The Johns Hopkins Hospital cyclotron

In a first-person recollection, Dr. Bob Gayler, retired associate professor in the Johns Hopkins Department of Radiology, recalled the January 1982 delivery of a cyclotron particle accelerator to the department’s Nuclear Medicine team. 

Dr. Gayler worked with Dr. Henry N. Wagner Jr., a towering figure in the nuclear medicine community who pioneered early positron emission tomography (PET) imaging research. Dr. Wagner had obtained a research grant to look at applications in the brain, with early interest in dementia assessment and schizophrenia. As PET scanning requires very short-lived radionuclides, a cyclotron and a PET scanner were needed for this work. 

The department’s nuclear medicine division had moved to the basement level of The Johns Hopkins Hospital between the new Nelson Building and the Billings Administration Building. A site for the new cyclotron was found on the west side of the nuclear medicine space. 

The cyclotron was delivered from the loading dock of the Children’s Medical and Surgical Center Building from Monument Street. The cyclotron was very heavy, even before it was filled with water. The machine was brought in by riggers through the dock and along the basement-level corridor. The heavy device was moved by pulling the large box-shaped machine on wooden beams. Unfortunately, the cyclotron fell off the wood beams during the movement. Luckily, the riggers were able to get it back on the beams and continued to the selected site. Then, a hole was made in the wall, and the cyclotron moved into position in nuclear medicine, and the wall was rebuilt. 

As Dr. Gayler explained, “We were told that we had the ‘B Team’ of riggers since the ‘A team’ was busy retrieving Air Florida Flight 90 from the Potomac River after it crashed shortly after taking off from then-Washington National Airport (now Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport) on January 13, 1982. We had no injuries, unlike the passengers on the aircraft.”