Lancet? I don't need no stinkin' lancet!

I was reading this month's edition of The Atlantic when I came across the magical line:

Diabetics may someday be able to monitor their glucose without poking themselves to get a drop of blood.

The statement was made in an article entitled "Everything is Illuminated" and was referencing the latest medical technology to come about: Raman scanners.

What has brought this Star Trek wonder scanner to life is Raman spectroscopy: a quick, easy, and non-invasive tool that tells users in seconds what something really is at the molecular level. Recent improvements in technology have shrunk the once expensive, unwieldy tabletop device into an array of smaller, more commercially viable Raman scanners, such as the handheld drug detector by DeltaNu, which costs $15,000 and is being tested by police departments in several states. About 1,000 portable devices that identify hazardous materials are also in use. Within 10 years, DeltaNu expects its handheld devices to be in every police squad car in the country, as ubiquitous as the breathalyzer.

The underlying concept was discovered back in the 1920's by the Indian physicist C.V. Raman, who was the first non-white to get any Nobel prize in the sciences. No, I've never heard of him either but that's probably a good bit of trivia to know if anyone ever plays Trivial Pursuit anymore.

I don't know how it works either, but it apparently does. No doubt Bayer or one of the other "big players" in the diabetic market will purchase the blood sugar detection characteristic rights and figure out how to charge us each time we use it, but for now we can imagine a world without finger pricks....