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Anatoli Petrovich Bugorski (Russian: Анатолий Петрович Бугорский; born 25 June 1942) is a retired Russian particle physicist. He is known for surviving a radiation accident in 1978, when a high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passed through his brain.

Accident

As a researcher at the Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia, Anatoli Bugorski worked with a big particle accelerator in the Soviet Union. It was known as the U-70 synchrotron. On July 13, 1978, Bugorski was checking a broken piece of equipment when the safety system failed. Bugorski was leaning over the equipment when he stuck his head in the way of the proton beam. Reportedly, he saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns" but did not feel anything. The beam passed through the back of his head, the occipital and temporal lobes of his brain, the left middle ear, and out through the left hand side of his nose. The exposed parts of his head received a local dose of 200,000 to 300,000 roentgens. Bugorski understood what happened, but continued working on the broken equipment. He at first opted not to tell anyone what happened.

Aftermath

The left side of Bugorski's face swelled up beyond the point of recognition. Over the next few days, the skin on his face started to peel. This showed the path that the proton beam took through parts of his face, his bone, and his brain. It was thought that he had far above the fatal dose of radiation. Bugorski was taken to a clinic in Moscow where doctors could see his expected death. However, Bugorski survived. He completed his PhD, and continued working as a particle physicist. There was almost no damage to his intellectual capacity. However, his mental fatigue increased a lot. Bugorski went deaf in his left ear. The left half of his face was paralyzed due to the destruction of nerves. He was able to function well, except for occasional complex partial seizures and rare tonic-clonic seizures.

Bugorski continued working as a physicist in the Institute for High Energy Physics and was the coordinator of physics experiments. Because of the Soviet Union's policy of keeping secrets related to issues about nuclear power, Bugorski did not speak publicly about the accident for over a decade. He continued going to the Moscow radiation clinic twice a year for check-ups and to meet other nuclear accident victims. He was described as "a poster boy for Soviet and Russian radiation medicine". In 1996, he applied but didn't recieve disability status to get free epilepsy medicine. Bugorski was interested in being available for Western scientists to study him. However, he didn't have enough money to leave Protvino.

Personal life

Bugorski is married to Vera Nikolaevna, and they have a son, Peter.