Cancer is a terrible disease that changes the life of anyone it touches. One incredible individual diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, John Kanzius, was motivated to develop a new treatment for cancer after having to experience the grueling side effects of chemotherapy. He used the disease as a motivator rather than a reason to give up on life and ended up inventing a device that could change history in the process.
As an inventor, Kazius was used to looking for solutions in novel places. He decided that a radio frequency generator (RFG) may work against cancer cells and he used anything available, such as pie plates to build the first prototype, dubbed the Kanzius RF device, in his basement. It seemed fitting for this self-taught inventor to look towards radio waves for a solution since he had once owned a radio station and operated a ham-radio in the past.
The theory was that the RF device would target cancer cells that had been prepped with nanoparticles, made of either gold or carbon. These metallic nanoparticles absorb the energy created by the radio waves more readily than living tissue. The frequency emitted from the Kanzius RF device would heat up the metal and destroy the cancer cells bound by it while healthy cells are left intact. Kanzius’s device was successfully tested at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center in 2005 but has yet to be tested on human patients.
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| The late John Kanzius: Is his process a promising desalination technology? |
That the RFG could potentially help make the treatment of cancer bearable was a major breakthrough, but what is even more impressive was that Kanzius came up with yet another use for the RFG by sheer coincidence in 2007: Kanzius’s mind was constantly at work and he decided that the transmitter could also function as a way to desalinate water. While testing out his theory, the salt water bombarded with radio waves did something that nobody expected-it ignited and never stopped burning.
The idea that saltwater could burst into flame was considered to be a hoax at first. How could something used to put out fires be flammable? Eventually, the truth was confirmed by Penn State University chemists. Saltwater could indeed burn.
The RFG disrupts the chemical composition of water, separating the bonds between the sodium chloride (salt), hydrogen and oxygen molecules that make up the water particles. Once the volatile hydrogen molecules are released, they ignite and continue to burn at an incredible 3000 degrees Fahrenheit as long as the RFG continues to subject them to the radio waves.
Videos of Kanzius’s invention have gone viral since they aired on national television. Some people claim that the RFG is a stepping stone for utilizing the saltwater gushing around our planet as fuel. The RFG does create an incredible phenomenon, but it is not a realistic solution as far as converting saltwater to energy: Producing the necessary radio frequencies takes more energy than is acquired from ‘burning’ the saltwater. Not only that, but once the water molecules are separated, the toxic chemical chlorine is emitted. The device coupled with saltwater isn’t efficient enough as an energy source yet.
On the other hand, using the machine as a non-invasive cancer treatment is definitely feasible. Unfortunately, Kanzius would never experience the treatment he had invented to cure the cancer that eventually took his life. Weakened by two recent sessions of chemotherapy, he succumbed to pneumonia and he passed away early last month. Kanzius, a self-educated inventor, made a place for himself amongst the scientific elite and he will be remembered, and admired, for it.
