Uppsala, Sweden

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OVERVIEW

The Gustaf Werner Institute was a nuclear physics research facility founded in 1949 in the historic university town of Uppsala, Sweden. It was home to a synchrocyclotron that, at the time of inauguration in 1951, was the most advanced particle accelerator in Europe.

It was an important centre for high-energy physics and radiation biology research for more than three decades, until in 1986 the facility was incorporated into Uppsala University within the newly established The Svedberg Laboratory (The Svedberg standing for Theodor Svedberg, a Swedish Nobel Laureate for chemistry, who led the Gustaf Werner Institute from its inception until 1967).

In 1957, the Gustaf Werner Institute became the first facility in the world to administer proton therapy to a patient with cancer, when a 60 year old woman received proton radiation for a large cervical tumour.

This was also where much of the experimental radiobiology was done that underpinned the development of the Leksell Gamma Knife, a radiosurgery machine now widely used for brain tumour treatment. It was here that Börje Larsson and his team, in collaboration with neurosurgeon Lars Leksell conducted animal experiments ‒ chiefly on goats ‒ to investigate the impact of targeted radiation on tissue of the central nervous system. (Leksell and Larsson eventually used a gamma ray source rather than protons for the Gamma Knife, as the name suggests.)

The Gustaf Werner Institute owed its origins, in part, to the medical profession. When the proposal to fund a particle accelerator was first put to the industrialist Gustaf Werner, the idea was to fund the construction of a cyclotron ‒ which was smaller, cheaper and less powerful than the synchrocyclotron that he ended up funding.

Werner’s business was in the textile industry and he was interested in researching how his fabrics stood up to exposure to radiation, but he was also a philanthropist and keen to make equipment available for academic research.

The proposal was put to Werner by the wife of a professor of gynaecology at Uppsala University, John Naeslund, who needed radionuclides for his medical practice, and had been relying on accessing them from Svedberg’s lab, when he was head of physical chemistry at Uppsala, and where radionuclides were produced in small quantities by a neutron generator constructed by one of Svedberg’s students, Helge Tyrén.

Naeslund needed more, so with his wife as a go-between, Werner talked to Svedberg about funding the proposed cyclotron, and Tyrén was dispatched to the Berkeley laboratories in the US to obtain drawings of a machine with an energy of about 20 MeV for radioisotope production. During the visit, however, Tyrén found that a new principle of accelerating particles to much higher energies had just been invented, which could generate an energy ten times that of a cyclotron.

Svedberg and Werner agreed to go for the more powerful synchrocyclotron, putting Sweden at the forefront of the dynamic field of high-energy physics and radiation biology.

In 2015, the The Svedberg Laboratory was itself decommissioned. Proton therapy is now delivered by the Skandion Clinic in Uppsala, run jointly by several local authorities.

See articles in Cern Courier (here and here and history information on the Uppsala University website.