The wire, which is threaded into a vein, attracts special magnetic nanoparticles engineered to glom onto tumor cells that may be roaming the bloodstream if you have a tumor somewhere in your body. With these tumor cells essentially magnetized, the wire can lure the cells out of the free-flowing bloodstream using the same force that holds family photos to your refrigerator. The technique, which has only been used in pigs so far, attracts from 10-80 times more tumor cells than current blood-based cancer-detection methods, making it a potent tool to catch the disease earlier. The technique could even help doctors evaluate a patient's response to particular cancer treatments: If the therapy is working, tumor-cell levels in the blood should rise as the cells die and break away from the tumor, and then fall as the tumor shrinks. For now, Sam Gambhir, MD, PhD, professor and chair of radiology and director of the Canary Center at Stanford for Cancer Early Detection, is focused on the wire as a cancer-detection method, but its reach could be much broader.

Ugh, you're not going sign up for Project: Baseline, are you? Which used to be Google Life Sciences, and is part of Alphabet, the company that used to be called Google but now owns Google. To wear the special new watch that monitors (but doesn't tell you) your heart rate? To put the sensor under your mattress that can tell when you're … er … you know … sleeping? To answer all the questions on your phone and report to one of the three groups Google is working with at Duke, or Stanford, or the ritzy private clinic in Los Angeles once a year for blood tests and imaging and genome scans and and and?