Wrecking Crews Target Cyclotron

Harvard’s cyclotron is a relic.

The particle accelerator is so old, in fact, that the city considers it an historic building. And, now that Harvard wants to tear it down, the University needs the permission of the Cambridge Historical Commission before the wrecking balls can move in.

Built at the beginning of the Atomic Age, the cyclotron enabled scientists in the 1950s to look into the nuclei of atoms and learn more about the behavior of tiny particles. The machine was state-of-the-art when it was built but became obsolete within two decades.

Since then has been used for treating cancer patients. But with the advent of a new facility for cancer treatment in Boston, the cyclotron is no longer needed for medicine either.

And now Harvard has found a more important use for the Oxford St. site.

The University wants to demolish the cyclotron and build a 730-car underground parking garage next door.

Tonight the Historical Commission will hear Harvard’s case for doing away with the cyclotron, and in the coming months Harvard officials will meet with community groups to sell their development plans to wary neighbors.

In its day the cyclotron was called a “heavy cruiser” in cutting-edge physics research but now stands next in line for the bulldozer.

‘The Tool Chest’ of Physics

When Harvard’s cyclotron opened in 1949, the New York Times wrote that it was a state-of-the-art device that filled “a gap in the tool chest of physicists.”

Harvard had previously owned a cyclotron but that particular machine had been shipped to Los Alamos in 1943 and subsequently was used in research for the Manhattan Project.

The device that replaced it marked an advance for Harvard’s physics department. The new cyclotron could handle a higher voltage, making it one of the highest-capacity machines of its kind then in existence, says Higgins Professor of Physics Norman F. Ramsey, then an assistant professor who oversaw the cyclotron’s opening in 1949.

“This one was a very well designed cyclotron,” he says. “It’s very easy to run and operate.”

By the mid-1960s, the cyclotron was “a bit outmoded” for cutting-edge science research, says Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics Richard Wilson, who in 1999 invited physicists and top University administrators to a celebration of the cyclotron’s fiftieth anniversary.

But at the same time its scientific value had run out, scientists in an entirely different field were finding a new use for the machine.

In that decade, doctors began testing the safety of radiation treatments on monkeys and by the end of the ’60s were using the cyclotron to treat cancer in human patients.

A cyclotron generates a focused proton beam. In atomic research, the beam ne them in detail. In medicine, the same beam is useful in treatment of eye, neck, prostate and several other cancers.

“What you want to do in many cases is to aim the radiation very carefully at the tissues you want to kill,” Wilson says.

By 1970, despite this medical work, the outdated and underused cyclotron faced a dearth of funding. With no scientists interested in conducting physics research at Harvard’s cyclotron, the physicists who had worked with the machine since the late 1940s held a goodbye party to mark what they thought would be its final days.

But at the last minute, one of the cyclotron’s staffers came up with an idea that would keep the proton beams coming.

Andreas M. Koehler thought the cyclotron’s future lay in the cancer work doctors had been doing there for several years. He proposed that the physics department would continue funding the cyclotron but that Harvard would be repaid with money from the cancer treatments.

Ever since, the cyclotron’s proton beam has been primarily used for treating cancer patients from Massachusetts General Hospital.

“It sort of a service we were happy to do for good science,” Ramsey says.

Over the last three decades the cyclotron has been used to treat nearly 9,000 cancer patients, sent over from hospitals that lacked a comparable device.

But this past November, Mass. General opened a proton therapy center of its own which has gradually been filling the cyclotron’s niche in cancer treatment.

These days, the small cement cyclotron building is still being used to treat patients. And, though retired, Koehler still comes in every day just to be around the machine he helped to preserve for decades.

But several of the cyclotron’s employees now work for Mass. General and the device is being phased out.

ACID Opposition

Eliminating the cyclotron is part of a larger overhaul Harvard is planning for science buildings around Oxford St. and Divinity Ave. The University promises the end result someday will be more research facilities, more grass and less asphalt.

But residents in the surrounding Agassiz neighborhood remain wary, fearing an onslaught of Harvard construction.

This winter, when Harvard first announced that the cyclotron was slated for destruction, residents in the surrounding Agassiz neighborhood expressed alarm. Neighborhood activists formed a group to take a second look at Harvard’s plans. They call themselves the Agassiz Committee on the Impacts of Development—or ACID for short.

Initially some residents raised fears that the demolition of the device could release radiation into the air, though Harvard officials assured them the state Department of Public Health would have to sign off before demolition began.

But until Harvard’s report to public health officials is completed, the danger of the cyclotron site will be unclear, says Sheldon Krimsky, a member of ACID and a professor of urban and environmental policy and planning at Tufts University.

“No one really knows what we have at stake,” Krimsky says. “We don’t want to have [radiation] in the air, we don’t want to have it in dust particles, we don’t want it blown over Agassiz school.”

—Staff writer Lauren R. Dorgan can be reached at dorgan@fas.harvard.edu.