Wired News: Nanotech Moves Closer to Cure

Wired News: Nanotech Moves Closer to Cure: "
Nanotech Moves Closer to Cure By Howard Lovy
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68195,00.html
02:00 AM Jul. 26, 2005 PT
When Dr. James Baker returned from the first Gulf War in 1991, his University of Michigan colleagues must have assumed the medical researcher's head had sustained a direct Scud missile hit. The good doctor came home with some pretty wacky ideas.

Here was one of them: Instead of using live viruses to destroy diseased cells, why not send in man-made, nanoscale molecules with tiny tendrils that scientists could engineer to battle specific types of cancers?
Remember, this was the early '90s. Few had even heard of the internet, much less 'nanotechnology,' which was then firmly the domain of futurists, and certainly not on the radar of respectable beaker slingers.
'In fact, there was a lot of derision at NIH (National Institutes of Health) that this was not real science,' Baker recalls. 'But as it became clear that gene therapy was not going anywhere without different approaches, I think the reality of, the necessity of, bioengineering in this process became clear.'

Today, the National Cancer Institute is on its way to becoming a Nano Cancer Institute as it prepares to spend $144.3 million over five years on the engineered nanoparticles 'approach' that Baker and just a few others had championed more than a decade ago.