Engineer Spotlight: John Viator
Posted on June 27th, 2007 by als
John Viator has an ear for skin cancer. Literally. Viator, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Missouri, Columbia, fashioned the listening device out of a laser, special microphones and a computer interface. And while the setup doesn’t look much like an ear—Viator calls it a photoacoustic detection system—he thinks it can help doctors “listen in” on deadly melanoma cells as they spread throughout the bloodstream.
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“I wanted to do this my whole life,” says Daniel Moran, a biomedical engineering professor at Washington University. As a bright kid growing up in the 1970s, Moran was a devoted fan of “The Six Million Dollar Man”— a TV show about an astronaut who is “rebuilt” with bionics after a serious crash. The show’s opening lines still resonate with him: “Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s first bionic man. Steve Austin will be that man. We can make him better than he was. Better. Stronger. Faster.”
For pharmaceutical companies, the antihistamine Seldane is a textbook example of what you don’t want in a new drug. Seldane hit the market as the first nondrowsy allergy medication in 1985. It was a stunning success, quickly becoming one of the top 10 most-prescribed drugs. But the U.S. Food and Drug Administration started to get some alarming reports about the drug.
