Cerner Corporation

Type: Public
On the web: http://www.cerner.com
Employees: 7,873
Employee growth: 6.1%

Cerner provides the IV that pumps information through a health care organization's computer network. The company's products and services combine clinical, financial, and administrative information management applications, including tools for managing electronic medical records, patient care, and health information access. Cerner's clinical and administrative information systems link emergency rooms, pharmacies, and other health care departments. The company's service offerings include implementation, data migration, maintenance, and security compliance services.

Key numbers for fiscal year ending December, 2007:
Sales: $1,519.9M
One year growth: 10.3%
Net income: $127.1M
Income growth: 15.7%

Officers:
Chairman and CEO: Neal L. Patterson
President: Earl H. (Trace) Devanny III
EVP: Jack A. Newman Jr.

Competitors:
Eclipsys
GE Healthcare
McKesson

(Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire, European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland, www.cern.ch) The world's largest particle physics laboratory. Founded in 1954, European countries are CERN's Member States with the U.S., Japan, Russia and others having observer status. To enhance collaboration on research documents pertaining to particle physics, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN in the early 1990s. See World Wide Web.

Incorporated: 1980
SIC: 7375 Information Retrieval Services; 7371 Computer Programming Services

Cerner Corporation is a leading supplier of information systems for the health care industry. Cerner designs, installs, and supports applications developed around a single architecture, called Health Network Architecture (HNA), which allows clinics, hospitals, HMOs, physicians, and integrated health organizations (IHOs) to share clinical and management data across multiple disciplines and facilities. Cerner's 12 major system applications, which are supported by more than 200 component applications, operate on the single HNA platform. This allows Cerner clients to purchase the entire HNA system, or to choose among the individual applications, adding applications as needed, while achieving a seamless flow of information across applications. These applications fit into four interrelated groups: clinical management, care management, repositories, and knowledge systems. With its products, Cerner has led the health care industry away from finance-driven information systems to a patient-centered system more appropriate for an increasingly integrated industry focused on managed care and cost-effective services. In addition to developing its own products, Cerner has forged several alliances to share technology and marketing activities with other companies. Cerner's goal is to automate the entire health management process, creating paperless patient records that the company calls the Electronic Medical Record (EMR), which can be accessed and shared by the full spectrum of medical and health professionals, as well as by the patient.

Cerner supports its products with eight regional offices in the United States and branch offices in Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and England, providing technical and sales assistance to more than 1,330 client sites. Of these clients, more than 30 have implemented the full HNA system, and over 100 have linked multiple Cerner applications. As of the mid-1990s, Cerner's growth has come primarily from clients purchasing multiple applications. The majority of Cerner's clients are located in the United States; international growth is hampered somewhat by the need to translate its products into other languages, and international sales have been limited largely to countries with health care systems based on the U.S. and British models. Sales of Cerner applications, together with revenues from continued application support and add-on purchases, combined for $187 million, with a net profit of $22.5 million, in 1995. Cerner is led by chairman and CEO Neal Patterson, and president and COO Clifford Illig.

In 1979, Neal Patterson, Clifford Illig, and Paul Gorup left the management information systems consulting division of Arthur Anderson's Kansas City office to found Cerner as a developer of laboratory information systems. Cerner was incorporated in 1980, as the company worked to perfect its first product.

By 1984, Cerner was ready to roll out its first application, the PathNet laboratory information system. PathNet provided a comprehensive information system for laboratory clinicians, allowing laboratories to automate their processes. PathNet, which grew to combine applications for general laboratory information, microbiology, blood bank transfusion and blood bank donation, and anatomic pathology, broke away not only from the traditional paper-based sharing of information, but also from the prevailing financial focus of data gathering systems.

PathNet proved an early success. First year revenues were just under $2 million, with a net loss of $1.5 million. However, by the following year, Cerner turned a profit on $10.3 million in sales and was already establishing itself as a leading provider of laboratory information systems. By 1986 PathNet became the market leader, with more than 30 client site placements generating $17.5 million in revenues for a $2.3 million net profit. In that year, Patterson and Illig took Cerner public, offering one million shares at $16 per share.

