CERN: An asset for research and for Switzerland

8 years ago - Published in Expert opinion

CERN is known for the latest discoveries in nuclear research, but the European organization is also important in many other fields, including the economy. Tiago Araujo, Knowledge Transfer Officer at CERN, explains why to Marketplus.

 

Usually, the technology CERN develops becomes important for the general public, too, maybe years later. Could you give us an example?

 

It’s true, due to the specificity of our scientific challenges, our technologies are often state-of-the-art. A very good example of an early stage development ongoing at CERN are the high magnetic field magnets. We are producing unprecedented magnetic field intensity magnets that are potentially very interesting for example for the ultra-high MRI (Magnetic Resonance Image).  

 

What are the next few discoveries we’ll be facing in the next years, technology wise?

 

CERN is everyday expanding the frontiers of technology and innovation on three main areas, Accelerators, Detectors & Computing.

Computing: big data is an emerging trend in healthcare; at CERN, we have one of the largest computing infrastructures for research, and we are exploring how to address the challenges related to the collection, storage and processing of increasingly larger data sets for medical research, clinical applications, and diagnostics.

Accelerators: The accelerators will play an important role in health care for two main reasons: 1) production of innovative radioisotopes for medical research. I invite you to have a look at CERN-MEDICIS and MEDICIS-PROMED, two Marie Curie project, as with a high participation of Swiss institutes – see https://home.cern/about/updates/2013/09/cern-produce-radioisotopes-health and https://medicis-promed.web.cern.ch).  2) To enable techniques like hadron therapy, which uses protons and other ions to treat cancer.

Detectors: Nowadays the medical field is more and more dependent on the complementary diagnostic tools like medical imaging. The capability to look inside our body is already considered as the revolution of the medical field. Particle physics applications have contributed to the development of many different ways to look inside the human body, including PET (Positron Emission Tomography), MRI and CT (Computed Tomography) scanning.

Knowing that the resolution and efficiency of our detectors is increasing every day, on the speculation side, all the aforementioned facts make me dream and imagine better and easier ways to continuous monitoring of human biosignals. 

I took the medical field as an example but you can extrapolate my answer to all the core sectors of the society with examples like the World Wide Web.

CERN is also established in Geneva. How is Switzerland important to CERN?

Switzerland was a founding member of CERN and is one of the two Host States. Switzerland has a strong tradition in particle physics: scientists in Switzerland have made important contributions to the advance of Particle Physics in general and have always maintained a strong involvement in CERN. 

What do you think CERN gives back to Switzerland and in particular its economy?

Swiss society, science and industry benefit in a direct way from technical spin-offs and medical applications from particle physics and high-energy physics, including imaging techniques and cancer treatment. In addition, for each CHF that Switzerland contributes to CERN, Swiss industry receives almost 2 CHF in return through contracts related to materials and utilities.