July 20, 2008
The Kanzius Machine: A Cancer Cure?
Inventor Tells 60 Minutes He Hopes To Live Long Enough To See Machine Cure Humans
-
Play CBS Video
Video
The Kanzius Machine
Lesley Stahl meets a man who invented a machine that may kill cancer cells using radio waves. (This segment was originally broadcast on April 13, 2008.)
-
Video
Cancer Machine Shows Promise
John Kanzius, a cancer patient, invented a machine that uses radio waves to kill cancer cells. Harry Smith speaks with Kanzius and Dr. Steven Curley, who is testing the device.
-
Photo
John Kanzius (CBS)
-
Interactive
Cancer
Learn about the most common cancers, who gets them and how they are treated.
"That was the next $64,000 question," Kanzius said.
The answer would cost much more than that. Kanzius spent about $200,000 just to have a more advanced version of his machine built. He knew that metal heats up when it's exposed to high-powered radio waves. So what if a tumor was injected with some kind of metal, and zapped with a focused beam of radio waves? Would the metal heat up and kill the cancer cells, but leave the area around them unharmed?
He did his first test with hot dogs.
"I'm going to inject it with some copper sulfate," Kanzius explained, demonstrating the machine. "And I’m going to take the probe right at the injection site."
Kanzius placed the hot dog in his radio wave machine, and Stahl watched to see if the temperature would rise in that one area where the metal solution was and nowhere else.
"And when I saw it start to go up I said, 'Eureka, I've done it,'" Kanzius remembered. "And I said, 'God, I gotta shut this off and see whether it's still cold down below.' So I shut it off, took my probe, went down here where it wasn’t injected. And the temperature dropped back down. And I said, 'God, maybe I got something here.'"
Kanzius thought he had found a way attack cancer cells without the collateral damage caused by chemotherapy and radiation. Today, his invention is in the laboratories of two major research centers - the University of Pittsburgh and M.D. Anderson, where Dr. Steven Curley, a liver cancer surgeon, is testing it.
"This technology may allow us to treat just about any kind of cancer you can imagine," Dr. Curley told Stahl. "I've gotta tell you, in 20 years of research this is the most exciting thing that I’ve encountered."
That's because Kanzius impressed Curley with another remarkable idea: to combine the radio waves from his device with something cutting edge - space age nanoparticles made of metal or carbon. They are so small that thousands of them can fit in a single cancer cell. Because they’re metallic, Kanzius was hoping his radio waves would heat them up and kill the cancer.
"If these nanoparticles work then we truly have something huge here," Kanzius told Stahl.
Enter Rick Smalley, another cancer patient at M.D. Anderson and the man who won the Nobel Prize for discovering nanoparticles made from carbon. As luck would have it, Dr. Curley was called in one day to examine Smalley. Before leaving, he asked him for some of his nanoparticles.
"I proceeded to tell him what I wanted to do and that I thought they would heat. He looked at me with sort of a studied long look and didn’t say anything. And then he looked at me and said, 'It won’t work,'" Curley remembered. "And just laughed and said, 'Well, look, I'll give you some. But don't be too disappointed.'"
So Dr. Curley brought a vial of those precious nanoparticles to John Kanzius.
Produced by Tanya Simon
© MMVIII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Recent Segments
Scroll Left
Scroll Right


- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
...
- 6
- next
See all 264 CommentsThank You John Kanzius.
My best hopes are that you too benefit from a cure.
dogsoul your language certainly adds nothing to a conversation except a display of ignorance.
You are so right, how many other better cures are out there that the drug companies squash because it would interfere with their business. How easy it is for major corporations to kill a brilliant idea, just so they can keep their profits.
After all, if you cure someone, they don''t need to buy your drugs anymore.
You''ll need to go to Canada or Europe for this non-drug remedy, just like you have to now for biofeedback and other so-called "alternative" (i.e. alternative to drugs) cancer treatments that actually WORK. As long as the big drug companies have a powerful lobby in America, devices like this will be discredited and/or outlawed.
Somehow, this statement leads me to doubt your claim. If you were in the top 5%, you would be able to understand that intelligence is only a measure of the information you have access to, whether in your brain, or in your computer.
Information is intelligence, knowing how to use intelligence is wisdom. Do you possess more information than 95% of the world''s population?
Seeing as how quantum physics is nothing more than the study of mathematical abstractions to explain the nature of matter and energy in the universe, and is no more "intelligent" than an aboriginal forest dwellers knowledge of how best to survive in their own environment, it is highly doubtful.
Posted by uc2it at 03:03 AM : Apr 11, 2008
Priceless! Thanks for keeping the academic stereotype alive! And, of course, the best laugh we''ll get today, so thank you for that.
I pray this guy is correct but if he is, expect him either to have a sudden course of Death or that the machine will be purchased by a front company for Big Pharma and then thrown in the river.
I think you are a Big Pharma plant and a Snob and I fully expect that you fully support the Global Warming and the Bird Flu p r i c k s not to mention MMR.
According to a story published elsewhere, he was later able to secure a sample of carbon nanotubes, following his earlier hot dog experiments. To the amazement of many, he was able to boil water with the carbon nanotubes mixed in. This behavior was totally unexpected by researchers, as the nanotubes are far too small to be resonant at those frequencies. An explanation of how these particles heat at these low frequencies has not been made public to my knowledge.
As carbon nanotubes have not been approved for human research, gold nanotubes will probably be used, if and when tests are conducted on humans. Early reports indicate that healthy test tissue within 1 millimeter of the treated tissue suffered no damage by the process.
It is highly doubtful any possible cure for cancer will ever find it''s way toward benefiting humanity as long as the drug companies are in control of politicians. For them, there is no profit in it.... and our government won''t allow it either because they would have to pay most of us social security longer.
Pathetic, but true...
All reasearchers working for the drug companies are under strict orders to NOT develop any cures for anything. What they work on and develop full-time is TREATMENTS.
A cure is a short-term investment by a patient, whereas a treatment is a LIFE TIME COMMITTMENT, a never-ending stream of money to drug companies and the health care system.
I built one and have used it for the last 5 years...
I had prastate cancer..it is gone......some one in your employ is not doing thier home work......GET YOUR FACTS STRAIGHT.GIVE CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DO
guillfordn@bellsouth.net
Poowah@bellsouth.net
google it he did it and not one word!!!
big oil get to him?
big gov.??
his machine can also do this
modify a few oil burning water boiling plants and bingo!!!
google it he did it AND NOT ONE WORD ABOUT THIS!!!
big oil get to him?
big gov.??
his machine can also do this
modify a few oil burning, water boiling plants and bingo!!!
google it he did it AND NOT ONE WORD ABOUT THIS!!!
big oil get to him?
big gov.??
I am very disappointed by 60 min. that they didnt even mention this.
that attach to the Aids Virus could carry the nano
metal particles and burn the virus.
his machine can also do this
modify a few oil burning, water boiling plants and bingo!!!
google it he did it AND NOT ONE WORD ABOUT THIS!!!
big oil get to him?
big gov.??
I am very disappointed by 60 min. that they didnt even mention this.
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
...
- 6
- next
See all 264 Comments