Through the end of the decade, PathNet remained Cerner's primary source of revenue, but by 1985 the company had already begun to define what would become its Health Network Architecture. Cerner's goal was to automate the health care process, focusing the various aspects of the health care process--from registration to clinical care to pharmacy services to outcomes measurement--around the individual patient. By providing access across the continuum of a patient's care, the HNA system would achieve higher quality care, from prevention to treatment, as well as improved cost-effectiveness. Unlike paper-based medical charts, the medical records of a patient within Cerner's automated system could be made instantly available to each member of a health care network, including laboratory clinicians, nurses, general physicians, and such specialists as radiologists and surgeons, while also providing resources for patient input and information.

Cerner's vision of an HNA-based system would allow total management of a patient's care, including alerts and reminders to the patient of scheduled checkups, information to providers on patient clinical history, medication allergies, and the like, and a means to provide routine and emergency care based on information uploaded by the patient. In this, Cerner anticipated the changing focus of the health care system, from a fee-for-service system, to the largely managed care-based system of the 1990s. Equally, Cerner's vision anticipated the mid-1990s trend toward integration that would sweep the health care system, as more and more hospitals, clinics, and other providers moved toward providing vertically integrated, complete health care services.

Cerner's client base grew steadily in the late 1980s, reaching 70 sites in 1987, 120 sites in 1988, 170 sites in 1989, and reaching 250 sites in 1990. Installations were primarily of PathNet systems, and sales of systems made up the bulk of Cerner's revenues, which topped $57 million in 1990. However, recurring revenues, especially from support services and also from add-on applications sales, began to form an increasing share of Cerner's annual sales. Meanwhile, research and development spending grew from $4.2 million in 1987 to $10 million in 1990.

Cerner's R&D efforts began to show results as early as 1987, when it introduced two more components of its future HNA system: MedNet and Discern. MedNet joined PathNet in the clinical management family of Cerner products, offering support for pulmonary medicine, respiratory care, and other internal medicine departments. Discern formed the basis of Cerner's knowledge systems applications, offering retrospective and prospective databases and services that enabled providers to monitor patient care regimens and institute treatment and preventive protocols.

In 1988, Cerner added the next component of its clinical management systems, RadNet, which focused on automating radiology department functions. The following year, pharmacy support was added with the PharmNet application. As with PathNet, each new component was based on the same application architecture, allowing applications to be seamlessly combined to share information across applications.

The flexibility of Cerner's HNA set it apart from its competitors as well. Through the 1980s and into the 1990s, hospitals, clinics, and their various departments typically purchased "best of breed" applications, that is, individual products from many different vendors. As more and more hospitals and their departments began to forge the health care networks that slowly came to dominate the health care industry in the 1990s, they were faced with the task of forcing integration of their disparate information systems and products. This created not only confusion within each system but also the need to maintain costly support personnel to integrate the systems and maintain their functionality. By basing their applications around a single architecture, Cerner demonstrated a marked advantage for functionality as well as cost-effective operation.

By 1990, more than 200 PathNet sites had been installed, solidifying Cerner's position as the leading maker of laboratory information systems. Cerner next moved to expand its product family beyond clinical management systems and into care management systems, with the introduction of its ProNet and CareNet products. ProNet provided automated support for patient management and registration, ordering, scheduling, and tracking processes. CareNet gave patient care planning, management, and measurement tools to nurses and other direct care providers. Care management was meant to play a central role in gathering information needed for the care process. With Cerner's care management tools, providers could more easily manage the many pieces of patient information, including demographic and financial data, health status, operations data such as treatment procedures and protocols, while linking this information to ordering, tracking, scheduling, and patient, case, and health records management.

By the end of 1991, Cerner's client base had expanded to 320 sites, producing revenues over $77 million and net earnings of $4.7 million. These sales still centered primarily around PathNet. Yet in 1991, Cerner moved closer to its goal of creating the paperless patient medical record with the acquisition of Intellimetrics Instrument Corporation of Massachusetts, and with the launch of its repository product line with the introduction of its Open Clinical Foundation (OCF). The OCF was an enterprisewide, relational database with multimedia capabilities, which captured the information generated by the various clinical and core systems to form a computer-based patient record, while also supporting data extraction capabilities for medical and outcomes research.

