Armando E. Giuliano, Clinical Professor of Surgery, University of California; Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. Los Angeles, California, USA

In the mid-1970s, I was a fellow in surgical oncology at the University of California, Los Angeles, with Donald L. Morton. At that time, for clinically node-negative melanomas of the mid-trunk, we would perform four elective lymphadenectomies – bilateral axillary and bilateral inguinal. To determine which nodal basin would drain a truncal melanoma, Morton began injecting radioactive gold into the primary tumor which demonstrated that the pattern of gold drainage seen with lymphoscintigraphy could predict the nodal basin most likely to have metastases.