Big Beam

At the University of Illinois' College of Medicine in Chicago this week, a gaunt, sallow-faced man, a sufferer from cancer of the throat, stepped into a basement room furnished only with an improvised table, a mirror and an awesome machine. Technicians arranged the cancer victim on the table while Dr. Roger A. Harvey peered through the strange machine's ring sights (like those on an aircraft machine gun) at the patient's neck. When the apparatus was aimed just right, the technicians left the room.

Dr. Harvey ducked into the adjoining control room and peeked at the mirrored image of his patient through a hole three inches wide, bored through the 50-inch lead-shielded wall. Physicist Dr. John S. Laughlin grasped a knob on a black panel and set it at 25 million volts. He set another knob at 100. Then, on a signal from Harvey, Laughlin pushed a big green button.

High Speed. The air was filled with an electric whine. On the white-sheeted table, the patient could hear nothing else. He could see nothing except the grey, perforated wallboard beyond his feet. But coursing through his neck, in invisible bursts 180 times a second, was a beam of X rays whipped up by the 25 million volts to a speed almost exactly equal to that of light. The beam was aimed at the center of the cancer.

The unseen but terrifyingly powerful bombardment lasted for three minutes and 20 seconds while Laughlin nursed his controls. When the machine's electrical brain reported that the prescribed dosage of 100 roentgens had been delivered to the patient, it shut itself off. "O.K.," said Laughlin, "that's it." Thus the University of Illinois unveiled its betatron, the first of such power to be used in the U.S. for medical treatment.* Its advantage over earlier X-ray producers, most of which generate no more than a sixtieth of its power, is in the penetrating power of its high-speed, ultra-shortwave rays. Ordinary rays do most of their work at the skin surface or just below it, and are then dissipated. In large doses they cause serious skin burns. The betatron's supercharged rays have their greatest impact on malignant cells from an inch to an inch and a half below the surface.

The betatron's first patient, who is 72, had cancer of the larynx, rooted about an inch beneath the skin. It was bigger than a golf ball and was spreading to the lymph glands in his neck. He had spent hours at a time racked by uncontrollable coughing. His sense of taste was gone. And he was losing weight. The cancer was too far advanced to be operated on. Unchecked, it would grow until it killed him by strangulation.

High Hopes. If Radiologist Harvey's estimate is right, every day for the next two to three weeks more & more cancer cells in and around the patient's larynx will have their nuclei killed by the betatron's almost irresistible rays. Patients with deep-seated malignancies in other parts of the body also started treatment this week. Soon Dr. Harvey should be able to tell whether medicine's new weapon, which now costs $85,000, shows promise. If the answer is favorable, high-powered, penetrating X rays may be used in about 10% of cancer cases.* Whether they give lasting results cannot be known for several years.

The betatron is not basically a producer of X rays, but of high-speed electrons. Since little is yet known about the effect of electrons on the human body, they are not used directly. Instead, a superbarrage of electrons is fired against a platinum target, which then gives off the X rays.

The University of Illinois' Dr. Donald W. Kerst, inventor of the betatron (TIME, Dec. 29, 1941), hopes that the doctors will learn how to cut out the middle step and use the electrons raw upon cancerous tissues.

*A sister machine at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon has been used experimentally to treat eight patients since February. Directors of the Canadian project are not yet ready to report results. * Patients with cancer so widespread as to be considered hopeless will not be treated with the betatron. Also, many common types of cancer cells do not yield to X-ray treatment.

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