In 1991, Cerner also established its first international subsidiaries, in Australia and in the United Kingdom, marking the first implementation of its international strategy. In England, it took over service of PathNet systems originally installed in fifteen hospitals through a licensing agreement with McDonnell Douglas Information Systems. In Australia, agreement had been reached to install PathNet in the New South Wales Health System. With client sites already operating in Canada and Singapore, Cerner reached an agreement to install PathNet at the Riyadh Armed Forces Hospital in Saudi Arabia. International sales grew to $9 million by the end of 1991. By 1993, Cerner had established the first of its two German offices as well.

By the end of 1993, Cerner had completed the largest part of its product family, with the 1992 introduction of its SurgiNet and Open Management Foundation (OMF) products, and the 1993 introduction of its MRNet product. SurgiNet, part of Cerner's clinical management product line, offered information management support for operating room teams. OMF extended Cerner's repository line with tools for supporting management analysis and decision-making based on process-related information. MRNet functioned to link the OCF and OMF products in automating the chart management process for the medical records department. By 1993, Cerner's repository and care management products had begun to make significant contributions to the company's $120 million in revenues. Net earnings for 1993 reached $14.6 million.

In November 1993, Cerner acquired Megasource, Inc. in a stock-swap merger valued at approximately $6.7 million, creating the company's wholly owned Cerner Megasource Inc. subsidiary. The Megasource merger added an additional product to Cerner's clinical management group, MSmeds, which added information management capabilities to pharmacy operations. This merger was significant in that roughly 80 percent of all physician orders, both in inpatient and outpatient areas, went for either laboratory or pharmacy services. With Megasource, Cerner filled out a significant presence in both services. During 1993, also, Cerner moved to expand its client support services, opening regional offices in Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Kansas City, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., while providing 24-hour emergency support at its Kansas City headquarters.

Strategic alliances had formed a part of Cerner's growth since the early 1990s. By 1991, Cerner had participated in a joint venture with Sony Corporation's medical electronics division to develop the Cerner Pathology PACS Workstation, which integrated Sony's color video capabilities with Cerner information technology. A second collaboration was formed with Beckman Instruments Inc. to introduce PathTrac, which coupled parts of PathNet with Beckman's chemistry analyzer. A third alliance, with APACHE Medical Systems, Inc., gave PathNet, ProNet, and CareNet capabilities through APACHE workstations.

In 1994 Cerner extended its alliance strategy with the formation of the Cerner Alliance Program. Initial partners were SDK Health Care Information Systems of Boston, MEDIC Computer Systems of Raleigh, North Carolina, and Amisys Managed Care Information Systems of Rockville, Maryland. With these alliances, Cerner moved to add administrative and financial functions, based on HNA, that fell outside of its own development efforts. In addition to collaborating on engineering, the alliances also profited from some shared marketing activities.

By year-end 1994, more than 30 clients had contracted with Cerner for the broad implementation of the complete HNA system, including five contracts in the fourth quarter alone; another 100 clients had purchased multiple system components. The company rolled out support for the IBM RISC System/6000 processor and announced support for Microsoft's Windows interface. Revenues reached $156 million, and net earnings grew to $19.5 million, representing increases from 1990 of 217 percent and 686 percent, respectively. An important component of Cerner's success had been its aggressive R&D spending--more than $80 million in the first half of the 1990s, with plans to spend another $200 million by the year 2000.

In the mid-1990s, the trend toward consolidation and integration throughout the health care industry was evident. Increasing numbers of hospitals, clinics, physicians, and other providers were joining forces to create integrated health care organizations (IHOs). This trend would see a drop in the numbers of individual purchasers of information systems. Yet, the creation of large, regional health care systems would drive a resurgence in the need for automated information systems, with purchases of products and services expected to rise from $8.5 billion in 1995 to $13 billion by 1997. Cerner, with a mature product line centered around HNA raising $189.6 million in 1995 revenues, was positioned to continue its market leadership.

Principal Subsidiaries

Cerner Megasource, Inc.; Cerner Corporation Pty., Ltd. (Australia); Cerner Deutschland GmbH (Germany); Cerner Arabia Co. Ltd. (Saudi Arabia); Cerner Limited (U.K.).

