February 06, 2007 — From Trojan Family Magazine.


By Carl Marziali
Photographs by Mark Berndt

POPULAR INTRODUCTIONS to nanotechnology usually crow about the minuteness of it all. Nano* means small, we are told: really, really small. Think “teeny” and keep going.

Like a bolted morsel triggering the cough reflex, such naïveté forces an involuntary guffaw out of Timothy Triche, chief pathologist at Childrens Hospital Los Angeles and a member of the USC Provost’s Biomedical Nanoscience Initiative. Nanoscale objects (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter) are plenty big compared to, say, an atom. And that’s a good thing, explains the physician-researcher who once dreamed of becoming a particle physicist.

There is a reason no one has ever heard of quark-based medicine or lepton therapy: nanoparticles in medicine need to hit a sweet spot. Make them too big, above 100 nanometers, and they get trapped in the bloodstream, unable to reach their target cells. Too small, below 10 nm, and the particles vanish into the churning waste-treatment plants of the kidneys and liver. “These things are certainly not tiny like elementary particles,” says Triche of the nanomedicines his lab is currently developing. “These things at least have some discrete constitution.”

One might expect the nano scale to be an attractive research area – being so much more manageable than lab work at the atomic level. But science does not always progress by the most direct route. In the first half of the 20th century, Einstein’s famous formula (you know, that one) and quantum mechanics worked like a gold rush, pulling scientists from the East Coast of classical mechanics to the western ranges of high-energy physics. Overlooked in the physics frenzy was that nondescript land in the middle, a Nebraska of understated promise, an Omaha waiting for its sage.

The sage has been slow in coming.

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