So, remember those cartoons in which they'd have an opera singer's voice breaking mirrors? And then remember how, in high school physics class, you discovered how that could actually happen? How you could hit a mirror or piece of glass at just the right frequency so as to match the vibrations of its own molecules and make it shatter? Okay, now that you're with me, what if I told you this could be the cure for cancer?
A man named Jonathan Brody went to college to study music. Then he went back to study oncology. Natural transition, right? He proceeds to collaborate with his old music teacher, Anthony Holland, on his medical study. Well, out of this comes his crazy idea that you can hit single-celled organisms with certain frequencies of vibrations to make them lyse (explode). If you can do it with Euglena, why not a cancer cell? And if each kind of cell requires a customized frequency, perhaps you could lyse all the cancer cells with a customized vibration, while leaving normal cells unharmed.
You can listen to this "So Crazy it Just Might Work" story at ThisAmericanLife.org.
Why didn't I think of that? Oboe players make the best closet cancer researchers.
