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Nanotechnology in Medicine
cencini writes "Here is an article from the MIT Technology Review regarding the future possibilities of nanotechnology in hospitals and genetic engineering. " There's been some recent coverage of the possibilites of using nanotechnology in medicine including a Wired article earlier this week. As always, this is merely one facet of what nanotechnology can - and will do.
Well, that was a real bummer 'cuz they finally had to kill him with about 300kV across the chest and then blow up the lab he was in. Moral of the story: if you build something so small you can't see, build an off switch into them that can't fail!
Nanites bring up an interesting privacy concern too... since you can't see them, who's to say your employer wouldn't drop a few hundred thousand of the buggers in your office, they'd attach to your shoe, and tell you how long you were out to lunch, in the bathroom, listen in to all your phone calls, etc.? It's perfectly legal to do that now... and what are we gonna do - scan our workplace with a microscope whenever we get to work? How about computer security? Just drop a few nanites outside SuperMega Corp and in a few days they get inside all the servers and attach to the memory, modify a few POPs and PUSHes and viola, instant security breach.
IMHO MIT Tech Review is always a bit optimistic with time frames. Breakthrough's are always portrayed as just around the corner. I think that this view comes from working close to researchers on a regular basis - they tend to have a different mindset than the general populace.
-JB
- The Diamond Age
can tell you, the really good stuff that will come from nanotech are:a) undersea colonies of telepathic "drummers" involved in massive gynocentric orgies
b) free mattresses from public matter compilers
c) that cool intelligent paper
d) sailor moon-style armies
e) skull guns
It's good to see that they're not letting the first failure stop them. The kid who volunteered to let them do that knew very well that he may not live through the procedure, but he did it anyway. He knew that some way, he'd wind up helping others. At least he didn't die in vain.
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If we are able to implement nano-devices inside of cells, it would indeed create some interesting possibilities. Not only could these devices spot treat problems (infections, chemical imbalances, etc.) at their source (eliminating the need to douse the entire body in potentially harmful chemicals), they could take preventative measures against other problems (perhaps even degredation due to aging?).
If a network of these devices were able to communicate with one another, and presumably with an external computer system, doctors could easily diagnose patients unintrusivly. If the nanomedical devices couldn't treat the problem themselves, at least they could ask for help!
Besides the medical applications that nano sized devices have, it makes one wonder about the possibilities of adding computational power/memory to our bodies. If our hypothetical nano-network were able to communicate with our nervous system, think how much information might be stored and manipulated, even if each device individually only contributed a small amount! And it could even allow us to hook into external computer systems!
The improvement in communication amoung the population that has been fostered by the Internet, with Slashdot as the poster child, may mark the end of those too-good promotions where the company expects to come out ahead due to the general populations' misunderstanding of the terms of the deal.
Well, we're all familiar with William Gibson being pretty spot-on in the early 80s with the impact the Net and technology in general would have on our lives, with his book Neuromancer.
:)
In many ways his imagination has probably been the inspiration for many researchers, wanting to get things moving in the directions he comes up with. Prophecies are usually cyclical in that manner - events can tailor themselves around the prophet's tellings
And so in Idoru, he talks a lot about nanotech, from construction to, ultimately, a fusion between nanotechnology and AI - the idea and implications of which are fascinating, both on a micro- and macro- scale.
Is he pointing in the right direction again? Or are we following his call again? Nanotech really has a great potential for medicine, allowing *intelligent* manipulation on a cellular level, a far more light-handed approach than simply administering antibiotics or any of the other solutions we ingest to counter ailments or conditions.
Ultimately, in the field of medicine, fusing AI and nanotech might create a learning "fixer cell" system, which can run round the body scanning things, and warn about, or even prevent, the onset of diseases such as cancer. Fantastic.
Fross
Why can't we just start with some lower-tech things like implanted sugar sensors and insulin pumps. Or how about medication dispensors for bipolar disorder, etc. I know there is preliminary work being done with implanted insulin dispensors, and I guess somebody has to be thinking about way out there. Perhaps I wish that a bit more of that intellect would be directed toward making things like the implanted insulin real, sooner.
