The fantastic voyage to tomorrow's health

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By Mike Pettapiece

Canadian scientists in a group called the Sentinel Bioactive Paper Network are thinking impossibly small to take on tiny programmed killers.

If the researchers succeed, they could save lives in environments as diverse as supermarket shelves, hospitals and contaminated water sources. And they will do it with cutting-edge nanotechnologies, working with particles that are billionths of a metre in size.

The scientists are tackling pathogens that cause communicable diseases, dangerous bacteria and viruses such as E. coli or salmonella or the SARS coronavirus. The research is but one example of thousands of ongoing projects around the globe that deal with the world our eyes cannot see: the kingdom of atoms and molecules.

Nanotechnology research is a scientific hot spot, with billions of dollars being poured into studies and potential applications - from metalworking to space elevators to cancer detection.

The bioactive paper project, a technology-in-development, is complex but the end product might be as simple as specially 'inked' paper. If a pathogen is present, the idea is that the paper, impregnated with nanosensors, would change colour or perhaps give off an odour. "For me, this is really exciting," said Robert Pelton, scientific director of the network and a professor of chemical engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton. "For most of my career, I've been working on chemical processes that have to do with paper technologies. This is the first thing I've worked on that has the potential to improve world health." The network includes 10 Canadian universities, nine industry partners and three government agencies. It is working with a five-year, $11-million budget.

Network researchers and other investigators of the nano world, know that ultra-tiny particles can exhibit different physical properties than they do at macro normal size.

Gold offers a good example. In bulk, gold has the fabled yellow sheen. But in nanosize, where electrons are restricted in its movement and gravitational forces cede to electromagnetic forces, gold takes on a red hue as it reacts with light. That's a shift that bioactive paper can utilize. Antibodies within a bioactive gel impregnated within the porous paper would act as sensors, signaling the awareness of pathogens. And if gold nanoparticles were used, an enzyme on the particles could start them aggregating in such a way that they began to turn red - somewhat like pathogenic litmus paper.

Hospital masks could be impregnated with bioactive inks or paper could be used to detect salmonella on a food product or dipsticks could test for bacteria in drinking water. The bioactive paper might not only detect but also repel or deactivate a pathogen.

Bioactive paper has many technical and financial hurdles to overcome. But it and other nano proposals carry the promise of a wondrous tomorrow. Some health-related possibilities include:

-'Bio-bombs' that recognize, target and kill disease cells in the body
-Sensors that can detect food- and water-borne pathogens (such as bioactive paper)
-'Smart-shirts' that monitor movements or heart rates of old people living alone
-Remarkable reversals of spinal cord paralysis in which subjects are injected with molecules in solution that self-assemble in nanostructures, creating bones or nerves
-Coatings that control the rate of spoilage or ripening of produce

Internationally renowned Canadian economist Richard Lipsey thinks nanotech is the latest - and potentially the most explosive - of 24 sweeping innovations since history began. But he believes nano is a sun not yet fully risen, a technology that is "but a faint glow on the distant horizon'.

Some disciples go so far as to make the claim that nanotechnology will dramatically reverse human aging, that bodies and brains can be kept in an optimal state indefinitely: the nano fountain of youth.

Worldwide, companies and governments are digging deep to fund nano projects. In late 2003, U.S. President George Bush signed a bill that allocated $3.7 billion US in multi-year funding for nanotechnology.

In Canada, then-Liberal Industry Minister David Emerson (now Conservative Minister for International Trade) said in 2005 that Ottawa alone (never mind the provinces) would invest more than $400 million, including money for the new nanotech centre in Edmonton that opened last summer. But nanomaterials are with us now. They are used in skin products (French cosmetics maker L'Oréal is one of the world's most nano-oriented research companies), in computers, stain-resistant fabrics, sports equipment and in medical diagnostic tests.

With mankind having cracked the genomic code of information that defines human life, scientists are manipulating matter at the atomic level to create novel life forms. That has led to great scorn and condemnation of nano's brave march into the future. Many opponents see only menace at the molecular level.

Nay-sayers from Prince Charles to the Christian Right in the U.S. want to put the brakes on nano research and development. In Ottawa, the non-profit Action Group on Erosion, Technology and Concentration (ETC) - the same group that went after genetically modified organisms a decade ago - has renewed its call for a global halt to production of nanoparticles, citing its potential toxicity as a great unknown.

Yet nano's boosters argue that the treasures are simply too great to spurn. One of them is Israeli Vice-Premier and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres, who has said: "Nanotechnology will make it possible to produce new materials, new dimensions, new engines, new energies, unknown to the world beforehand." Zealot Robert A. Freitas Jr., at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing in Palo Alto, California, thinks nano can stop death in its tracks. To him, death is history's "greatest outrage." "How far can we go with this?" he once asked at a conference in 2002. "Well, if we can eliminate 99% of all medically preventable conditions that lead to natural death, your healthy lifespan should increase to about 1,100 years."

Mike Pettapiece, a journalist for more than 30 years, most recently at the Toronto Star, writes and edits the newsletter for the Golden Horseshoe Biosciences Network, based at McMaster University in Hamilton.