John Laughlin, Leader in Radiation Cancer Care, Dies at 86
NY Times
Dr. John S. Laughlin, a medical physicist and educator who was an early leader in the use of radiation to diagnose and treat cancers, died on Dec. 11 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan, where he headed the department of medical physics for four decades. He was 86.
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The cause was leukemia, said a daughter, Dr. Catherine Laughlin.
In 1952, shortly after arriving as a department head at Memorial Hospital, a forerunner of Sloan-Kettering, Dr. Laughlin helped acquire the institution’s first betatron machine, a particle accelerator that had been developed for experiments in atom-smashing in nuclear physics. In its medical application, the betatron was used at Memorial and elsewhere to point a stream of high-energy electrons at cancerous tumors to shrink or destroy them.
