I met one of the authors of one of the cited papers, Tom Budinger, when he was a professor at UC Berkeley and I was a postdoc. We were chatting one day about various biophysics things and he explained how he basically looked into a particle accelerator to see if it could explain "that scene in The Right Stuff". I was kind of shocked, but he pointed out that he was one of the world experts in nuclear radiation and was extremely careful to do a bunch of math to find ways to reduce the number of particles to be well within the safety range, and "you're always allowed to experiment on yourself".