now on bbc news, it s time for click. this week, we are going atomic at the european organization for nuclear research, cern. we will look at the cutting edge cancer treatments that are foxing the physicists. ifind it fascinating because it does not talk to my physics brain. so, i am curious to see whether it will bring something or not. how does science become fiction? we will meet an author looking for disaster. we want conflict.
and it is called the flash effect. so, you deliver the radiation in a very intense burst to the tumour instead of on several seconds, for example. you condense it in milliseconds. for a physicist, this should not make any difference, but it is like when you deliver radiation like this, the tumour gets damaged, the healthy tissue does not get damaged, and of course it could be game changing because you could forget everything about damaging surrounding tissues, etc, and it is as if the particles would know this is a healthy cell, this is a cancer cell. do we have any idea why it happens? we don t know the mechanisms. we don t fully understand how flash works. ifind it fascinating because it does not talk to my physics brain. so, i am curious to see whether it will bring something or not.