A Proton Beam Shot Through His Head — He Survived

[00:00:00]Did you know a man once had a proton beam pass straight through his head and he felt nothing? In 1978, Soviet physicist Anatoli Bugorski was working at a particle accelerator outside Moscow. A safety system failed.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> He leaned in to check a component and a beam of protons moving at nearly the speed of light passed clean through his skull. He saw a flash brighter than the sun. No pain, nothing. The left side of his face [music] swelled grotesquely over the following days. The skin peeled. The tissue underneath began to die. Doctors expected him to be dead within a week. He wasn't.

[00:00:35]>> [music] >> The left side of his face slowly froze.

[00:00:37]No wrinkles, no movement, no expression.

[00:00:40]The right side aged normally. [music] For the rest of his life, he wore two faces, one living and one still. He kept having seizures. He kept working. He earned his PhD and the Soviets classified the entire incident.

[00:00:54]>> [music] >> Western scientists had no idea a human being had survived a proton beam to the brain until 1997.

[00:01:00]>> [music] >> Nearly 20 years of data locked away. The accident was survivable. The silence was a choice.