It almost certainly won't work against the flu. The big problem with RNA interference therapies like this is that viral genomes mutate rapidly. Otherwise we would have had AIDS cured the day after RNAi was published in 1998.
Turns out getting the government to approve drugs takes time.
Soot was just so ordinary no one ever bothered to distill the different molecules out of it, to see if any had unusual properties. C60 is just too big a fraction, with too distinct properties, to have been missed otherwise for so long.
There are literally thousands of different species produced when even the simplest organic compound is burned incompletely (i.e., to form soot). C60 is a tiny fraction of what's produced in most soot from ordinary flames. This is why C60 is still $50 a gram. It actually took the researchers who found C60 in candle soot a pretty heroic effort, and even then, they already knew what they were looking for. The manufacture of C60 on an industrial scale occurs by maintaining an electrical arc across two graphite rods in a rarefied atmosphere. The temperature of the carbon plasma created is around 10000-15000 K, as opposed to a candle flame, which usually isn't more than a few thousand Kelvin. The exciting thing about this study is that there have been several groups that have proposed areas in space where these kinds of high temperature, low pressure conditions exist (namely in the atmospheres of aging red giants) which should, with the carbon rich atmospheres of these stars, form detectable amounts of fullerenes. Until now, this was just a theory. Obviously, it's still just a theory, but at least now it has some evidence to back it up.
It would be like Christmas.
Except for the fact that you've spent a few days in jail and are out a few thousand dollars on lawyers' fees. Or maybe your Christmases were much more interesting than mine were.
I go on working for the same reason a hen goes on laying eggs. -- H.L. Mencken
