. "He had a passion for food. He always knew the best places to eat. He deliberately arranged his flight schedules so he would have a two- or three-hour stop in Boston so he could eat at the oyster bar in the airport. Each year, until he became ill several years ago, Yamamoto held a pool party for his colleagues and their children at his house in Pierrefonds."
"His pool parties were really memorable events, like Halloween or Christmas," Thompson said. "He was a warm and kind person. Kids warmed to him like mad."
"He enjoyed the company of people; he was always surrounded by people. He would listen as much as he would talk."
Yamamoto became a full professor in 1980. He did work on strokes and brain hemorrhages and conducted experimental cerebral work on animals. He also developed and led the Neuro’s research training program in nuclear medicine for neurosurgeons from Japan, an exchange program that lasted 20 years. And he wrote more than 300 papers on nuclear medicine that were published in scientific journals.
He retired nine years ago.
The funeral was Thursday.