Lars Leksell
BIOGRAPHY
Lars Leksell was a pioneering neurosurgeon, and the father of stereotactic radiosurgery and the Gamma Knife machine now used to treat brain tumours at many locations globally.
Leksell went to medical school at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm and later became chair of neurosurgery at the Karolinska in 1961. He worked under Herbert Olivecrona (1891–1980), who carried out Sweden’s first brain tumour operation, and went on to combine his surgical skills with technical ideas to address neurosurgery challenges.
It was at University Hospital in Lund where Leksell set up the first neurosurgical clinic in the country outside of Stockholm, and where he developed a stereotactic instrument to treat brain injuries, and started to explore radiation as a tool for radiosurgery.
With Börje Larsson at Uppsala’s Werner Institute, where there was a synchrocyclotron used in the world’s first proton cancer treatment in 1957, Leksell tested proton beams and then settled on gamma rays from cobalt-60 as a more efficient radiation source and it was when Leksell moved to Seraphim Hospital in Stockholm that the prototype of the Gamma Knife was developed. It required multidisciplinary skills, not least precision engineering.
Leksell’s family background was in manufacturing and he said he visited the factory workshop to learn to drill and solder. The diverse disciplines Leksell had to engage with to develop the Gamma Knife shows a person who moved with unusual confidence and enthusiasm across medical, scientific and engineering boundaries in search of ways to improve the therapeutic options for his patients.
He enthused experts from the different fields, and people with money and influence, to collaborate with him to bring the project to life. Jeremy Ganz, who spoke to a wide range of sources when researching The History of the Gamma Knife says: “Leksell’s contemporaries remember a man who was constantly having new ideas and testing them. They remember a man who had a talent for collecting around him a group of colleagues who could cooperate in making the ideas become reality.”
See also this article by Elekta, the company that makes the Gamma Knife, and our main article on the Gamma Knife.