Further Reading

Electronic Medical Record: Supporting Lifetime Health Management. Kansas City, Mo.: Cerner Corporation, 1995.

Intrarelation: Characterizing Cerner's Health Network Architecture. Kansas City, Mo.: Cerner Corporation, 1995.

Meyer, Gene, "Diagnoses on Cerner: More Growth Ahead," Kansas City Star, September 26, 1995, p. E20.

Tierney, Mary C., "Cerner Corporation," Business Digest, March 1996, p. 24.

— M. L. Cohen

For more information on CERN, visit Britannica.com.

CERN, located along the French-Swiss border near the Swiss capital Geneva, is the world's largest particle-physics laboratory. (The acronym stands for Conseil Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire, French for CERN's original name, the European Council for Nuclear Research; since October 1954, despite retention of the old acronym, CERN's name has actually been Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire.) CERN was founded in 1954 and today is supported by a consortium of 20 European nations and by a number of "observer states," including Japan and the U.S. Besides being responsible for many fundamental discoveries in particle physics, primarily through the use of particle accelerators, CERN is the birthplace of the World Wide Web.

CERN is a non-military organization; Article II. 1 of the multinational convention establishing the laboratory states that it "shall have no concern with work for military requirements and the results of its experimental and theoretical work shall be published or otherwise made generally available." However, CERN is unavoidably relevant to military affairs via the relevance of all physics to military affairs. The proposal in 1949 to form a regional European physics laboratory (i.e., CERN) was directly inspired by the explosion by the Soviet Union, in that year, of its first atomic bomb; furthermore, while CERN was being founded during the early 1950s, the building of particle accelerators in the United States was funded primarily by the military, which hoped to produce particle-beam weapons and to manufacture polonium for radiological warfare (i.e., the use of radioactive dust as a weapon). Both scientists and politicians involved in the founding of CERN were, therefore, aware that military applications of research in particle physics, though not predictable, might eventually occur. Furthermore, the advanced scientific equipment and techniques that would be developed at CERN and the large pool of expertise it would create and sustain were seen as basic military European assets. Likewise, the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Research financed research in fundamental physics in U.S. universities in the postwar years on the ground that even "untargeted" research— science for science's sake—could, on average, ultimately be counted on to bear military fruit.

Nevertheless, CERN is as non-military, non-secretive, and international as an institution could well be. The construction of a nuclear reactor at CERN was ruled out from the beginning precisely because of the obviously military applications of such technology. CERN has therefore focused on the use of particle accelerators for research, avoiding the production or use of militarily significant amounts of fissionable materials and leaving the military implications (if any) of its discoveries to be worked out by national and commercial laboratories. To further distinguish it from a weapons-research laboratory, CERN does not classify any of its results, but, in accordance with its founding convention, makes them openly available to all inquirers.

Design work for CERN's first facilities proceeded in Geneva, Switzerland during 1953 and 1954 while the final international agreements were being worked out by CERN's original 11 member states. Construction contracts were awarded in October 1954, and CERN's first accelerator, a 600 MeV proton synchro-cyclotron, began operation in 1957. Confirmation of pion decay was one of the first experimental results, beginning a long line of important physics results made at CERN.

Not all of CERN's contributions have been in the realm of physics; in 1990, CERN computer scientists Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau proposed a network of "hypertexts"(texts, images, and other information objects linked by computer addresses routinely hidden from the user) that would run on computers connected through the Internet, which was already used for file transfers, e-mail, and other purposes. They proposed that this network be called the World-Wide Web, a name which has stuck.

Approximately 6500 physicists from 80 countries work at CERN, which operates a number of particle accelerators and detectors. CERN's largest tool is a circular particle accelerator 16.7 miles (27 km) in circumference, located some 320 feet (100 m) underground. CERN can achieve higher particle energies than any other facility in the world, making it a key facility for ongoing advances in particle physics.

Further Reading

Books

Hermann, Armin, et al. History of CERN. Amsterdam: North-Holland Physics Publishing, 1987.

Electronic

"The CERN Archive." February 12, 2002. <http://library.cern.ch/archives/index.html> (March 11, 2003).

