Why do popular science articles always sound like this? First, there’s a splashy lead with a BIG claim:
A team at Harvard has just published results showing that nanorobots could cure provide the cure to cancer.
Then, an overview of the "quest"– including the fundamentally flawed current methods:
Scientists have long struggled to find a way to destroy cancer cells without damaging healthy tissue. Traditional techniques rely on high-dose chemotherapy or radiation techniques, which not only kill cancer cells, but also weaken the patient and his or her immune system.
Then, THE SOLUTION! Someone smart has made a fundamentally new discovery that will solve everything!
Recently however, Professor X has discovered a way to make nanorobots that chew apart the cell membranes of cancerous cells — leaving healthy cells intact.
Except… most research involves only tiny, incremental progress. So next we have the clarifying details that were so far left out:
The team synthesized jointed macromolecules that change configuration when binding to antigens on the surface of a cell.
Ah-hah. So "nanorobot" just means a big molecule that changes shape.
In laboratory experiments, the binding of a molecule to the cell membrane made it bend, causing an increase in stress on the cell membrane. Over a period of several days, the induced stress increased the probability of rupture by 20%.
…and "chewing" means "pulls on in such a way that eventually it breaks." Oh, and the effect takes a long time and usually doesn’t work.
Professor X is optimistic about the prospects for clinical therapy. "In the next step, we hope to demonstrate enhanced cell rupture due to binding to cancer-specific antigens on the membrane surface," she said.
Translation: actually, the experiments don’t have anything to do with cancer yet. Nothing whatsoever. But hopefully there is something different about the surface of cancer cells and regular cells, and then we can use that difference to bind our molecules! And lastly: a quote of praise and a quote of dismissal:
"X’s work has pioneered the development of nanosynthesis techniques in medical molecular therapy," said Professor Y of Stanford.
(That’s X’s former thesis advisor.)
Others are skeptical, however. Said Professor Z of UCLA, "Using mechanical changes to induce cell death is in the long run, probably not the way to go. Purely chemical methods are likely to be much more successful in inducing membrane rupture."
Translation: Professor Z himself studies chemical methods.
Sigh. The truth is that most scientific results are incremental, not revolutionary. Only once in a long while is a result truly useful, powerful, and immediately applicable. I guess that story doesn’t go over well in the press, though, so you hear the one above. But the REAL story seems more like this: you try this and that. You look at a number of pretty interesting problems with pretty interesting solutions. You write some papers. If you are very, very lucky, and also in the right place at the right time, one of your pretty interesting ideas is actually really useful, too. Like you invent the atomic force microscope, or a better LED, or synthesize buckyballs. But face it: if research actually WORKED more of the time, they’d call it "product development." So in the meantime, you enjoy your interesting problems and hope for the best.
