Medical Cyclotrons

OCT 01, 1993

In 1932 Ernest Lawrence and Stanley Livingston envisaged a device for basic research on the atomic nucleus; today modern versions of their device provide healing radiations at many medical centers.

DOI: 10.1063/1.881366

Henry G. Blosser

Each day in Detroit and Seattle and a score of other cities around the world, dozens of cancer patients report for neutron treatments of tumors resistant to conventional photon‐based radiation therapy. Few, if any, of these patients know that the healing radiations are being produced by a cyclotron operating in accord with basic principles first promulgated some 60 years ago in a journal, the Physical Review, which they also know nothing of. And Ernest Lawrence and Stanley Livingston, as they wrote their pioneering 1932 paper, spoke of the relevance and need for such a device in the study of the atomic nucleus, but at least in their earliest papers, no thought of a future benefit in the treatment of cancer is considered.

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More about the authors

Henry G. Blosser, National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory, Michigan State University.