— LARRY GILMAN

Click here to submit an acronym.

CERN logo

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (French: Organisation européenne pour la recherche nucléaire), commonly known as CERN (see Naming), pronounced [sɝn] (or [sɛʀn] in French), is the world's largest particle physics laboratory, situated just northwest of Geneva on the border between France and Switzerland. The convention establishing CERN was signed on 29 September 1954. From the original 12 signatories of the CERN convention, membership has grown to the present 20 member states. Its main function is to provide the particle accelerators and other infrastructure needed for high-energy physics research. Numerous experiments have been constructed at CERN by international collaborations to make use of them.

The main site at Meyrin also has a large computer centre containing very powerful data processing facilities primarily for experimental data analysis, and because of the need to make them available to researchers elsewhere, has historically been (and continues to be) a major wide area networking hub.

CERN currently has approximately 2600 full-time employees. Some 7931 scientists and engineers (representing 500 universities and 80 nationalities), about half of the world's particle physics community, work on experiments conducted at CERN.

As an international facility, the CERN sites are not officially under Swiss or French jurisdiction, and some company vehicles have diplomatic number plates.

Naming

The acronym CERN originally stood, in French, for Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), which was a provisional council for setting up the laboratory, established by 11 European governments in 1952. The acronym was retained for the new laboratory after the provisional council was dissolved, even though the name changed to the current Organisation Européenne pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Organization for Nuclear Research) in 1954.^[1] According to Lew Kowarski, a former director of CERN, when the name was changed, the acronym could have become the awkward OERN, and Heisenberg said "But the acronym can still be CERN even if the name is [...]"

Soon after its establishment, the work at the laboratory went beyond the study of the atomic nucleus, into higher-energy physics, an activity which is mainly concerned with the study of interactions between particles. Therefore the laboratory operated by CERN is commonly referred to as the European laboratory for particle physics (Laboratoire européen pour la physique des particules) which better describes the current research being performed at CERN.

Scientific achievements

Several important achievements in particle physics have been made during experiments at CERN. These include, but are not limited to:

• 1973: The discovery of neutral currents in the Gargamelle bubble chamber.
• 1983: The discovery of W and Z bosons in the UA1 and UA2 experiments.
• 1995: The first creation of antihydrogen atoms in the PS210 experiment.
• 2001: The discovery of direct CP-violation in the NA48 experiments.

The 1984 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to Carlo Rubbia and Simon van der Meer for the developments that led to the discoveries of the W and Z bosons.

The 1992 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to CERN staff researcher Georges Charpak "for his invention and development of particle detectors, in particular the multiwire proportional chamber."

Current accelerator complex

CERN operates a network of six accelerators and a decelerator. Each machine in the chain increases the energy of particle beams before delivering them to experiments or to the next more powerful accelerator. Currently active machines are:

• Two linear accelerators generate low energy particles for injection into the Proton Synchrotron. The 50 MeV Linac2 is for protons, and the 4.2 MeV/u Linac3 is for heavy ions.^[2]
• The Proton Synchrotron Booster increases the energy of particles generated by the proton linear accelerator before they are transferred to the other accelerators.
• The Low Energy Ion Ring (LEIR) accelerates the ions from the ion linear accelerator, before transferring them to the Proton Synchrotron (PS). This accelerator was commissioned in 2005, after having been reconfigured from the previous Low Energy Anti-proton Ring (LEAR).
• The 28 GeV Proton Synchrotron (PS), built in 1959 and still operating as a feeder to the more powerful SPS.
• The Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS), a circular accelerator with a diameter of 2 kilometres built in a tunnel, which started operation in 1976. It was designed to deliver an energy of 300 GeV and was gradually upgraded to 450 GeV. As well as having its own beamlines for fixed-target experiments, it has been operated as a proton-antiproton collider, and for accelerating high energy electrons and positrons which were injected into the Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP). From 2008 onwards, it will inject protons and heavy ions into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
• The On-Line Isotope Mass Separator (ISOLDE), which is used to study unstable nuclei. Particles are initially accelerated in the PS Booster before entering ISOLDE. It was first commissioned in 1967 and was rebuilt with major upgrades in 1974 and 1992.
• The Antiproton Decelerator (AD), which reduces the velocity of antiprotons to about 10% the speed of light for research into antimatter.

