Man Facing Leukemia Invents Nanotech Cancer Treatment

When John Kanzius found himself facing aggressive and debilitating chemotherapy treatment for advanced leukemia, seeing the effect the treatment had on fellow patients, he decided to find a better way. Kanzius had worked for decades with radio technology, and understood that radio waves could pass harmlessly through the body. He also knew they could heat metal even at low frequencies.

He decided to try to find a way to embed metal into the malignant cells, so they could be targeted by simple radio waves, leaving the surrounding tissue healthy and intact. An obvious part of the problem would be obtaining and directing metal particles small enough to fit into cancer cells. The biggest challenge, however, would be finding a way to inject a large enough number to have the desired effect, without inadvertently loading healthy cells with the targeting conductive particles.

The Los Angeles Times reported of Kanzius:

Awake in bed one night in 2003, as the clock ticked past 2, Kanzius pulled himself from beneath the covers, leaving his sleeping wife, Marianne. He staggered down a flight of stairs, grabbed some copper wires, boxes, antennas and Marianne’s pie pans, and began building a machine.

For months, Kanzius tinkered, using the pie pans to create an electronic circuit, often waking Marianne with his clanging. By day, he sent her out with supply lists: mineral mixtures, metals, wires.

His early-morning experiments would lead him to one of the nation’s top cancer researcher centers, and earn the support of a Nobel Prize winner.

After his cancer appeared to go into remission, he was re-diagnosed with a more aggressive form of cancer, and given less than one year to live. Further aggressive treatments put the disease into remission, and two years later, Kanzius continued research into building his tumor-burning machine. He had tested crude versions of the device on hot-dogs and other meats, and found that the burning was targetted. For human tissue, it would need to be far more precise.

He obtained a patent for his machine, and began to seek help in manufacturing the device. He would need nanoparticles that could be made to attach to cancer cells only, reliably. His doctor put him in touch with Dr. Steven A. Curley, an oncologist specializing in more invasive radio-frequency cancer treatments.

Curley was able to obtain state of the art nanoparticles (1/75,000th to 1/100,000th the width of a human hair) from Richard Smalley, a Nobel-prize winning chemist experienced in nanoparticles, also suffering from cancer, and took them to Kanzius to test whether they would heat enough to yield the desired targetted burn effect. They did.

Smalley was astonished by the news when it reached him, and asked colleagues at Rice University to team with Curley and Kanzius and make the treatment a reality. Shortly before succumbing to his cancer, Smalley urged Curley to promise he would continue the work, reportedly saying “Nothing has the potential to help people, to help patients, more than this.”

As research progressed, it was discovered that Kanzius’ system may also be effective in separating hydrogen atoms from water, making it a good candidate for the basis of a technology to extract hydrogen from salt water for use as a fuel.

The nanoparticle radio-frequency cancer treatment Kanzius developed is now progressing through the various stages of research it must pass before it can be tested in human beings. But Kanzius’ innovative thinking, daring and commitment to his vision have made it likely the system will become a standard option for treatment of some hard-to-combat cancers, in the coming decade.

• LA Times: “Sending his cancer a signal”
• Wikipedia: “John Kanzius”

Spaceblooms: Is Future of Farming in Outer Space?

Space flora or “xflora”, a category of synthetic biochemical organism, engineered to exist in floating colonies in space, combines nano-technology with and biotechnology. While it sounds near impossible, the concept is to create organisms that can feed from their environment, even where that environment would be deadly (for chill, high radiation or lack of nutrients) to Earthborne organisms, and that can be harvested freely as future “off-Earth” human colonies or transports may require.

One of the most obvious applications would be the potential for such vegetation to greatly extend the viable length of space journeys, providing a “native” farming option for astronauts, and a potential means of adaptation to life in zero-gravity, zero-atmosphere space.

NASA is reportedly working on potential test projects for space flora, and specifically the application of such technologies to creating an environment on Mars where human beings could take shelter and use space-age subsistence farming to keep a research colony going.

An astonishing array of ambitions accompany this field of research, including the hope of being able to implant nanotechnology into the cells of individual plants, to enable them to find light more efficiently, and to promote blooming on cue, and the ability to manipulate up or down the crop density for a given spacebloom.

The future-set web report Spacebloom: a Field Guide to Cosmic Xflora relays from the 23rd century the (currently future) history of space flora and off-Earth self-sustaining farming. The site’s “intro” section speaks of a 150 year period of massive innovation and quips that “The roots of this knowledge explosion can be traced to the middle of the 21st century, when, after many decades of empty rhetoric and grandiose posturing, a worldwide focus on equal access to all levels of education was realized.”

The key to the story, be it theory or practice, is that the field of spacebloom research has been opened, at NASA and by curious seekers, and it will be fed by the imagination of many. The goal of achieving self-propagating, self-reproducing synthetic organisms that can both harvest nourishment from and provide nourishment efficiently in outer space, takes us far beyond the scope of current thought in the realm of agriculture, with possible lessons, potential hazards, and many tempting possibilities, even for the realm of agricultural practice on Earth.

• Mutable Matter: “Salad Machines in Space”
• Spacebloom.net: “Spacebloom: A Field Guide to Cosmic Xflora”