Lester Skaggs

Lester Skaggs (November 21, 1911 – April 3, 2009) was an American nuclear physicist.

Life and Times Skaggs was born on November 21, 1911 in Trenton, Missouri. He grew up on a farm in northern Missouri. He attended a one-room schoolhouse and to get to high school, he had to ride a horse. Skaggs was the oldest of three children and his father planned for Skaggs to become a farmer. Instead, Skaggs had other interests and found amazement with tinkering, and enjoyed designing and building contraptions and made plans for a science career. He attended the University of Missouri and completed a B.S. in chemistry with a minor in mathematics in 1933 and M.S. in physics in 1934. He moved to Chicago in 1935, entered the University of Chicago and was accepted into the graduate program in nuclear physics. In 1939, Skaggs was awarded a Ph.D. in nuclear physics. At the University of Chicago, Skaggs had a post-doctoral fellowship in nuclear physics and secured part-time work at the Tumor Clinic at Michael Reese Hospital in radiation oncology. From 1941 – 1943, the war effort took him to Washington, D.C. where he served at the Carnegie Institution of Washington in the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. Skaggs worked with physicist Nicholas Smith to design an airplane proximity detection system that utilized radio waves to locate and detonate anti-aircraft shells.

As serendipity often plays a role in medical and scientific developments, sometimes accompanied by a dose of irony, chance presented a member of the team, who was a promising physics graduate student. The student was diagnosed with a brain tumor, glioblastoma multiformae and no current treatment options available for the tumor. The first clinical use of the high energy Betatron radiation for medical therapy proved beneficial to effectively reduce the mass of the tumor, yet not sufficient to eliminate the tumor and provide a cure.

University of Chicago In 1948, Skaggs accepted a faculty appointment as assistant professor of radiology at the University of Chicago. In 1949, he took the promotion to associate professor with the responsibility for the development of radiation therapy equipment and facilities at Argonne Cancer Research Hospital (ACRH). The Atomic Energy Commission program, titled "Atoms for Peace" funded the facilities at ACRH. In 1953, the ACRH was among the initial list of hospitals dedicated to radiation therapy for cancer treatment.

At ACRH, the next project for the Skaggs and Lanzl team was the design of a cobalt treatment unit.

In the 1970s, Franca T. Kuchnir and Skaggs developed a method to produce neutrons for radiation therapy, maybe the first fast-neutron therapy facility in the United States.