A prophet stands in front of four listeners. He says "I predict that all my predictions will be wrong". One onlooker responds "Gosh! He said that last year and he was right!"

It is said that they only ask you to predict the future if you are very old and/or will not be living long enough to know if you were correct. Hopefully I will live long enough to see if some of my predictions come true and also to contribute to some of them. However, 'crystal ball gazing' is a very unscientific process because physicists are trained to study and analyse situations, report their findings, draw conclusions and stop at that. Predicting the future is almost the antithesis of the scientific process.

So, I suggest that the goal of medicine and supporting science is to ensure that people live long and die quickly and I contrasted this with the past scenarios.

Steve Webb has been Professor of Radiological Physics since 1996 and Head of the Joint Department of Physics of the ICR/RMH since 1998. He is also a Team Leader in Radiotherapy Physics. He has PhD and DSc degree, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (FInstP), the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine (FIPEM) and the Royal Society (of) Arts (FRSA). He is a Chartered Physicist (CPhys) and a Chartered Clinical Scientist (CSci).

Steve has published some 200 peer-review papers in medical imaging and the physics of radiation therapy, as well as 5 single-author textbooks and an 'edited by' in these areas. With conference papers his list exceeds 500. He is Editor in Chief of the international journal Physics in Medicine and Biology. He was awarded the Silvanus Thompson Medal of the British Institute of Radiology in 2004 and the Barclay Medal in 2006. He has been Visiting Professor at DKFZ Heidelberg, The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre New York and Harvard (Mass General Hospital, Boston). He is Director of the radiotherapy part of the European School for Medical Physics. He is an Institute Trustee.