Inspiring the next generation
On January 28th, 2019, OMA fellow Anna Baratto Roldán gave a talk about particle accelerators and medicine in front of around 30 high school students, in her mother’s hometown Manzarares (Ciudad Real), in Spain. This opportunity arose from the collaboration with José Luis Olmo, professor of Biology and Geology at the Manzanares High School “IES Azuer”, who actively promotes scientific outreach in school, motivating his students to discover and get closer to science with genuine curiosity and fascination. The talk was given in the frame of the programme “Expertos” organized by the school, that aims to bring students closer to the “real life” by giving them the possibility to meet, listen and ask questions to experts of different fields.
Starting from the OMA acronym, Anna explained the link between accelerator physics and medicine, guiding the students in a journey from the origins of radiation physics to the construction of high-energy particle accelerators, focusing on the parallel evolution of the medical applications that arose from the very beginning, with the discovery of X-rays.
Finally, the last part of the talk was devoted to particle therapy, describing this technique ant its advantages and disadvantages in comparison with conventional radiation therapy with X-rays.
The students showed a great interest and paid a lot of attention during the presentation. In the end, they asked many interesting questions about particle therapy, that they had never heard of and awoke their curiosity. Some of them also stopped by after the presentation, to see some cell-samples Anna brought to the school to show the effects of increasing doses of radiation in living organisms. These CHO (Chinese Hamster Ovary cells) samples where irradiated with different doses of X-rays at the GSI-Darmstadt (Germany) and stained seven days after irradiation.
The event arose also the interest of the local television, who interviewed Anna and filmed part of the talk, enlarging the audience and bringing medical physics and particle therapy to the general public.