Greg Bear touches on this with the 'therapied' people in several of his novels, and casts it in a rather Orwellian way. But there is a fine line between fixing a few known chemical disorders and mass population-drugging. Perhaps we need to explore and define that line, publicly. Otherwise no doubt governments, multinationals, NGOs, and whatever other boogymen we dig up will do it for us.
We clearly don't want the educational system in charge of implanted ritalin.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
The woman from Michigan said that she expects clinical trials with (nanotechnology used for gene therapy) to begin within two years. Why does everyone else seem to think this will be waiting for at least a decade? Perhaps the laws of computing apply to nanotechnology, too... (doubling every 18 months). anyway, just goes to show you that with enough funding, scientists can do just about anything - although whether they come up with the thing which the funding was for... that's of course a very different story. but it certainly appears this folks at the U. of M. have something interesting to bring to the table, not someday, but now.
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
Good article, I especially liked the silicon bubble thingy acting like a shield that the antibodies can't get through. Of course, they didn't bring up something I thought of instantly...
If you can build a synthetic, ultra-small device capable of getting past all immune defense and infiltrating the cell, that's used exclusively for health and medical purposes, great. Bring it on. But why would thousands of researchers be interested solely in healthy applications? Something that can just breeze its way into the body's cells and muck about with the genes has an utterly fantastic potential for carnage, the likes of which this world has never seen. Can you imagine? Even simple changes, like instructing the liver to produce extremely toxic things, are just plain dastardly. And that's without even a little imagination. Jeez.
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"Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and
I think this technology is amazing, but like many other medical technologies that are available, I fear it will lead to a larger gap between rich and poor. I can just imagine a world where those with money live to ther 120's due to the wonders of modern science while the impovershid(sp??) wither away. I've said this before to friends and will say it again: technology is moving at a much faster pace than we can deal with at a socio-political level. We need to get away from scientists and engineer shoving technology into people's faces and saying "this will make your life better" to a world where there is open public discourse about a medical method before it is widely used. Somewhat of an utopian dream? Probably, but I think it's something we should work towards.
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Deepak Saxena
Deepak Saxena
"Computers are useless, they can only give you answers" - Picasso
I posted a reply to the IBM Flexible Transistor story posted on Slashdot way back on Oct 29, 1999.
... it makes for some interesting ideas.
... the name escapes me at this time), and some serious AI (we're far from that still), and we'll have Cyborgs a la Terminator (a friendlier name will have to be thought of though. "Terminator" just does not emit a warm fuzy feeling. Neither does Teletubby. Something in-between would be good.)"
Now, judging by this article, what I suggested is closer to becoming a reality.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's some type of scientific research body doing something about combining these 2 technologies.
For the lazy people out there, this is what I posted on Oct 29, 1999:
"These flexible transistors can have a huge benefit to the medical community. Imagine, if you will, taking these transistors, and combining them with nano-technology. Albeit, that's at the far end of the spectrum, but still
In the more immediate future, I can see them being used in prosthetic devices, tissue implants, etc.
Combine that with tissue cloning (not sheep cloning, and not full-blown human cloning either. I'm talking just a skin covering like the Borg gave Data in the 2nd Next Generation movie
After all, there isn't a practical manmade nanotech device yet in existence.
The benefits of nanotech are so vast that it is a waste of time trying to ennumerate them. Medical benefits can be summed up with: full capability for artificial replacement, perfect repair, and perfect control of any and all of the body. The end of all disease, and infinite potential for enhancement (clue: cyborgs are not going to be clunky mechanical things).
IMHO, after nanotech is developed, population will explode to the point where the average individual can't afford the mass to own a solid body (at least not a biological one). This will be after we've eaten all the asteroids, all the comets, all the planets, and started mining the sun. People will just be brains with a miniscule support system and a whispy "cloud" for a body. Don't worry, it'll still look and feel like a human body, and will probably be stronger and a lot sturdier as well. Not that I think people will actually spend most of their time using their "eyes" and other physical senses; it would all be facades anyway, why not just go direct to simulation?
