In the 1996 science-fiction film The Fantastic Voyage, a team of scientists and doctors are shrunk to microscopic size and injected into the body of an injured man to __15__ his life. The tiny crew travels through the body’s dangerous environment to locate and repair the damaged part of the man’s body. Eventually, the group manages to accomplish the mission and the man awakens, fully cured. Such an idea, while fun, sounds extraordinary to many. But__16__ if it were possible to cure a disease like cancer, injecting tiny particles into a person that would not only find the cancer but also destroy it without harming anything else in the body? Although it may sound like science fiction, tools like this are now being developed and may in fact become common in the near future, thanks to research in the field of nanotechnology.
Ted Sargent, a leading researcher in the field of nanotechnology, describes how using quantum 3 dots, particles that are a few nanometers in__17__ , will help diagnose disease. The particles shine brightly when exposed to UV light. These particles can be injected into the body and programmed to bond only to a certain type of cell, for example, a particular cancer cell. Doctors can then use a camera and look for the colored particles,__18__ will help them determine where cancer cells are growing in a person’s body. Using this technology, it will be possible to detect cancer at an earlier stage. One of the advantages of detecting and treating cancer at an early stage is that the cells are less likely to become resistant to drug treatment. In later stages, cancer cells often change and adapt to certain drugs so rapidly that many medicines become ineffective.
Once a certain type of cancer is detected, nanotechnology will also radically improve the way it is treated. Right now, most cancer treatments kill not only the cancerous cells but the__19__ ones as well, causing a number of side effects in people, such as hair loss, nausea, and intense pain. Nanoparticles, on the other hand, will allow doctors to attack cancerous tumors without disturbing healthy cells. The goal will be to deliver cancer-killing drugs, carried via the nanoparticles to the bad cells only. Unfortunately, even though nanoparticles have great medical potential, there are serious concerns that these same materials could have negative environmental and health effects. In recent studies, fish exposed to water containing large amounts of nanoparticles suffered brain damage, and people are at __20__ too. After exposing lab-grown human cells to water containing large amounts of nanoparticles, researchers found that half the human cells died. Because nanotechnology is so potentially useful, many scientists don’t think research into its many uses should be stopped; learning more about nanotechnology should remain a priority.
But scientists do believe that governments should allocate more money for safety-related studies to make __21__ that large concentrations of nanoparticles do not get into our food and water supplies and cause serious problems. Meanwhile, research into the uses of nanotechnology in health and many__ 22__ fields continues. “What’s amazing is how quickly this is evolving,” says chemist Vicki Colvin. “Even ten years ago, a lot of these applications would have seemed pretty unrealistic.” Perhaps that old movie, The Fantastic Voyage, isn’t so hard to believe after all.
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