The accelerator of the future: the Large Hadron Collider

Main article: Large Hadron Collider

Construction of the CMS detector for LHC at CERN

Most of the activities at CERN are currently directed towards building a new collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and the experiments for it. The LHC represents a large-scale, worldwide scientific cooperation project. Physics experiments are expected to start May 2008, delayed due to an inner triplet magnet assembly failing a pressure test in March 2007^[3][4].

The LHC tunnel is located 100 metres underground, in the region between the Geneva airport and the nearby Jura mountains. It uses the 27 km circumference circular tunnel previously occupied by LEP which was closed down in November 2000. CERN's existing PS/SPS accelerator complexes will be used to pre-accelerate protons which will then be injected into the LHC.

Six experiments (CMS, ATLAS, LHCb, TOTEM, LHC-forward and ALICE) are currently being built, and will be running on the collider; each of them will study particle collisions under a different point of view, and with different technologies. Construction for these experiments needed an extraordinary engineering effort. Just as an example, to lower the pieces for the CMS experiment into the underground cavern which will host it, a special crane will have to be rented from Belgium, which will be able to lift the almost 2000 tons for each piece. The first of the approximately 5,000 magnets necessary for construction was lowered down a special shaft at 13:00 GMT on 7 March 2005.

This accelerator will generate vast quantities of computer data, which CERN will stream to laboratories around the world for distributed processing (the GRID technology). In April 2005, a trial successfully streamed 600 MB per second to seven different sites across the world. If all the data generated by the LHC is to be analyzed, then scientists must achieve 1,800 MB per second before 2008.

Decommissioned accelerators

• The original linear accelerator (Linac1).
• The 600 MeV Synchro-Cyclotron (SC) which started operation in 1957 and was shut down in 1991.
• The Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR), an early collider built from 1966 to 1971 and operated until 1984.
• The Large Electron-Positron Collider (LEP), which operated from 1989 to 2000 and was the largest machine of its kind, housed in a 27 km-long circular tunnel which is now being used to build the Large Hadron Collider.
• The Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR), commissioned in 1982, which assembled the first pieces of true antimatter, in 1995, consisting of nine atoms of antihydrogen. It was closed in 1996, and superseded by the Antiproton Decelerator.

CERN sites

CERN's main site, looking from Switzerland towards France.

The smaller accelerators are located on the main Meyrin site (also known as the West Area), which was originally built in Switzerland alongside the French border, but has been extended to span the border since 1965. The French side is under Swiss jurisdiction and so there is no obvious border within the site, apart from a line of marker stones. There are six entrances to the Meyrin site:

• A, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel at specific times.
• B, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel 24/7. Often referred to as the main entrance
• C, in Switzerland. Open for all CERN personnel at specific times.
• D, in Switzerland. Open for goods reception at specific times.
• E, in France. Open for French-resident CERN personnel at specific times. Controlled by customs personnel. Named "Porte Charles de Gaulle" in recognition of his role in the creation of the CERN ^[5] it is known colloquially as "Checkpoint Charlie"^{[citation needed]}
• Tunnel entrance, in France. Open for equipment transfer to and from CERN sites in France by personnel with a specific permit. This is the only permitted route for such transfers. Under the CERN treaty, no taxes are payable when such transfers are made. Controlled by customs personnel.

The SPS and LEP/LHC tunnels are located underground almost entirely outside the main site, and are mostly buried under French farmland and invisible from the surface. However they have surface sites at various points around them, either as the location of buildings associated with experiments or other facilities needed to operate the colliders such as cryogenic plants and access shafts. The experiments themselves are located at the same underground level as the tunnels at these sites.

Three of these experimental sites are in France, with ATLAS in Switzerland, although some of the ancillary cryogenic and access sites are in Switzerland. The largest of the experimental sites is the Prévessin site, also known as the North Area, which is the target station for non-collider experiments on the SPS accelerator. Other sites are the ones which were used for the UA1, UA2 and the LEP experiments (the latter which will be used for LHC experiments).

