The Kanzius Machine

by Aimee Amodio | More from this Blogger

20 Apr 2008 12:17 PM

A former businessman named John Kanzius is working on a cure for cancer. No, he's not a scientist or a doctor. He's a guy who battled leukemia and spent a lot of time on the cancer ward at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Kanzius said it was the sad faces of the children that inspired him. Although he's been through more than thirty rounds of chemotherapy for his own cancer, he started work on his radio wave machine because of the kids.

During a sleepless night, Kanzius remembered the radios he built as a child. Using his wife's pie pans, he assembled a radio wave machine that is being heralded as one of the most promising breakthroughs in cancer research in years.

His wife thought he was losing his mind.

Here's how the radio wave machine works, according to a report by 60 Minutes: one box sends radio waves to another box. This creates enough energy to activate the gas in a fluorescent light. The radio waves are harmless to humans and animals -- Kanzius was looking for a way to treat cancer without the side effects. Metal heats up when exposed to high powered radio waves; Kanzius' theory was that you could inject a cancerous tumor with some kind of metal and hit it with radio waves. The tumor would be destroyed but the flesh would survive.

Kanzius spent nearly two hundred thousand dollars to have a bigger, more advanced version of his machine built. He ran his first tests with hot dogs, injecting them with various metals and testing the temperature of the meat at different places. As he'd hoped, the radio waves only heated up the area with metal -- the rest of the hot dog stayed cold.

Now the Kanzius machine is in testing at two major cancer research centers: M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Texas and the University of Pittsburgh. Scientists are using nanoparticles -- tiny bits of metal or carbon so small that thousands can fit into a single cancer cell. The Kanzius machine has already successfully cooked away cancerous tumors in lab animals.

Some day, scientists hope to be able to use the radio wave machine to treat cancer that has spread to more than one part of the body. It will be at least four years before researchers are ready to test the Kanzius machine on human subjects -- but Kanzius himself hopes to live long enough to be the first volunteer.

Learn more about Aimee Amodio

Aimee is a fiction writer... dog lover... music lover...

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