The 2011 MRS Fred Kavli Distinguished Lecture award was given to Mark E Davis from the CalTech. His talk Fighting Cancer with Nanoparticle Medicine - The Nanoscale Matters was very interesting and informative. His team built a chain of organic nanoparticles 40-50 nm in diameter that holds a drug and a gold nanoparticle for tracking. The particle is the right size and has the proper shape to enter a cell. Once in the cell, the nanoparticles in the chain break apart to release the drug and kill the cancer cell. This nanomedicine is in clinical trials for lung cancer and works well. His latest research replaces the drug with an RNA to turn of the genes in the cancer cell so that the cancer stops working and then dies.