I’ve been writing up my notes for tomorrow’s recording of Big Talk. My guest will be Terry Sloan, a poet who also spent 40 years as an engineer at Indiana University’s Cyclotron.
In case the word seems foreign to you, a cyclotron is is a type of particle accelerator, speeding minuscule subatomic bits of matter on spiral journeys toward each other where they crash into each other and create new, even teensier subatomic particles. The cyclotron was invented by the brilliant physicist, Ernest O. Lawrence (you might remember him from the 2023 movie blockbuster “Oppenheimer”), way back in 1930, the dawn of the atomic age. Within ten or so years, the smartest people on Earth were hard at work trying, with the help of cyclotrons, to design bombs that would conceivably fry all of humanity.
Somehow, we have avoided — to this date, at least — incinerating the surface of our planet. There are bigger and better particle accelerators than the cyclotron today; they’re called synchrotrons. The cyclotron is still a thing, though. There are nearly 1500 of them on Earth, creating the stuff used in nuclear medicine. Some of them are the big, scary machines that cancer patients sit in every day for weeks at a time in the hope that the linear beams of subatomic particles the machines emit will kill their tumors.
IU, as I say, once had its very own cyclotron. The gizmo here in Bloomington produced its first usable linear beam in the fall of 1977, spurring protons to a speed of 200 MeV, which I’m told is very fast indeed although I have no idea if that means they can outrace my Prius. According to the IU press room, the cyclotron here delivered its last batch of protons in a beam on December 5, 2014. Prior to that date, scads of people from around South Central Indiana came here to get their tumors bombarded, including a lot of prostate cancer sufferers.
Not only that, physics geeks attending IU got to fiddle around with the device for research purposes. Formally called the Indiana University Health Proton Therapy Center, the lab and its assorted machines comprised the first such site in the Midwest.
Now the nearest proton therapy setup is in Cincinnati, operated by the children’s hospital there. If you’re an adult and you have get tumors zapped by protons, you’ll have to trek up to Chicago or eastward to Columbus, Ohio.
One day researchers and inventors likely will come up with cancer treatments that don’t entail cyclotrons and nuclear medicine, which has been likened to swatting a mosquito with a sledgehammer. The linear beam is largely focused on the tumor but there’s plenty of stray radiation that floods the body. The basic idea is, if you have the misfortune of catching cancer, your oncologist and radiation therapist will bring you to the edge of death, hoping the tumor dies first. Like I said, sledgehammer and mosquito.
Anyway, in delving into all this arcana, I came across the name Fabiola Gianotti, a great Italian moniker if I’ve ever heard one. She’s the director-general at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, home of the Large Hadron Collider. That’s a 17-mile in circumference underground tube where physicists in 2012 found the long sought-after Higgs Boson, AKA the God Particle. Many of the world’s physics geeks saw the God Particle as the most basic piece of matter in existence. It’s probably not, inasmuch as there always seems to be a smaller, more basic brick in the wall of physical existence. Not only that but physicists hate the term God Particle, even though Nobel Laureate Leon Lederman coined it in 1993.
Gianotti.
Lederman was as much a jokester as a scientist. That’s a healthy combination when you consider the fact that particle physics may yet result in the end of us all. May as well die laughing, right?
Fabiola Gianotti is the first woman to be named Big Boss at CERN, a landmark she reached in 2016. Imagine that! As recently as the 1950s, women were still seen as invisible in the most daunting scientific fields.Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say they were unseen. Not only is Gianotti a topnotch experimental particle physicist, she calls the shots for the thousands of people — still mostly men — who do their thing at CERN.
I always prefer to see the glass as half full so I think it’s great that in the 61 short years since Rosalind Franklin was cheated out of a Nobel Prize by Crick & Watson for her work in identifying the helical nature of the DNA molecule, a woman could be put in charge of the world’s most complex scientific lab. Then again, were I a woman, I might say it’s a goddamned shame members of my gender had to sit in the back of the science bus, as it were, for centuries. And I’d be rightly infuriated about it all.
Let’s just say the name Fabiola Gianotti should be known by schoolchildren around the world. It isn’t of course, but that has to do more with our contemporary disrespect of science and knowledge than simple sexism. Either way, she gets cheated.