Today at 2pm CET, Ugo Amaldi of the Technische Universitat Munchen and the TERA Foundation will talk about the 120-year history of diagnostics and tumour therapy using particle accelerators.

Watch the webcast here at 2pm CET

German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen discovered X-rays in 1895. The first attempts to heal tumours with X-rays were made only one month after his discovery, but the understanding of the mechanisms by which radiation kills cells and the introduction of dose fractionation took much longer.

The use of X-rays in diagnostics developed much faster and its benefits were very visible during the First World War. Today no tumour could be treated and no patient could be operated on without first getting a CT scan, which employs an X-ray tube that is not very different from the one introduced by William Coolidge in 1912.

On the particle-therapy frontier, larger and more sophisticated particle accelerators have contributed to the continuous increase of the tumour control rate. The initial betatrons were replaced, at the end of the 1950s, by radiofrequency electron linacs. More recently proton- and carbon-ion accelerators have become important tools in the fight against tumours, in particular “radio-resistant” tumours.

In this lecture, Amaldi will review the rationale for all forms of radiotherapy and of the accelerators used in proton therapy, discuss the European centres for carbon ion therapy and describe the challenges facing physicists and the engineers developing the accelerators.

This John Adams Lecture is organized by the CERN Accelerator School. Lectures from previous years are listed here.