On July 13, 1978, Anatoli Bugorski was a Soviet physicist checking malfunctioning equipment on the U-70 synchrotron, the most powerful particle accelerator in the Soviet Union. Nobody told him the safety mechanism had been turned off.

A proton beam traveling at 99.99% the speed of light passed directly through his skull. It entered through the back of his head, burned through his brain tissue, and exited through his nose. He saw a flash "brighter than a thousand suns." He felt no pain. He finished his work and went home. He went to the hospital the next day. Doctors expected him dead within weeks. The beam had delivered an estimated 300,000 roentgens of radiation through his brain. A dose of 500 roentgens across the entire body is typically fatal. The left side of his face swelled beyond recognition and his skin began peeling away along the exact path the beam had burned through. He didn't die. Because the beam was only a few millimeters wide, the radiation was concentrated in a narrow line rather than spread across his entire body. He recovered, completed his PhD, and returned to work at the same accelerator. But the long term effects were permanent. The left side of his face stopped aging entirely, while the right side aged normally.