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 die, leading to organ failure" (Discover). And yet, unlike fallout or whole-body exposure, "the particle beam was narrowly focused," meaning "only his brain received any exposure to the radiation, keeping the damage concentrated to a single area" (Discover). That narrowness, Discover suggests, may be part of why he lived: "He may have just been lucky, and the beam missed important areas of his brain, or perhaps proton beams affect the body differently than other sorts of radiation" (Discover). Reading the Discover article, I wonder if they realize just how important the brain is. I don't feel like Bugorski got lucky because the particle accelerator beam only hit him in the face.

The Atlantic zooms out: this kind of radiation—protons at these energies—"is a rare beast indeed" Almost no one ever encounters a dose like this in such a focused line. When they do, it's usually deliberate and medical: "Particle accelerators can deliver targeted doses of radiation to cancer patients, a process known as proton beam therapy … Those doses are around 300 times smaller than the one Bugorski sustained" (Discover). So cancer-destroying proton beams are 300 times smaller than the beam that smacked our guy in the head. Wild!

So no, this isn't an origin story for Super-Anatoli. As the Discover article cracks: "Were this a comic book, Bugorski would certainly be endowed with fearsome powers … As it is, he's probably just happy to be alive" One possibility they didn't consider is that Burgorski did, in fact, develop superpowers, but like Superman with his glasses on, he is clever enough not to advertise his powers to the rest of the world. Yeah, that's the ticket.

Back to 1978. Like with Slotin, Kelley, and Daghlian, Bugorski's Doctors expected a death watch. "They expected him to die, but he survived with severe but non-fatal injuries" (..). The physical toll was immediate and visual: "The left half of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond recognition and, over the next several days, the skin started to peel, revealing the path that the proton beam had burned through parts of his face, his bone, and the brain tissue underneath" (..). Discover's article version is also a tad grisly but concise: "his skin blistered and peeled off where the beam had struck" (Discover).

Permanent damage for Bugorski coincided with the beam's route through his head. He "completely lost hearing in the left ear, replaced by a form of tinnitus" (..). "The left half of his face became paralyzed due to the destruction of nerves" (..). "He was able to function well, except for occasional complex partial seizures and rare tonic-clonic seizures." Or as Discover translates the neurology: "in the long-term, Bugorski suffered for a time from both petit mal and grand mal seizures and found that he became more easily mentally fatigued" (Discover). One other side effect: Apparently, The paralyzed side of his face never aged, but if you are dealing with wrinkles and looking for a fountain of youth style medical cure here, you might want to verify that in person before sticking your body into a particle accelerator.

What about his mind? Did he lose his wits? Most reports note that "There was virtually no damage to his intellectual capacity, but the fatigue of mental work increased markedly" (..). After the accident, Discover magazine reports that Bugorski "nevertheless went on to earn his doctorate, and even returned to work at the same facility where his accident occurred" (Discover). The Atlantic underscores the same improbable normalcy: "Despite having nothing less than a particle accelerator beam pass through his brain, Bugorski's intellect remained intact, and he successfully completed his doctorate after the accident" That's pretty impressive, and puts him in a tier of one. I'm pretty sure he's the only guy in history to earn a doctoral degree after taking a million-mile fastball from a particle accelerator to the face. Impressive.

After the accident, he "continued to work as a physicist … eventually becoming the experiment coordinator for the same particle accelerator by which he was injured" (..). In an institutional world that can sometimes be quick to sideline, that's a quiet triumph.

The human story here runs on two tracks: private medical vigilance and public silence. .. again: "Because of the Soviet Union's policy of maintaining secrecy on nuclear power-related issues, Bugorski did not speak publicly about the accident for over a decade" (..). Meanwhile, he "continued going to the Moscow radiation clinic twice a year for examinations and to meet with other nuclear accident victims" (..). In that circle, he was "described as 'a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine'" (..).

Money and medication brought their own hard edges. "In 1996, Bugorski applied unsuccessfully for disability status to receive free epilepsy medication" (..). It's not just the US that denies legit insurance claims, folks.

He "showed interest in making himself available for study to Western researchers but could not afford to leave Protvino" (..). There's sadness tucked between those lines: a unique case that could teach the world, a scientist willing to help, and a visa-sized wall of costs and borders, red tape and bureaucracy. Ugh.

Through it all, life continued. "Bugorski got married to Vera Nikolaevna, and they have a son named Peter" (..). Sometimes the most radical sentence, after 2,000 grays of piercing radiation in and 3,000 grays out, that's pretty remarkable.

