(CBS) And on an August day in 2005, Curley and Kanzius put them to the test. Would the metallic nanoparticles heat up enough to kill cancer?

"So we take the nanoparticles, we put 'em in the radio field. And in about 15 seconds, they’re boiling and heating and Steve Curley couldn't contain himself. He called Rick Smalley and he said, 'Rick, you’re not going to believe this. He just blew the smithereens out of your nanoparticles,'" Kanzius recalled.

Smalley's response? "The only thing that I got out of him after this pause was, “Holy s…,'" Curley recalled.

Not long after that day, Smalley died of lymphoma. Once a skeptic, he had become one of Kanzius' biggest supporters.

"He didn’t expect it, but he embraced it to his death bed when he told Dr. Curley this will change medicine forever. Don't stop, no matter what you do," Kanzius told Stahl.

And they haven't stopped. They’ve already shown that the Kanzius machine can heat nanoparticles and cook cancer to death in animals. Dr. Curley with rabbits, and in Pittsburgh, Dr. David Geller demonstrated to 60 Minutes how he used nanoparticles, made from gold, to kill liver cancer cells grown in rats.

"Now what we’re going to do is inject the nanoparticles," Dr. Geller explained. "Directly into the tumor."

In the study the rats, anesthetized to keep them still, were exposed to the Kanzius radio waves. Dr. Geller later examined their tumors under a microscope.

"What you can see is that cells are starting to fall apart. You see white spaces in between them. The body of the cell is shrinking, the cells are starting to die," Geller pointed out.

"And can you tell from this whether the area surrounding the tumor had any destruction?" Stahl asked.

"Grossly inspecting the animal, we did not see not see any damage to the surrounding tissue," Geller said.

So far, the Kanzius method has only been applied to solid, localized tumors in animals. The ultimate goal is to treat cancer that has metastasized or spread to other parts of the body. Those undetectable rogue cells are what most often kill people with cancer and the trick is finding them.

"If we can't target the microscopic cells this is not going to be a cure," Curley said.

Produced by Tanya Simon
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