therapy with heavy ions Treatment with ion beams is a very precise and highly effective, yet extremely gentle, therapeutic process. The major advantage of this method is that the ion beams, which have [...] widespread medical application. As a pioneer of heavy ion therapy in Europe, GSI has become a central research center in this field today. The novel heavy ion therapy was pioneered in joint research of the GSI [...] treatment with heavy ions had initially been conducted as early as December 1997. This had been preceded by four years of technical development of the therapy unit at the heavy-ion accelerator of GSI, which