Wired News surveys current work on nanotech for cancer treatment: “It’s a space-opera scene we know by heart: The hero’s tiny craft faces off against the vast enemy ship. Now scale down the set a billion times or so, and replace Luke Skywalker’s X-wing and the Death Star with a clump of drug-bearing molecules and a misshapen cancer cell.
“This scenario — from a National Cancer Institute video — is just one possibility offered by the burgeoning field of cancer nanotechnology, where miniscule molecules are designed with literally atomic precision to combat a disease that kills half a million Americans every year….
“Indeed, the National Cancer Institute, which recently announced two waves of funding for nanotech training and research, sees nanotechnology as vital to its stated goal of ‘eliminating suffering and death from cancer by 2015.’ ”
About the video: despite being on a high-speed connection, I ended up viewing the low-speed version. The high-speed one just took too long to download.—Christine
