In that decade, doctors began testing the safety of radiation treatments on monkeys and by the end of the ’60s were using the cyclotron to treat cancer in human patients.
A cyclotron generates a focused proton beam. In atomic research, the beam ne them in detail. In medicine, the same beam is useful in treatment of eye, neck, prostate and several other cancers.
“What you want to do in many cases is to aim the radiation very carefully at the tissues you want to kill,” Wilson says.
By 1970, despite this medical work, the outdated and underused cyclotron faced a dearth of funding. With no scientists interested in conducting physics research at Harvard’s cyclotron, the physicists who had worked with the machine since the late 1940s held a goodbye party to mark what they thought would be its final days.
But at the last minute, one of the cyclotron’s staffers came up with an idea that would keep the proton beams coming.
Andreas M. Koehler thought the cyclotron’s future lay in the cancer work doctors had been doing there for several years. He proposed that the physics department would continue funding the cyclotron but that Harvard would be repaid with money from the cancer treatments.
Ever since, the cyclotron’s proton beam has been primarily used for treating cancer patients from Massachusetts General Hospital.
“It sort of a service we were happy to do for good science,” Ramsey says.
Over the last three decades the cyclotron has been used to treat nearly 9,000 cancer patients, sent over from hospitals that lacked a comparable device.
But this past November, Mass. General opened a proton therapy center of its own which has gradually been filling the cyclotron’s niche in cancer treatment.
These days, the small cement cyclotron building is still being used to treat patients. And, though retired, Koehler still comes in every day just to be around the machine he helped to preserve for decades.
But several of the cyclotron’s employees now work for Mass. General and the device is being phased out.
ACID Opposition
Eliminating the cyclotron is part of a larger overhaul Harvard is planning for science buildings around Oxford St. and Divinity Ave. The University promises the end result someday will be more research facilities, more grass and less asphalt.
But residents in the surrounding Agassiz neighborhood remain wary, fearing an onslaught of Harvard construction.
This winter, when Harvard first announced that the cyclotron was slated for destruction, residents in the surrounding Agassiz neighborhood expressed alarm. Neighborhood activists formed a group to take a second look at Harvard’s plans. They call themselves the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development—or ACID for short.
Initially some residents raised fears that the demolition of the device could release radiation into the air, though Harvard officials assured them the state Department of Public Health would have to sign off before demolition began.
But until Harvard’s report to public health officials is completed, the danger of the cyclotron site will be unclear, says Sheldon Krimsky, a member of ACID and a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University.
“No one really knows what we have at stake,” Krimsky says. “We don’t want to have [radiation] in the air, we don’t want to have it in dust particles, we don’t want it blown over Agassiz school.”
—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.