I don’t know about you, but ever since I started covering the Large Hadron Collider and other large-scale particle accelerators for ExtremeTech, I’ve always morbidly wondered: What would happen if a scientist was accidentally hit by the main particle beam? Would the scientist explode in the style of beam weapons in Star Trek? Would the beam bore a hole clean through the scientist’s chest? Or maybe the beam would do nothing at all and pass through the scientist harmlessly? Well, fortunately (unfortunately?) we don’t have to guess, as this exact scenario actually happened to Anatoli Bugorski, a Russian scientist, way back in 1978.

Back in the 1970s, Anatoli Bugorski was a researcher at the Soviet Union’s Institute for High Energy Physics. The Institute housed the U-70, a synchrotron that when it was built was the most powerful particle accelerator in the world (it’s still the most powerful accelerator in Russia today). The U-70 smashes two beams of protons together at a combined energy of around 76 GeV, at a speed that gets very close to the speed of light.

On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a malfunction on the U-70… and then somehow his head ended up in the path of the main proton beam. The beam entered his skull on the back left, and came out near the left side of his nose. Sources seem to disagree on how much ionizing radiation Bugorski actually took to the head, but some say it was as high as 2,000-3,000 grays (200,000-300,000 rads). In any case, the beam would’ve been more than strong enough to burn a hole through the bone, skin, and brain tissue.

At the time, Bugorski reported seeing a flash that was “brighter than a thousand suns,” but otherwise didn’t feel any pain. Over the next few days, the left side of his head swelled up “beyond recognition,” and then his skin started peeling off. Bugorski was moved to Moscow, where doctors avidly observed his expected demise — but, curiously enough, he survived. The left side of his face is paralyzed (due to nerve damage), his left ear is shot (all he can hear is an “unpleasant internal noise”), and he occasionally suffers from seizures, but otherwise Bugorski was relatively unscathed by the accident. He went on to complete his PhD — and he’s still alive today.

Slightly anticlimactic, eh? Well, if it’s any consolation, Bugorski probably got incredibly lucky that the proton beam (apparently) missed any vital parts of his brain. If it had hit the hippocampus, motor cortex, or the frontal lobe, this story wouldn’t have had a very happy ending. Likewise, it’s probably lucky that the beam hit his brain — which has the remarkable ability to rewire itself when such disasters occur — rather than some other vital organ. If the beam had sliced through his heart, or an artery in his neck, he probably would’ve died instantly.

It’s also important to note that the beam from a particle accelerator is very narrow (the more focused the beam is, the higher the chance of collisions with protons in the other beam). As you can see in the black and white photo above, only a small patch of hair is missing from Bugorski’s scalp, suggesting the beam only fried quite a narrow channel of brain tissue. In much the same way that you could pass a very thin hypodermic needle through someone without causing too much damage, a particle beam probably isn’t going to carve a comically large cylinder through the victim’s chest.

A dosage of between 2,000 and 3,000 grays, if it was effectively absorbed by the human body (i.e. sieverts), would usually be more than enough to cause acute radiation sickness and death. In this case, though, the beam was so focused that it just passed straight through his body; if it had been more scattered, and fried a wider smattering of cells, Bugorski would certainly have died.

Finally, though, it’s worth noting that the Russian U-70 is a very weak particle accelerator by today’s standards. When the Large Hadron Collider comes back online in 2015, it’ll have a proton-proton collision energy of around 14 TeV — or about 200 times more power than the U-70’s 67 GeV. Despite its high energy, though, we’re still only talking about a beam of protons that’s a few millimeters wide — and of course there are all sorts of security measures that would prevent a CERN scientist from ever being hit by the LHC’s main beam. If those safety mechanisms failed, and the superconducting magnets that keep the beam focused and on target were on the fritz, then maybe you’d end up with a proton beam that moved around enough to slice a scientist into pieces. It’s a long shot, though.