Sunlight is a type of radiation, as are the invisible waves picked up by your radio antenna and turned into an audio signal. Neither is radiation uncontrollable or unnatural. Radiation of various sorts is safely utilized by modern technology, such as the kind that cooks your dinner inside the microwave oven. In this sense, without radiation we would not exist at all. But certain types of radiation most certainly are dangerous, especially because of their capacity to cause cancer.
Sunlight is a good example, a fact to which anyone who has had a melanoma can attest.
John M. Cameron is professor of physics and director of the Indiana University Cyclotron Facility , a national research center in Bloomington, Ind. Photo Tyagan Miller . Which is exactly why John Cameron and an IU team at the MPRI are working to increase the amount of control doctors have. And that marriage is making possible a new technique whereby radiation is not enemy but ally, not the cause of cancer, but a novel part of the cure. The new technique going on at the IUCF in Bloomington is called proton therapy . In a fundamental sense, though, it isn't really new.