<
Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons
NASA-funded scientists are crafting microscopic vessels that can venture into the human body and repair problems -- one cell at a time.
Listen to this story via streaming audio, or a downloadable file (help).
January 15, 2002
It's like a scene from the movie "Fantastic Voyage." A tiny vessel -- far smaller than a human cell -- tumbles through a patient's bloodstream, hunting down diseased cells and penetrating their membranes to deliver precise doses of medicines.
Only this isn't Hollywood. This is real science.
Tiny capsules much smaller than these blood cells may someday be injected into people's bloodstreams to treat conditions ranging from cancer to radiation damage. Copyright 1999, Daniel Higgins, University of Illinois at Chicago.
Researchers funded by a grant from NASA recently began a project to make this futuristic scenario a reality. If successful, the "vessels" developed by these scientists -- called nanoparticles or nanocapsules -- could help make another science fiction story come true: human exploration of Mars and other long-term habitation of space.
While space applications will be the researchers' primary focus, nanoparticles also hold great potential for many fields of medicine, particularly cancer treatment. The tantalizing promise of delivering tumor-killing poisons directly to cancerous cells, thus averting the ravaging side-effects of chemotherapy, has generated a lot of interest in nanoparticles among the medical community.
(Full Story Here)
Upgrading the primary tool of exploration -- the human body.
Cheers,
Dan
Voyage of the Nano-Surgeons . . .