Outside of the LEP and LHC experiments, most are officially named and numbered after the site where they were located. For example, NA32 was an experiment looking at the production of charmed particles and located at the Prévessin (North Area) site while WA22 used the BEBC bubble chamber at the Meyrin (West Area) site to examine neutrino interactions. The UA1 and UA2 experiments were considered to be in the Underground Area, i.e. situated underground at sites on the SPS accelerator.

Computer Science and CERN

This NeXTcube used by Berners-Lee(UK)at CERN became the first Web server.

The World Wide Web began as a CERN project called ENQUIRE, initiated by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau in 1990. Berners-Lee and Cailliau were jointly honored by the ACM in 1995 for their contributions to the development of the World-Wide Web.

Based on the concept of hypertext, the project was aimed at facilitating sharing information among researchers. The first website went on-line in 1991. On 30 April 1993, CERN announced that the World Wide Web would be free to anyone. A copy of the original first webpage, created by Berners-Lee, is kept here.

This Cisco Systems router at CERN was probably one of the first IP routers deployed in Europe.

Prior to the Web's development, CERN had been a pioneer in the introduction of Internet technology in Europe, beginning in the early 1980s. A short history of this period can be found here.

More recently, CERN has become a centre for the development of Grid computing, hosting among others the Enabling Grids for E-sciencE and LHC Computing Grid projects. It also hosts the CERN Internet Exchange Point (CIXP), one of the two main Internet Exchange Points in Switzerland.

Member States

Member States of CERN      Founding members      Members who joined CERN later

The original CERN signatories were:

•  Belgium
•  Denmark
•  Germany (then West Germany)
•  France
•  Greece
•  Italy
•  Norway
•  Sweden
•  Switzerland
•  Netherlands
•  United Kingdom
•  Yugoslavia

Since then:

•  Austria joined in 1959
•  Yugoslavia left in 1961
•  Spain joined in 1961, left in 1969, rejoined in 1983
•  Portugal joined in 1985
•  Finland joined in 1991
•  Poland joined in 1991
•  Hungary joined in 1992
•  Czech Republic joined in 1993
•  Slovakia joined in 1993
•  Bulgaria joined in 1999

There are currently twenty member countries.
Eight additional international organizations or countries have "observer status":

• European Commission
•  India
•  Israel
•  Japan
•  Russia
•  Turkey
• UNESCO
•  United States

Public exhibits

The Globe of Science and Innovation at CERN

Facilities at CERN open to the public include:

• The Globe of Science and Innovation, which recently opened and is used four times a week for special exhibits.
• The Microcosm museum on particle physics and CERN history.

In fiction

• CERN played an important part in Dan Brown's novel Angels and Demons.
• CERN played a prominent role in Stel Pavlou's novel Decipher.
• CERN was a prominent location in Robert J. Sawyer's novel Flashforward.
• CERN was mentioned in asides in Cliff Stoll's novel The Cuckoo's Egg (a non-fiction piece).
• CERN was mentioned in Michael Crichton's novel State of Fear.
• CERN was mentioned in John G. Cramer's novel Einstein's Bridge.
• CERN was mentioned in Anne McCaffrey's novel Pegasus in Space.
• CERN was referred to by Maddox in one of his older satire articles.
• CERN played a critical role in the final season of the TV series Lexx. Although not mentioned by name, the particle accelerator was described as doing all the same research that CERN actually does.

Notes

1. ^ The CERN Name, on the CERN website. Last accessed on 25 October 2006.
2. ^ http://linac2.home.cern.ch/linac2/default.htm
3. ^ BBC article on revised LHC schedule
4. ^ CERN report on LHC inner triplet incident
5. ^ (Nov. 2004) "Red Carpet for CERN's 50th". CERN bulletin. 

See also

• List of Directors General of CERN
• Fermilab
• ROOT
• Léon Van Hove
• SLAC

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

CERN

• Official site
• CERN at 50
• CERN chronology
• CERN Visits
• Hands-On-CERN (Educational Site about CERN and Particle Physics)
• Globe of Science and Innovation info
• Microcosm Museum Info
• CERN Courier - International Journal of High-Energy Physics
• NYT's A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions

Coordinates: 46°14′03″N, 6°03′10″E

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