CANCER ANTS

Researchers in France say they have successfully trained ants to sniff out cancer cells. In lab experiments, the ants could actually tell the difference between the smell of healthy cells and disease cells. The team from the French National Centre for Scientific Research tested the ants’ ability to not only sniff out cancer cells from healthy ones, but also tell the differences between two different forms of cancer. They claim that individual ants need only a few training trials to learn, memorize, and reliably detect the odor of human cancer cells. The findings suggest that using ants “as living tools to detect biomarkers of human cancer is feasible, fast, and less laborious than using other animals.” The study is published in the journal iScience.
* Unfortunately, they’re best at detecting colorectal cancer.
* How does this work, exactly? Do they crawl inside you, look around, then crawl out and give a little ant “thumbs up”?
* “I don’t know, Jean-Luc… maybe we should not have used ze fire ants in ze experiment, no?”
* I guess they’re still working the bugs out.
* Wait until the day you look at your hospital bill and there’s a $4,000 charge for “ants.”
* Yeah, I think I’d rather go to the clinic that’s sticking with microscopes.