Episode 9: Anatoli Bugorski. Anatoli and the Splitting Headache.
One more story to tell today in our mini series of scientific heroes who work in dangerous mediums and, like the last couple of episodes, today’s story is also a cautionary tale of sorts, but it’s a story of a mistake most of us won’t even have a chance to duplicate even if we wanted to. I’m looking forward to telling you about today’s subject, Anatoli Bugorski, but even MORE looking forward to the next few episodes when we dive into the primary sources - pre all of this societal polarization and vitriol - and learn in their own words what a Nazi is and what a Fascist is. What did each of those parties believe, what were their planks, and how did they behave? In a world where everybody who disagrees with you politically is a vile Nazi or Fascist, it might just be helpful to look up what each party was all about. That’s history-history, and a time period that is right in my wheelhouse, a few years before and after WW2.
Sometimes science brushes so close to the edge that it leaves a scorch mark. Today’s story is about a man, unlike our other heroes of science, who escaped the flash “brighter than a thousand suns” ( Discover), even though it hit him square in the head. It’s also about how a human life can thread the needle between disaster and miracle and keep on going, to finish a PhD, show up to work, and survive.
This is the tale of Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski, “a Russian retired particle physicist … known for having survived a radiation accident in 1978, when a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passed through his head.” Yep, you heard me correctly. Essentially, he is the Phineas Gage of the nuclear era. And if you don’t know about Gage…look him up. Ouch!
We start in Protvino, in the Russian SFSR, at the Institute for High Energy Physics. Bugorski “worked with the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union, the U-70 synchrotron” (..). On July 13, 1978, he walked into the kind of malfunction that turns a routine check into legend: “he was checking a malfunctioning piece of equipment when the safety mechanisms failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the path of the 76 Giga electron volt proton beam” (..).
He didn’t really feel pain as such, at least not immediately. Instead, he saw light. Specifically, he “reportedly saw a flash ‘brighter than a thousand suns’” In that instant the beam “passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left-hand side of his nose” The dose in the exposed pathway: “200,000 to 300,000 roentgens Discover puts the energy another way: “2,000 grays … on the way in, and … 3,000 grays by the time it left. A dose of around 5 gray can be lethal to humans” (Discover). How do those two things cohere, considering that Bugorski didn’t die? I’ve no idea. Like Homer Simpson, I’m no nuclear scientist, and unlike Homor Simpson, I don’t even work at a nuclear power plant.
Somehow, someway, Bugorski “understood the severity of what had happened, but continued working on the malfunctioning equipment, and initially opted not to tell anyone” (..). That detail feels very Soviet, very scientist, and very human: finish the job, then process the catastrophe. It reminds me of the time I was bit by a racoon…..And, you know what? Don’t expect anybody to make a podcast in the future about my raccoon incident…Bugorski’s story is a billion times better.
There’s a reason we generally don’t put our hands in beams. When I was a kid, if I heard my mom say that once, I heard her say it a million times.
As The Atlantic frames the broader thought experiment: “What would happen if you stuck your body inside a particle accelerator? The scenario seems like the start of a bad Marvel comic” (The Atlantic), according to the Atlantic, but a GOOD Marvel comic if you’re asking me.
Accelerators “allow physicists to study subatomic particles by speeding them up in powerful magnetic fields and then tracing the interactions that result from collisions” (The Atlantic). But that neat chalkboard world becomes very real when “a beam of subatomic particles traveling at nearly the speed of light meets the flesh of the human body” (The Atlantic).
Discover says it plainly: “protons are still very much physical objects, and when you take trillions of them and force them through something as delicate and complex as a human cell, the collisions tend to tear biological structures apart” (Discover). Radiation harms by “breaking apart chemical bonds that hold DNA and other cellular components together” (Discover). With enough energy, “cells are unable to duplicate and begin to
CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist
It’s 1996 in rural North Carolina, and an oddball crew makes history when they pull off America’s third largest cash heist. But it’s all downhill from there. Join host Johnny Knoxville as he unspools a wild and woolly tale about a group of regular ‘ol folks who risked it all for a chance at a better life. CrimeLess: Hillbilly Heist answers the question: what would you do with 17.3 million dollars? The answer includes diamond rings, mansions, velvet Elvis paintings, plus a run for the border, murder-for-hire-plots, and FBI busts.
Crime Junkie
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