A fried egg
A fried egg at a roadside shack REUTERS/Stefan Wermuth

A research story about how scientists found a way to "unboil an egg" has become viral on the Internet. The story was published in ChemBioChem, a journal for researchers who focus on medicine, biology and chemistry.

Gregory Weiss is a professor of Chemistry at the School of Physical Sciences in the University of California Irvine and the co-author of the paper. He was surprised that his research had gone viral, and he laughed about the fact that his research was trending on Facebook.

The unboiling of a hen egg was done by pulling the tangled proteins apart and then giving it a chance to refold. The process had broad implications and took just minutes, while other methods could take days for refolding the proteins and also involved a large amount of money.

The method of unboiling an egg could help the sectors of agriculture as well as molecular gastronomy. It can also help in early detection of cancer, which will also work out to be cheaper. The method could also improve treatment of cancer as well as the chances of survival. It was also found that the process of unboiling the egg could help lower cost of expensive therapeutic proteins that were used for the treatment of diseases like cancer and brain injuries.

Weiss said that taking the research to the market was anything but easy. He added that the process could be the "valley of death for great ideas." He said that getting to a big scale from small scale was a major challenge for a lab like his. He added that when one starts talking to companies, they want to know how many litres could one do this on.

A licencing officer who focused on biomedical engineering from UC Irvine, Grace Yee, said that there had been significant interest from major companies after Weiss's paper was published. She was not allowed to name the companies though.

Weiss has a personal attachment towards this research, especially with regards to the improvement of the detection of the cancer molecule. Arthur Weiss, Greg's father and a former Navy doctor, died due to lung cancer, and Greg's wife is a survivor of breast cancer.

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