The connection between physics and cancer is peculiarly intimate—as intimate as cause and effect. For radiation, a valuable agent in the treatment of cancer, can itself cause cancer. This curious interrelationship exists largely because no one knows what causes growth, whether it be normal or abnormal. The primary problem in cancer is not an exploration of such isolated problems as the connection between radiation and cancer. It is the much larger and much more stimulating problem of understanding the fundamentals of growth.
The first necessary step, therefore, is an examination of the contributions that physics can make to the larger problem of growth, rather than to the more limited and purely applied problem of the treatment of cancer. This is just another way of asking the even more fundamental question: What can physics bring to biology? Precisely because cancer is not yet understood, and precisely because the explanation may lie...
