Proton radiotherapy: some perspectives

A news article highlighting the use of protons in radiotherapy is presented. Development of stereotaxic radiosurgery is the result of contributions from physicists, radiologists, and neurosurgeons, says Jacob Fabrikant, MD, head of the Arteriovenous Malformation Program at the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley laboratory. It also appears to have been the product of Harvard University (Boston) and University of California (Berkeley) cooperation. Robert R. Wilson, PhD, now a professor emeritus at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, is credited with proposing the medical use of charged particles. Wilson, a physicist, says that the idea occurred to him while he was at Berkeley in the mid-1940's, designing the cyclotron to be built at Harvard. Although he was aware of their work, he does not remember discussing it with Robert Stone, MD, or John Lawrence, MD, who only a few years earlier at Berkeley had begun the initial medical experiments with neutrons. Wilson says that it simply occurred to him that in certain instances charged particles had two advantages over x-rays