A Soviet physicist put his head inside a ginormous particle accelerator in 1978; a proton beam 600 times the radiation dose a human could survive pierced his skull, peeled off his skin and paralyzed half his face, but he survived

In the summer of July 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski was working on the Synchrotron U-70, a Soviet particle accelerator, which is the largest in modern-day Russia. On July 13, the research scientist, 36 at that time, leaned into the high-energy proton accelerator to check on a malfunctioning piece of equipment, and then he accidentally ran his head through a beam of protons.

Initially, he felt no pain; it was just a strange flash of light, which he later described as ‘brighter than a thousand Suns,’ as quoted by Today I Found Out in a 2010 explainer, which described the scary incident. But the damage was already done by radiation and the light of a flash in no ordinary one.

Doctor put Bugorski on observation to study

Bugorski, however, didn't tell anybody, and when the superiors found out, they thought he was going to die. Anyways he was taken to hospital and placed under observation, because accident like this are so rare that it posed an opportunity for the doctor to study him.

How powerful was the proton radiation

To understand the proton’s impact from the 20,000 tons of electromagnets and infrastructure, we need to know about a unit that actually measures energy absorbed from ionizing radiation, it's called a gray, a SI unit which has replaced the older “rad” designation.


“One gray is equal to the absorption of 1 joule of radiation energy by 1 kilogram of matter,” the Today I Found Out’s Daven Hiskey explains. As per Discover Magazine’s Nathaniel Scharping, only 5 grays are enough to kill a person within 14 days of the proton exposure.

Synchrotron U-70 struck Bugorski 600 times powerful than what human can handle

To put that into perspective, the proton beam that went through Bugorski's head was rated at a mind-boggling 2,000 grays on its way in and 3,000 on its way out. The results on his face appeared to show slowly; the powerful blast of particles made the left side of his face swell unnaturally, and some of the skin where the laser hit him peeled off.

Bugorski is still alive to tell his tale

Doctors were convinced that he was going to die; it was only a matter of time, but Bugorski lived. He is still alive. But some health complications followed him; he lost hearing in his left ear, started having seizures, and half of his face became paralyzed. The left side of the face didn't get any wrinkles. Defying all the health complcication, he earned himself a PhD.

How Bugorski survived

There is no clear reason known how he survived, one possible explanation is he is just lucky, theoretically speaking. However, Scharping had a theory about how Bugorski survived; he noted that the beam of protons was too narrow to fully unleash the destruction.

“Most radiation exposure affects the whole body, meaning that whole organ system are affected. In Bugorski’s case, only his brain received any exposure to the radiation, keeping the damage concentrated to a single area,” he explained.

Another possibility is that “perhaps proton beams affect the body differently than other sorts of radiation,” he concluded before admitting that we don’t have many case studies to look at the aftermath of when a high-energy beam of proton hitting humans, as it is so rare.