Over four decades, my father, Kit Hill, who has died aged 94, worked to develop the use of ultrasound in medicine, from the earliest handbuilt scanners with little computational power through to very much higher levels of sophistication. He and his team at the combined Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) and Royal Marsden hospital in London also explored the biological impact and potential for risk from ultrasound exposure, developing safe codes of practice for worldwide application.
Kit’s career at the ICR started in 1957 when he was a PhD student mapping the concentration of radionuclides in plants, livestock and human organs following nuclear-bomb testing and power-plant failures. On a visit to Kit’s lab, Sir Ernest Marsden, who had worked with Sir Ernest Rutherford, was intrigued by the alpha particle spectrometer Kit had built from “bits and bobs”.
