On June 3, 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron — the largest particle accelerator in the Soviet Union — when the safety mechanisms failed. He leaned over and put his head directly into the path of a 76 GeV proton beam. He saw a flash “brighter than a thousand suns” and felt no pain. The beam entered the back of his skull, passed through his occipital and temporal lobes, his left middle ear, and exited through the left side of his nose. Then he kept working on the equipment and initially told no one.
The exposed tissue took a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens — hundreds of times what would be lethal spread across the whole body. Doctors moved him to a Moscow clinic to observe his expected death; the left half of his face swelled beyond recognition, and over the following days his peeling skin traced the beam’s path through skin, bone, and brain. He survived. He finished his PhD, lost hearing in the left ear, developed seizures, and ended up with a paralyzed left side of his face free of wrinkles — then went on to become experiment coordinator for the same accelerator that shot him.
Soviet secrecy around anything nuclear kept him from speaking publicly about the accident for over a decade. In 1996 he applied for disability status to get free epilepsy medication, and was turned down.
Previously:
• What happens when you stick your head in a particle accelerator