A team of international scientists around former Co-Chair and founding member of the Global Young Academy Gregory Weiss garnered a lot of international media attention with a chemical method to “unboil an egg”. Their ChemBioChem-paper went viral on social media.
The method enables to pull apart tangled proteins and allows them to refold to their original shape. It is not only fast and relatively affordable, but might also have beneficial applications in food science, pharmaceutical research, agriculture and cancer treatment. Its enormous benefits in detecting cancer at an early stage, helps to improve the treatment and the chances of survival. Based on the newly found chemical method, Gregory Weiss hopes to be able to develop an at-home cancer test, which could save millions of lives over the next decades. The institution will focus on further basic research around this method before releasing it to the market.
“The collaboration with Australian chemist Colin Raston, which resulted in the egg unboiling experiment, resulted directly from contacts made through the GYA”, says Gregory Weiss.
Find the original ChemBioChem-paper at the Wiley Online Library.
You can find more information in a press release by UC Irvine as well as media feedback by The Guardian and Sciencedaily.