Sunday, January 15, 2012

Every so often, I worry about the future

Then I see stories like this one about Angela Chang.  Angela is a high school student in Cupertinio, Washington.  And she may have just cured cancer.  Seriously.  In most respects, Angela is like other teenage high school girls.  For example, she likes shoes and is trying to master the fine art of driving a car.  She also wrote a research paper "for fun" in her spare time about an intriguing method for curing cancer.  Angela came up with the idea of mixing cancer medicine with a polymer that would attach to nanoparticles.  The nanoparticles were crafted to attach themselves to cancer cells.  Actually, I am getting ahead of myself.  First she just concentrated on getting the nanoparticles with a heavy metal to attach to the invasive cells so an MRI would show a doctor exactly where the tumors were.  Once that worked on mice, she jumped to the idea of adding in the targeted cancer medication.  Then she zapped the cells with infra red light and voila the polymer melted and the cancer drugs were released straight into the diseased cells, leaving the healthy ones untouched.  So with the future in the hands of young women like Angela, I worry a little less about where we are headed.

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