Given the obvious implications of nanotech, these unambitious speculations seem awfully silly, especially when we are so far from the first assembler.
Having a sister-in-law going through high dosage chemo at the moment, I can attest to the need for more pinpoint delivery methods. Everybody reading /. probably remembers the promise of Buckyballs for undetectable delivery methods. Lots of research is happening in this area and it's good to see some of it make some public progress. It's also good for people to start realizing that chemical engineering is a good, current way of getting nanotech things done rather than having to rely on the programmed, atom by atom assemblers and VLSI lithography methods exclusively.
It was an episode of The Outer Limits; I thought it was pretty cheesy myself. IIRC, the "mad scientist" (is there any other kind on that show?) built "smart" nanites that would make any changes they deemed necessary for their host's survival. Meanwhile, back in the real world, scientists are in the early stages of developing specialized, non-replicating nanites to perform specific tasks within the human body. Somehow, I can't get really scared about such far-out disaster scenarios.
Folks, there is a long road from the molecular-scale manufacturing processes and primitive specialized nanites of today to the artificially intelligent assemblers of far-out science fiction. Nanotechnology may someday (possibly within our lifetimes, but I wouldn't count on it) become Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology", but we still have a long way to go.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
The first major book on nanomedicine has been
published. It's entitled, appropriately,
Nanomedicine and is by Rob Freitas.
see http://www.foresight.org/Nanomedicine/index.html
where you can find chapter summaries, a sample
chapter, and other info.
--JoSH
It's a lot less threatening when you pause to consider that these things have to be injected first. You could put them on the shrapnel of a fragmentation device, but what's the point? You don't increase the range or power significantly, and you make the area containing the fragments dangerous long after the explosion. It would be a lot less dangerous than depleted uranium, since the active ingredients are organic; you could get rid of them with plenty of UV, hydrogen peroxide or just plain grocery-store bleach. This means that it would not be very useful as a way to deny an enemy the use of an area either. These packaged bits of DNA just do not have significant weapons potential.
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Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
Nah, not replaced, supplemented. We're talking about technology working inside the cells. It would be very easy and much more useful to load them into the white blood cells themselves and let the body's already functioning method of getting white blood cells to the site do the delivery. Once on site, point the "big guns" out the "car windows" and waste 'em.
This reminds me of Nancy Kress's "cell cleaner" in her Beggars in Spain series. The cell cleaner also allowed people to "eat" just by going naked - their skin was changed to allow photosynthesis and the absorbtion of nutrients from mud.
First, make it work, then make it right, then make it fast, then, make it bloated!
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I've been unsuccessfully trying to find this link every time you've posted a nanotech story. In this MIT Tech Review nanotach special issue, several articles discuss how, while nanotech research is proceeding well, virtually every expert working in the field feels that Eric Drexler-type nanoassembly is impossible. Basically, the Drexler mentality has been popular among CS people who can think of greta ways to use that technology if it existed but hasn't caught on among the people who actually have to deal with all the weird forces at nanoscales.
Unfortunately it's not available online but you might want to see if you can find a hard copy.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Mr. Slippery said: Vegan and animal rights advocate that I am, I hope that given the tech level to create artery-scouring nanobots we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures for pleasure and that you'd be eating tank-grown cloned meat instead.
Just because it's grown in a tank doesn't make it any less of an animal. You're still killing it. Just like you kill a tree when you buy a wood chair.
Don't get me wrong - I've cut down more forests than I care to remember and grew up on tree farms and so saw where the meat you eat comes from. And I still eat some meat.
I think the thing would be to try to grow food that was less expensive to the environment, personally. And maybe have the nanobots (or genetic viral alterations) make it so that a good soy burger tasted (in our brains) as good as a free-range cow burger.
