From space to curing cancer, the future of tractor beams

The classic spaceship tractor beam in old cheesy science fiction movies has become quite the overused cliché; apparently, however, NASA didn't get the memo, because it's providing $100,000 to develop three possible tractor beam technologies.

 

Laser light can push objects forward. It is this physical property of lasers that allowed scientists to develop “optical tweezers.” “Optical tweezers” utilize multiple lasers to trap and push an object forward in order to manipulate the objects trajectory in multiple directions. While innovative, “optical tweezers” are not the same as a tractor beam. 

 

A theoretical tractor beam, rather than pushing an object, can actually capture and pull objects back towards the source of the laser.  The ability to actually use a laser to pull an object was thought to be a thing of fantasy, but the February 2011 science article “Backward Pulling Force from a Forward Propagating Beam", which showed a mathematical model of an actual functioning tractor beam, proved otherwise.   

 

Although the ability to move large objects is still a logistical and physical impossibility, scientists feel that using tractor beams to collect small particles from a planet’s atmosphere for later scientific analysis will be a great success.

 

Tractor beams are no doubt an incredible scientific innovation, but using them to capture small microscopic planetary and atmospheric particles is a far cry from what we saw in the movies. Tractor beams may not be what we imagined, at least not yet; however, NASA and space do not exactly have a monopoly on this technology either.

 

The use of a tractor beam, even one that only works on small microscopic objects could prove invaluable in many aspects of life, including healthcare. Think about it…   lasers are presently used in many diverse ways for cancer therapy, such as photodynamic therapy. 

 

Photodynamic therapy utilizes a photosensitive drug that is activated by a laser once the drug reaches the tumor.  The tumor is killed but normal cells, for the most part, are unharmed. In 2009 the FDA approved the use of laser surgery for brain tumors, which uses heat to directly kill a tumor.  These techniques have taken cancer treatment into the 21st century, but they are far from perfect.

 

While usually less invasive than a scalpel, laser treatments still have their drawbacks.  For example, if not properly managed, raising the temperature in the brain by a laser, can be disastrous. Now, imagine if you will, the ability to program a tractor beam to find a specific tumor protein; perhaps an antigen expressed on the tumor surface. Rather than cutting into the tumor, risking injury and the possibility of releasing metastatic cells into the body, the tractor beam instead would gingerly pull the whole tumor, away from the body, leaving no cell behind and greatly reducing the chance for cancer remission.  Cancer survival could improve greatly.  

 

And if you think this is wild fancy, in 2007, researchers from MIT showed by using “optical tweezers” that cancer cells can be manipulated and moved by the use of laser light. Their experiments were a far cry from removing a whole tumor with an actual tractor beam, but their results are promising.  Who knows what the future will hold. All I know is that I never thought I would ever say these words - “one day a tractor beam may save your life.”