John Kanzius was suffering from chemotherapy for leukemia, witnessed the pain of children with the same disease, decided there must be a better way, then went into his garage and developed a cancer-fighting machine that has doctors marveling.
"I noticed young kids losing their smiles, losing their hair. And I said to myself, 'Today's chemotherapy is cruel. There's gotta be a better way to cure cancer,'" Kanzius told ABC News.
Combining knowledge from his days as a radio engineer with spare parts from ham radios and pie pans, he invented the first generation of what would become a machine that uses radio waves instead of radioactivity to fight cancer.
"He woke me up in the middle of the night making all this clamor in the kitchen," said his wife, Marianne.
Is it possible a retired businessman who made a fortune owning radio stations in Pennsylvania could invent a breakthrough in cancer treatment? Some medical professionals think there's a good chance.
"It's beyond remarkable," said Dr. Steven Curley of the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the University of Texas. "He was just a private citizen who just came up with an idea and had the wherewithal and the tinkering ability to do it."
Curley and his colleagues at the center took Kanzius' made-in-the-garage invention very seriously. They tested the radio-wave technology on animals, and say they completely destroyed liver cancer tumors in rabbits. The findings will be part of a study to be published in the journal Cancer.
Kanzius got tearful when talking about the study. "Not until the manuscripts were available online for me to read did the gravity of what we developed hit me," he said.
Experts stress it's important to emphasize that this research is still in the very early stages. Just because it appears to have worked in animals does not mean it will work in humans. It is nonetheless a remarkable story. One scientist told ABC News that in 20 years of cancer research he has never encountered anything like this.
(Agencies via Xinhua News Agency November 5, 2007)
