There are a few things that we take for granted that once were the vision of a single individual. One of the greatest life-saving inventions of the 20th century was the result of one man’s perseverance to cure cancer.
In 1997, the Silicon Valley Historical Association had the opportunity to interview Edward Ginzton, one of the founders of Varian Associates and co-inventor of radiation oncology, and the main protagonist of the Stanford Linear Accelerator.
Ginzton had debilitating Parkinson’s disease at the time of the interview, but his mind was alert and active. While growing up, Ginzton was an illiterate young boy; the son of two healers who traveled the villages of Ukraine, China and Czarist Russia during the Russian revolution.
When he was about 14 years old, his parents boarded a steamer in Vladivostok for San Francisco. They felt that it was too dangerous to continue their arduous trek throughout Asia.
Because he was illiterate, Ginzton was enrolled in the first grade. Each week, his teachers advanced him to the next grade until he was soon in a class with other students his age.
In 1937, at the age of 22, Ginzton received a bachelor’s degree and in 1938, a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. By 1941, he had earned a doctorate in electric engineering from Stanford University.
A relentless commitment
By 1941, Ginzton was working at Sperry Rand along with the Varian Brothers who were developing the klystron; a revolutionary onboard airplane radar device that helped to defeat the Nazi U-boat fleet during World War II.
The importance of the top-secret klystron cannot be understated; the Nazi U-boats controlled the Atlantic shipping lanes that had to be cleared before the D-Day invasion.
By the klystron “seeing” the U-boats surface at night for oxygen, the British, Canadian and American military planes were able to destroy 90 percent of Hitler’s fleet, clearing the lanes for Allied shipping.
Varian Associates was formed in 1947. It was Ginzton who convinced President Dwight D. Eisenhower to fund the linear accelerator project in 1952.
In 1954, at Stanford, Dr. Henry Kaplan and Ginzton co-invented the first medical linear accelerator in the Western Hemisphere. Both Varian brothers passed away in the early 1960s and Ginzton was named CEO at Varian.
He insisted that Varian keep pouring precious resources into the development of directing a precise radiation beam at a cancer cell. It took the Varian team more than 10 years to perfect the beam and show a stream of income. Many, if not most CEOs would drop a project after a few years if it couldn’t produce a profit.
Ginzton passed away in 1998 with little fanfare. Today, Varian Medical Systems carries on as the world leader in the radiation oncology industry with more than 6,300 employees in 70 support sales and support offices worldwide. Millions of lives have been saved because of Ginzton. ●
John McLaughlin is founder and president of the Silicon Valley Historical Association. For more information, visit www.siliconvalleyhistorical.org.