Particle accelerators are weird and hard to understand for laymen like most of us. The Atlantic reminds us that particle physics often lives far from intuitive analogies. Compared to pictures from Mars, "CERN's research doesn't produce stunning, tangible images. Instead, the study of particle physics is best described by chalkboard equations and squiggly lines called Feynman diagrams" (The Atlantic). That distance from common experience is why even "some professional physicists" hesitate when asked what happens if you put a body part in a beam; in one interview, "Professor Michael Merrifield put it succinctly: 'That's a good question. I don't know is the answer. Probably be very bad for you'" (The Atlantic).

Now, about the numbers. The U-70's beam energy was "76 billion electron volts," and The Atlantic speculates Bugorski "might have experienced the full wrath of a beam with more than 300 times" the energy typically used in therapeutic settings (The Atlantic). That's beyond catastrophic, if it's delivered broadly. But, as Discover stresses, "only his brain received any exposure," sparing "organ system[s]" that usually fail in radiation sickness

And that flash? The Atlantic ties it to astronaut lore: "Apollo astronauts … exposed to cosmic rays containing protons … reported flashes of visual light, a harbinger of what would welcome Bugorski" (The Atlantic). Bugorski's own report—"brighter than a thousand suns"—is both poetry and neurology.

You know how they say that statistics lie? Here is a statistic that is a bit of a paradox in that it is both 100 percent true and a 100 percent misleading. Based on empirical evidence, the chances of dying from a direct hit in the face by a particle accelerator beam is 0 percent.

Put another way, in the statistics of the world, 0 percent of the people hit by a particle accelerator beam in the head have died. It is, on paper, one of the single safest incidents known to man. Walking out to your mailbox, blowing your nose, swivelling in your chair, adjusting your airpods, and bending over to pet a friendly animal ALL have a higher likelihood of killing you - based on available statistics - then does a full on head shot from a fully operational particle accelerator, because Bugorski, as near as I can tell, is the only human in history to experience that, and he is still alive. It could be argued, in fact, that being hit in the face with a particle accelerator makes you absolutely immortal, but we should probably continue our observations a little longer before we break that news to the rest of the world.

When we tell stories about scientific accidents, we often end with a policy, a protocol, a new rule on a laminated card. In this case, much of what survives is a man—and some unanswered questions.

According to Discover: "what prevented him from experiencing much more damage is still unknown" (Discover). The focus of the beam "likely helped," but perhaps "proton beams affect the body differently than other sorts of radiation" (Discover). The Atlantic adds that accidents like this are so rare that "the effects of super-high energy proton beams on the body are relatively unknown" (The Atlantic). That's science's honest shrug: sample size of one, no control group, ethics that forbid replication. As V.S. Ramachandran, the Indian-American neuroscientist, says, "it takes only one talking pig to prove that pigs can talk" (The Atlantic). Bugorski is the talking pig of particle-beam human exposure—a phrase he surely never asked for, but one that marks a singular place in the medical literature of the unimaginable. By the way, I like the way Ramachandran's mind works.

One thing this episode and its predecessor have taught me is that radiation and dangerous chemicals rarely, if ever, lead to superheroes, and that is one of the great disappointments of my life. In my spare time, I like to treasure hunt with my metal detector, and have found all sorts of treasures and old coins, but no magic rings.

After the accident, Bugorski lived under secrecy, under observation, under the ceiling of a clinic he visited "twice a year" (..). He tried for disability medication help and was denied, but He kept working. He finished the doctorate. He coordinated the accelerator (..). He has a wife, and a family. He is, depending on what line you read last, either an emblem—"a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine" or a private citizen who did the impossible thing and went home for dinner. He is still alive today and in his 80s. My deficit in the speaking and reading of Russian is a barrier to finding out much about his current life, as English speaking sources lack very few contemporary details on the life of Bugorski.

What can we learn from Anatoli Bugorski? Just this: When life hits you full in the face with a focused beam from a giant particle accelerator, don't quit, don't give up, don't stop…earn your doctoral degree and keep moving forward. And maybe get married and have a kid named Peter. Something like that.

Our next set of episodes are all about what it actually means to be a Nazi or Fascist using primary sources from the 1930s-1960s…before all of today's inflammatory rhetoric. I can't go a day right now without reading a progressive on social media call a conservative a Nazi or Fascist or vice versa, and I hope it is time for all of us to learn precisely what those words mean, so that they don't just become a synonym for something/somebody I don't like. Until then - Keep Digging!

• Discover Magazine — "If You Stuck Your Head in a Particle Accelerator …" (Nathaniel Scharping, 2017): (Discover)

• The Atlantic (Aeon) — "What Happens If You Stick Your Head in a Particle Accelerator?" (Joel Frohlich/Aeon):. (The Atlantic/Aeon)