On July 13, 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was checking a piece of equipment at the U-70 synchrotron in Protvino when the unthinkable occurred. Due to a mechanical failure in the safety interlocks, he leaned directly into the path of an active 76 GeV proton beam. The beam entered the back of his head and exited near his nose at nearly the speed of light, delivering a local radiation dose of 300,000 rads. This dose is over 600 times the amount required to kill a human being. The horror r

Can you solve this classic radiation quiz? | Kyle Hill

The True Story of Anatoli Bugorski — The Man Who Survived a Proton Beam Through His Head In 1978, 36-year-old Soviet scientist Anatoli Bugorski was working at the Institute for High Energy Physics near Moscow. He specialized in particle accelerators — massive machines that fired proton beams at near the speed of light. One afternoon, while inspecting a malfunction inside the U-70 accelerator, Bugorski leaned in to check a component. At that exact moment, the safety interlocks failed. A proton be

In 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski leaned over the U-70 particle accelerator when a malfunction occurred—and a near–light-speed proton beam shot straight through his head. The beam entered the back of his skull and exited near his nose, delivering radiation levels thousands of times higher than a lethal dose. He didn’t die. Instead, the left side of his face became paralyzed, blind, deaf, and frozen, as if caught mid-expression. The rest of his body functioned normally. Despite absorbing