Amersham plc
company
Amersham plc was a manufacturer of radiopharmaceutical products, to be used in diagnostic and therapeutic nuclear medicine procedures. The company became GE Healthcare following a takeover in 2003, which was based at the original site in Amersham, Buckinghamshire until 2016, when the headquarters moved to Chicago.
History
Chilcote House in Little Chalfont near Amersham was first used for extraction of radium from radium concentrates in 1940, under Walter Patrick Grove. Over the next four years over 500 kilograms of radium bromide was produced, to be used to make luminous dials and instruments. In 1946 the facility was taken over by the Ministry of Supply and it became known as the "national centre for the processing and distribution of radium, radon and artificial radioactive substances for scientific, medical and industrial purposes". With a new focus on healthcare and industrial applications, the site was expanded, and by 1949 when the name changed to "The Radiochemical Centre (TRC), Amersham", the production included radium gas capsules for cancer treatment and carbon-14. The following year it became an outstation of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (UKAERA) at Harwell, processing materials produced in its reactors.
By the 1960s, TRC had over 1,000 catalogue items, using over 100 isotopes and exporting to 60 countries. A cyclotron was installed, the first for medical isotope production. With the restructuring of the UKAERA in 1971, TRC became a limited company.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q470179. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2003, 2016, 1940 and 1946.
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This entry incorporates text from “Amersham plc” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.