Sample Informative Speech

David’s topic could suggest a chronological pattern of arrangement. For example, he could have arranged his main points to trace the invention from inception to ongoing trials. Instead, he uses the topical pattern of arrangement (see Chapter 13) to first focus on the history of the new cancer treatment and then explain key concepts related to it.

₁One night in 2003, Marianne Kanzius awoke to a tremendous clamor coming from downstairs. She found her husband John sitting on the kitchen floor, cutting up her good aluminum pie pans with a pair of shears.

₂ As Peter Panepento describes the scene in an article titled “Sparks of Genius,” published in the May 2006 edition of Reader’s Digest, when Marianne asked him why he was wiring the pans to his ham radio, John told her to go back to bed. So off she went, knowing that her single-minded husband wasn’t the kind of person to quit until he was satisfied.

₃ Marianne soon learned that John’s late-night experiment with pie pans was an attempt to use radio waves to kill cancer cells—and to rid himself of the rare form of leukemia threatening his life. In the next five years, John Kanzius would radically modify an existing cancer treatment technique called radiofrequency ablation, making it potentially far more effective than existing treatments.

Soon, the work of this retired TV and radio engineer might give additional hope to the 1.4 million Americans diagnosed with cancer every year, according to the 2008 American Cancer Society “Facts and Figures” section of its Website.

₄ To understand John’s discovery, we’ll explore how the medical profession currently makes use of radio waves to treat cancer, learn about John’s truly promising new approach, and consider the implications for the future.

₅ But first, to understand radiofrequency energy, we need a crash course in wave physics.

₆Energy moves in a wave and is measured in frequency, how quickly it moves up and down. High frequency waves, like Supermans’s X-ray vision—and real X-rays—move quickly and penetrate most matter, but can alter the chemical and genetic material in cells. Low frequency waves, such as radio waves, move slowly and don’t disturb the atomic balance of matter they pass through. Radio waves are harmless to healthy cells, making them a promising tool for ablation.

₇ Let me explain the term. Ablation, according to the National Cancer Institute’s Dictionary of Cancer Terms, available on its Web site, is the medical term for “the removal or destruction of a body part or tissue or its function,” using hormone therapy, conventional surgery, or radiofrequency. Radiofrequency ablation, or RFA, uses radiofrequency energy to “cook” and kill cancer cells, according to the Society of Interventional Radiology. The least invasive RFA technique practiced today is through the skin; it’s also done laparoscopically.

₈Here’s how the Radiological Society of North America explains radiofrequency ablation on its Web site, last updated December 17, 2008.

₉ First, a doctor makes a small incision in the skin and inserts a needle electrode or a straight hollow needle containing retractable electrodes.

₁₀ The doctor guides the needle to the site of the tumor using an imaging technique such as ultrasound.

₁₁ The needle in turn is connected to an electric generator, and once in place, electrodes extend out of it and into the tumor.

₁₂ Next, contact pads, also wired to the generator, are placed on the patient’s skin; this completes an electric circuit so that when the generator is turned on, electric energy in the form of radio waves pass through the body, going back and forth between the needles and the contact pads.

₁₃ Here’s the critical part:

₁₄ Every time that the radio waves meet the resistance of the electrodes at the treatment site, they create heat. It’s kind of like an atomic mosh pit, with a crowd of atoms suddenly agitated by radio waves; the electrons begin to bounce around and collide, creating friction and thus heat. This heat gets up to 212 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperature at which water boils. The heat destroys the cancerous cells in the tumor, essentially cooking them, but leaving noncancerous cells alone.

₁₅ In many ways, it’s a great treatment option right now. However, while it is called “minimally invasive” surgery, the needles required by this method can damage tissue and even organs near the tumor site, limiting its usefulness.

₁₆Enter John Kanzius.

₁₇John was diagnosed with leukemia in 2002, and his ordeal with chemotherapy motivated him to find a better way to attack cancer cells.

