This week, Newsweek
reported another ‘breakthrough in the search for a cure for cancer.’
Getting patients’ hopes up only to see them overtaken by the speed of
the disease or outright disavowal weeks or months or years later has become the
central disheartening reality of oncology. And while proof of concept is now in
hand for an ingenious new approach, its potential for medical treatment may or
may not have its greatest potential in the cure for cancer. But it holds immense
promise in many more ways than this.
Cylindrical nanotubes made of graphene,
ingested through a pill or intravenous access, enter the blood stream where
they are “programmed” to bind to cancer cells, and cancer cells ONLY – even
microscopic ones not otherwise detectable and therefore treatable. Heated by
radio waves, they literally “burn” cancer cells away, leaving healthy tissue
intact. 2,000 such nanotubes can be made
to fit into a single erythrocyte,
or red blood cell. The invention is now going into human trials, with
breathtaking promise.
What matters most is not any single application but the concept of
engineering tissues, structures and layers at the nanolevel. Another leading
cause of death in humans is coronary heart disease – which, in reality, is neither limited to coronary arteries nor to
the heart but affects the entire vascular system in all organs to a greater or
lesser extent. Being able to strip away layer by layer the plaque that lines
our vessels could not only add considerable length to life but also to its
quality.
And the range of applications goes on. Medicine is replete with known
causalities for which we lack the infinitesimally fine and subtle tools to
manipulate individual cells and organs in the body. Nanotechnology provides
those tools in principle, through a variety of manipulation and control
techniques that, for the patient, do not necessarily feel all that much like
space-age science. But they are.
At the same time, at least given the cost of present-day manufacture,
manipulation, and imaging,
nanotechnology is sure to boost another quantum leap in the explosion of health
care cost. Still, that was also the thought at the cradle of the computer
revolution when IBM president Thomas J. Watson reputedly said in the early 1940s, “I think there is a world market for about five computers.” Right. Elementary, Watson.
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