Chris - Yes, that’s absolutely true. People have found that there’s a technique that’s called Raman spectroscopy. When you shine light at something the light gets bombarded or ricocheted about like bullets bouncing around a room when it passes through different substances. Depending upon the structures it’s passing through you get a different fingerprint scatter pattern. We know what normal skin does. If you shine light into skin which has got a malignant melanoma on it you get a different scatter pattern entirely. Scientists are investigating this as a very sensitive diagnostic technique. You may be able to use it to pinpoint a lesion which you might think I’m not suspicious enough to want to biopsy it but I might be suspicious enough to wave one of these wands at it and it would say, yes that’s got a scatter pattern that says it’s got a lot of cells which are in an abnormal configuration under the skin. It could be cancer, it’s worth doing a biopsy.

Chris - Yes, there are. This is endometrial cancer. It's not that common but common enough that it's a major problem. Obviously it only affects women because men don't have a uterus. the common associations are it tends to be in people who've been exposed to certain hormones in life. It's also linked ot certain types of breast cancer, it's genetic and it's also linked to people that are carrying a bit too much weight. All those things are risk factors for endometrial cancer. The sign that it might be going to happen is people develop bleeding when they shouldn't be bleeding. In other words, when they're post-menopausal or inter-menstrually so that's a sign there might be something wrong. In terms of dealing with it there are a number of approaches. One of them is surgery. If you remove the organ then that takes the cancer out of the body. The other way to do it is sometimes used in addition to subsequent surgical treatment which is that you can use radiation. You can put these pods, if you like, into the vagina and they contain a radioactive source which is put up close to where the uterus is. The radiation comes out, goes into the cancerous cells and damages them. Then you can kill the cancer that way. Then you withdraw the whole apparatus and this is a way of preventing it. There's a number of different treatments and there's also people investigating various hormonal treatments as well. I don't know of any clinical trials that are doing that at the moment.

Chris - Definitely. This was experimental but very exciting. One of the big problems with cancer spreading around the body or cancers that may be so tiny or almost impossible to see on the skin surface, for example, is how do you know if they're already in the blood stream? Cancers throw off cells. These are called metastaces or metastatic cells. If you've got malignant melanoma which is making a lot of melanin, a dark pigment what you can do is take blood samples and there might be one in a million cells in the blood stream which is a malignant melanoma. Scientists have found that if you zap this with laser light at a frequency which the melanoma will absorb but other cells won't then the cell can be made to resonate. It makes a sort of snapping or ricocheting-like noise which you can hear with a very sensitive microphone and this tells you the cells are there.

Chris - There was a study that was done on edelweiss, not just the song in the Sound of Music. This is a plant that grows high up in the alps. Because it's growing at altitude it's exposed to a lot of solar radiation and a lot of ultraviolet so how does this fend off? Scientists recently published a paper in which they looked at the surface of the leaves of edelweiss and they found these tine hairs. If you zoom in on the hairs the hairs are made of even tinier filaments which are about 100nm across. 100nm is roughly the wavelength of ultraviolet light. These hairs interfere with or interrupt the passage of the ultraviolet light, stopping it getting onto the leaf surface. Instead they channel the ultraviolet into some water in the middle of the hair and this soaks up the UV and protects that plant.

Helen - Could we make this into anything we could use? The new generation of sun creams perhaps?

Chris - That's not such a silly thing to say because yes, people are saying we might be able to make nano technology sun cream. Sun cream uses titanium dioxide that you just spread on the skin. They're saying if we made edelweiss extract you could rub this on the skin and the same trick might work to fend of the UV rays.