Mankind benefits from Cern's work

Published on Saturday 7 November 2009 19:03

AS A Scottish engineer lucky enough to be working at Cern (and spending my weekends next to flatulent cows in the Alps), I feel obliged to react to some of the more provocative remarks of your columnist Gerald Warner ("Flatulent cows and light bulbs won't kill us, but Cern could", 1 November).

The desire to understand the nature of our surroundings – the primary aim of Cern – is one of those qualities, like a passion for art or music, which makes us fully human.

In the pursuit of that knowledge, the particle physics community spends money, it's true, but the payback in terms of its contribution to society is often overlooked.

Particle physics is at the origin of technologies such as PET scanners which help doctors to diagnose cancer and plan treatment.

Also, new hadron therapy machines, which treat cancer using focused particle beams, have their origins in high-energy physics. I'm personally involved in a project seeking to change fundamentally how X-rays are taken.

So if Mr Warner is unfortunate enough to find that his meat-eating habits land him one day in the oncology department, he may want to reassess his opinion about the usefulness of those "high priests" over in Geneva.

Incidentally, if your readers are still concerned about the nonsense propagated by a few crackpots and regurgitated by Mr Warner about the safety of the LHC, I invite them to consult our website (http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) for reassurance of a scientific nature.

In fact, the invention of the web itself is arguably the most important single contribution of Cern to mankind in the past 20 years.

Dr Michael Campbell, Geneva, Switzerland