When Michigan State University went looking for someone who could build a cyclotron from scratch, Henry Blosser wasn’t the first choice. He got the job only after two of his co-workers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and a Canadian researcher had turned it down.
It was 1958. MSU President John Hannah was building an agricultural college into a research university, “and one of the ways he did it was to bring in young men like Blosser, give them responsibility and let them go and do their thing,” said Charlie Downs, a retired public relations science writer who hired into the university the same year.
Blosser’s thing, as it turned out, was first to bring in one the biggest grants the university had ever seen, then to develop a new technique for extracting accelerated nuclei from a cyclotron that turned it into a precision instrument, to create the world’s first superconducting cyclotrons.
Blosser died in late March at the age of 85. His legacy at the university isn’t small. He and the team he built put MSU’s nuclear science program on the map, laid the foundations that, two decades after his retirement, would allow the university to compete for and win the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams project.
“He built the laboratory, and he built this culture of always looking for something new and something that would keep the laboratory, as it expanded, at the forefront of the field,” said Sam Austin, co-director of MSU’s National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory with Blosser for several years during the 1980s and director of the lab for a few years after Blosser’s retirement. “That’s, in a way, almost the most important thing.”
But just putting together that first cyclotron was “a real tour de force,” said Austin, who is writing a history of the lab’s early years, “because there was, for example, basically not a machine shop” at the university when the project started.
But Blosser knew how to throw around his weight and John Hannah’s name. “He really made things happen in a way that was unprecedented at MSU and would be impossible now, because it’s a much bigger operation,” Austin said.
He could also play good politics. In a 2000 interview for MSU’s Sesquicentennial Oral History Project, Blossser recounted the way the lab got funding to build a prototype magnet for the first superconducting cyclotron in the mid-1970s.
Competition among various labs had resulted in a sort of funding stalemate. “Everybody stomped on everybody else’s proposals,” he said. “Nothing got approved.” So MSU pitched the magnet as a development project only. Other labs would have a chance at the actual superconducting cyclotron that might grow out of it. As it happened, the money to build the actual cyclotron went to MSU, as well.
That cyclotron, known as the K500, was completed in 1982. Its successor, the K1200, went online six years later. Now coupled together and somewhat modified, the two machines are still in operation, still at the heart of the lab’s research operations.
“Without having these machines at MSU, I don’t think we would have had a shot in heaven to propose for the Facility for Rare Isotope Beams,” said Konrad Gelbke, director of the lab since 1992. “We’re standing on the shoulders of giants.”
There was a coda of sorts to Blosser’s career. A phone call from a Detroit doctor piqued his interest in the medical applications of cyclotrons. In 1984, he began designing a neutron-producing superconducting cyclotron for use in radiation treatments. First operated with patients at Harper Hospital in Detroit in 1992, it would be he first superconducting machine used in clinical therapy. Blosser would work for years after his retirement on a superconducting proton therapy cyclotron.
“He was a builder. He just liked to build things,” said Gabe Blosser, one of Blosser’s four children and a collaborator on the Harper Hospital cyclotron.
“And he was fortunate enough to convince people to spend a hell of a lot of money to back up the things he wanted to do.”
A memorial service for Henry Blosser is scheduled for 3 p.m. April 19 at the MSU Alumni Chapel, 636 Auditorium Road in East Lansing.
