Computer Science CS855 class assignment - predict a futuristic reality 10 years out.

Prediction: Based on the current state of research efforts, I predict that radio waves will be successfully applied to humans to fire up nanotubes embedded in tumors and destroying liver cancer in humans in the next ten years. (See excerpt from real article below describing the current state of the research in this area)
http://www.media.rice.edu/media/NewsBot.asp?MODE=VIEW&ID=10217
11/02/2007
Radio waves fire up nanotubes embedded in tumors, destroy liver cancer
BY SCOTT MERVILLE

Special to the Rice News

Cancer cells treated with carbon nanotubes can be destroyed by noninvasive radio waves that heat up the nanotubes while sparing untreated tissue, a research team from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center and Rice University found in preclinical experiments.

In a paper now posted online and to be printed in the December issue of the journal Cancer, the scientists show that the technique completely destroyed liver cancer tumors in rabbits. No side effects were noted. However, some healthy liver tissue within 2-5 millimeters of the tumors sustained heat damage due to nanotube leakage from the tumor."These are promising, even exciting, preclinical results in this liver cancer model," says senior author Steven Curley, professor in M.D. Anderson's Department of Surgical Oncology.

"Our next step is to look at ways to more precisely target the nanotubes so they attach to, and are taken up by, cancer cells while avoiding normal tissue."Targeting the nanotubes solely to cancer cells is the major challenge to advancing the therapy, Curley says. Research is under way to bind the nanotubes to antibodies, peptides or other agents that in turn target molecules expressed on cancer cells. To complicate matters, most such molecules are also expressed in normal tissue.

Curley estimates that a human clinical trial is at least three to four years away....