There was a lot of fear and anticipation when
the Large Hadron Collider first started up
in 2008.
It’s the world’s largest and most powerful
particle collider.
And while physicists were hoping for new breakthroughs
in our understanding of the cosmos, a few
people feared that colliding particles at
a cosmic speed could even destroy us all.
And it’s no wonder . This is the greatest,
most expensive scientific experiment in history,
and the science behind it is hard to understand.
Why is it worth all that money and risk?
How is it even beneficial to our everyday
lives ?
Now, 15 years later we know the collider is
not just safe, but the way the Apollo program
gave us the MRI, the LHC gifted us not just
with new scientific understandings, but revolutionary
innovations in medicine as well.
So, here are the three things the LHC gave
us so far:
1.)
Proton Beam Therapy
Surviving cancer today can often be a matter
of surviving the cancer treatment itself.
Chemotherapy bombards the affected areas of
the patient to destroy cancer cells, but it
affects billions of healthy cells in the process.
But during the hunt for the God Particle at
LHC, scientists perfected a technology called
synchrotrons.
These particle accelerators have long been
in use in experimental physics, but their
newer, more compact versions are a tremendous
addition to our fight against cancer.
Proton Beam Therapy harnesses this technology
in a kind of radiation treatment that can
precisely target a cancer cell inside t he
body and deliver its radiation with a focused
beam.
It’s less damaging to normal tissue and
easier for the patient to tolerate, because
it minimizes damage to normal tissues and
organs surrounding the targeted cancer cells.
2.)
Medipix
A New Zealand company has announced that they
generated the first 3D color X-Ray images
by using an advanced medical scanner.
Their scanner utilizes CERN's Medipix3 chip
that was developed at LHC for particle imaging
and detection.
Unlike the flat, monochromatic X-Ray images,
this state of the art technology can finally
generate full-color three di mensional, high-resolution
images, making it easy to identify different
components of body parts such as bones, lipids,
soft tissues and disease markers.
It’s a giant step in diagnostics, enabling
us to do more accurate diagnosis and more
personalized treatments.
3.)
Carte blanche of isotopes
Radioactive isotopes are vital for medical
imaging, diagnosis and treatment.
But many of the isotopes currently use d are
not perfect; they don’t target cancer cells
closely enough or have a long half-life and
stays in the patient’s body for longer time.
A facility at CERN is using LHC’s technology
to produce isotopes for medicine that can’t
be produce d anywhere else.
Terbium-152 is used for imaging and Terbium-149
produces alpha radiation, which is used in
radiotherapy to kill resistant cancerous cells.
Overall, LHCs example show us, when it comes
to science, even something as enigmatic as
theoretical physics, it will push us forward
and benefit our lives.
