"It's simple, very fast… and you have a system that is six orders of magnitude more sensitive than anything out there," Mirkin explains. "It is going to provide many opportunities in terms of developing new tests for new diseases, and creating tests that allow us to follow and treat existing diseases in a much more efficient manner." ...

As reported in Discover magazine, they created tiny gold nano-particles — hundreds of thousands of time smaller than the width of a human hair. When the particles are released in a blood, urine, or saliva sample taken from a patient, the genetic material latches on to any disease proteins they find. Proteins, the building blocks of living things, can serve as fingerprints for diseases.

"The nano-particle is coded with many strands of DNA which are identical, which are the barcodes," Mirkin explains. "When the nano-particle binds to the protein target of interest, it releases these mini barcodes for every protein molecule that is in solution, so that you're getting amplification," allowing the researchers to easily scan for disease with currently available DNA detection techniques.

"We have a chip that has many different spots of DNA on it that are designed to recognize all of the possible barcodes that are in the mixture," Mirkin says. "It binds the right spot and provides a signal that can be easily read with a screener."

It has driven a widespread change in the type of food we are told to eat, and consequently the food that lines the supermarket shelves. Many people view bacon and eggs as a dangerous killer, butter is shunned, and a multi-billion pound industry has sprung up providing 'healthy' low-fat alternatives.

At the same time, millions of people are prescribed statins to lower cholesterol levels, and each new set of guidelines suggests that ever-more lowering of cholesterol is needed. When it comes to explaining what causes heart disease, the cholesterol hypothesis reigns supreme.

But as the US editor and critic HL Mencken put it, 'For every complicated problem there is a solution that is simple, direct, understandable and wrong.' This is how we might view the diet-heart hypothesis: just because it is dominant does not mean it is right, and just because it looks simple does not mean that it actually is.