Gold Nanorods

I've written about this before: the cool nanotechnology that uses the tiniest gold particles to combat tumors.

(It promopted me to write "There's gold in thar tumors!", which I thought was one of my better lines in Lympho Bob.)

It's come up again, in a new and improved version. (The gold treatment, I mean, not the funny line.) Researchers at Rice University have found a way to put 200  million gold particles into a single cancer cell. Obviously, they aren't doing this for kicks; it's the first step in figuring out how to kill the cell. The plan is to eventually fire a low-power laser at the cell, which will heat the gold nanoparticles and kill the cell. Such tiny particles create a very small amount of heat, so the challenge has been trying to get a sufficient number of them into the cell. The Rice University research seems to have accomplished this task.

I like this kind of research. It's sort of weird, which makes me think it might be useful. Sometimes a route other than the familiar surgery/chemo/radiation trio is necessary to get us to rethink what we are doinga dn why. So maybe this will work, or spark some other way of thinking about how to wipe out cancer cells.