The Proton
In Our Time: Science
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The Properties of Protons
The way that we treat cancer is largely a mixture of three modalities. With radiotherapy, what you're trying to do is use X-ray photons to irradiate the tumor. But protons are heavy somatomic particles compared to electrons. So if you take a proton and you accelerate it up and fire it into the body, rather than just undergoing a single interaction where it will crash into one electron and that electron pops out, the proton is charged. It's kind of rattling as it goes through little bump, bump, bump,. bump, interactions. The reason why we can treat cancers preferentially with protons, as opposed to x-rays, because we have
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