₁₈ Now John had no medical training, but he had worked in the radio industry for forty years, and he knew all about radio waves. He recalled that a colleague wearing wire-rimmed glasses got burned as she stood too close to a radio transmitter. As Peter Panepento describes it in Reader’s Digest, this led Kanzius to theorize that if you could infuse cancer cells with a conductive substance, you could use a transmitter to heat them with radio waves, while avoiding invasive needles. The cells marked with the substance would act like “tiny antennas,” as Panepento put it.

₁₉ It was this chain of thought which spurred John’s late-night kitchen experiment with the pie pans and his ham radio.

₂₀ Two things were amazing about John’s initial experiment.

₂₁ First, John was able to replicate RFA in his kitchen. Second, John made a huge improvement upon the technique, alone and at home. Instead of inserting needles into a tumor, he injected tiny metal minerals into a stand-in hotdog. He then placed the hotdog between the radio transmitter and receiver so that the radio waves would pass through the meat. When he cut the hotdog open, the are around the minerals was cooked, but the rest remained raw. Kanzius later repeated the experiment with liver, then steak, obtaining the same results.

₂₂Could there really be a way to use radiofrequency without side effects, and to treat more types of cancer with it?

₂₃As told by Charles Schmidt in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute on July 16, 2008, John shared his results with several leading oncologists, who immediately recognized the potential. He then filed for a patent for his RF machine.

₂₄ Researchers at two prominent cancer centers decided to test John’s theory, starting in August 2005 with the University of Pittsburgh’s Liver Cancer Center. As detailed in the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center newsletter of March 22, 2006, instead of using a hotdog, the researchers placed a thin test tube between the radio transmitter and the receiver. Inside this tube was a solution of carbon nanoparticles—actually pieces of metal about 1/75,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair. A speck of dandruff is like a mountain to a nanoparticle. When they turned on the electricity, the carbon nanoparticles successfully heated to 130 degrees Fahrenheit—the perfect temperature at which to kill cancer cells, according to Peter Panepento’s Reader’s Digest piece.

₂₅ Now that I’ve explained John’s major improvement over current RFA procedures, let’s consider the implications of his discovery.

₂₆ John’s noninvasive radiofrequency cancer treatment holds tremendous promise as an alternative to existing cancer therapies. First, because RFA uses electromagnetic energy in the form of radio waves, it’s much safer than chemotherapy and traditional radiation treatment. As noted, radio waves are harmless to healthy cells, as compared to X-rays.

₂₇Second, as explained in the January 2008 issue of the Journal of Nanobiotechnology by Gannon et al., the current RFA procedure can only be used in cancers that are not difficult to reach, such as liver, breast, lung, and bone; John’s new method potentially can target tumors anywhere in the body.

₂₈ Third, the current RFA procedure must be performed several times to target multiple tumors, but John’s method could make it possible to target multiple tumors in just a single treatment.

₂₉ Intensive research is now underway at the renowned M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The goal is to find ways to make the nanoparticles target cancer cells exclusively. Success occurred in late 2007, when in a preclinical trialresearchers at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center used the technique to completely destroy liver cancer tumors in rabbits, as described in the December 2007 issue ofthe journal Cancer.

₃₀ Another area they are trying to resolve, according to Schmidt, is the potential toxicity of nanoparticles in the bloodstream. Human trials may begin in two to three years, according to Dr. Steven Curley, lead investigator on the Kanzius project at M.D. Anderson, as reported this summer by David Bruce in the Erie Times News.

₃₁ Today we learned how a man with vision discovered how to cook a hotdog with a ham radio. We explored first the current procedure, then John’s new approach, and, finally, the implications of this new hope for treating cancer.

₃₂John’s cancer is in remission, and he’s established the John Kanzius Cancer Research Foundation, which you can read about online. He is continuing to refine his technique and is working on clinical trials.

₃₃ Marianne Kanzius was upset when she saw her husband destroying her good pie pans, but now it’s clear that the loss of a few pie pans and a hotdog may soon save millions of lives.