CERN's impact on medical technology

This article was originally published in the July/August edition of CERN Courier magazine. Today, the tools of experimental particle physics are ubiquitous in hospitals and biomedical research. Particle beams damage cancer cells; high-performance computing infrastructures accelerate drug discoveries; computer simulations of how particles interact with matter are used to model the effects of radiation on biological tissues; and a diverse range of particle-physics-inspired detectors, from wire chambers to scintillating crystals to pixel detectors, all find new vocations imaging the human body. CERN has actively pursued medical applications of its technologies as far back as the 1970s. At that time, knowledge transfer happened – mostly serendipitously – through the initiative of individual researchers.