Will in Seattle
Great. So now we'll not only encourage stupid people to have more kids than smart people, we'll encourage people with bad genes to live longer and pass them on.
And if those resulting humans ever colonize another planet and their tech fails them, they'll die in large numbers, being unsuited for survival.
Why don't you just rip out the teeth and bones and let us float in space habitats with cartilage only, and hard wire the pleasure centers so we never want to think hard thoughts or succeed at anything worthwhile? Just as effective - and just as useless.
Will in Seattle
So what's to stop hackers from reprogramming the nanotechs to replicate? And turn everyone's hair purple?
Will in Seattle
I love to think that nanites are possible, but it still bothers me that what power source they will use.
I know that we are going through another leap in space, and speed on computers, and the modeling that is possible allows us to manipulate on the genetic level. Once we get the Genes down, we should be able to make a virus to make changes, or fixes, and also have it die off after the change is in place. The projections that are being shown for this are to be in the 10 year planning phase.
For more ideas on this and how it is being used, you can check into any Pharmaceutical co, and what they are doing with that R&D. Not many are doing anything with Nanites because they are projected to be 50 or more years out.
But one of the 'Possible' ways to do manipulation and create the devices is to use an 'Electron Beam Microcope' and move around the atoms, on an atom, by atom basis. Slow, but it would work.
To find the truth, you must look beyond what you see.
The book was interesting, but more than the nanite technology was interesting in this book - the 'Teacher/book' that was invented was more of what the story line was about.
And the story missed one important fact about 'energy of production' - to move that many molecules would require a significant amount of energy. Something that all books on nanites seem to ignore.
The other thing that they ignore, is that we have 'Billions' of cells to make up our brain - and the nanites are created with intelligence - kind of like 'D-day 4th of July' when we could take a laptop, and make it manipulate the computer of the alien ship - Well not exactly, since all of the computer technology that we have is from the UFO that crashed, and they leaked the technology to the rest of mankind - but the OS was different - so the rest does apply. Ignore the reality of the situation.
Not to mention that they haven't even thought out how 'chaos' will fit into the picture. Granted, we are getting closer to the holistic view of how the universe functions. But we are still a LONG way off.
And besides - I haven't taken the time to write the program (in forth of course) to do the simulation of the chaos, that is holisticaly generating conciousness via a four vector resonance of the electrical propagation in the brain.
To find the truth, you must look beyond what you see.
Wasn't there someone who used an Electron Beam Microscope to write their company logo in 'Gold atoms' on the surface. Just take and move it up one level, and get a program that takes that ability, and move them around to form into whatever molicule that you want. Yes, 'Photo' - has limitations. So does your fingers, that is why we use 'mechanical' manipulators to do what we do. And just like the Zip-Drive technology, it takes someone with a different point of view to see how to use the same devices, and increase the density of storage on the same device. Is it that we have better hard drives now, or is it that they are using the concepts first thougth out by Iomega? And the limits of technology, are the limits of the mind of man - With the correct frequencies, you can change the 'random' orientation of molecules to harmonicly amplify the random properties of an atom - for instance the crystaline nature of IRON (FE) is such that when properly alighned in the molecular form, it creates what is known as a 'Magnetic Field'. So in one sense the wavelength of radiation is a limit - and in another sense, it is the frozen state of energy that we see as atoms that makes us believe that the energy wavefronts in the electromagnetic spectrum are the only energies out there... Maybe if we 'muse' and don't dismiss what is called 'STUPID' - 'IMPOSSIBLE' ideas we will finaly find real truths. Or is this one of those situations that the Write Brothers encountered when they flew over the NJ turnpike. Observers said it must be a trick - and it wasn't until a year(?) later that they finally were credited with the impossible. How many times have we seen in the past that man has said that you should not believe a thing - and who is this crazy man 'Galileo' who thinks that the earth revolves around the sun. We should stop wrong thinking because it is wrong. I have so many things that 'burst' into my mind - like the SuperTwist LCD. The Japaniese threw the technology out, and it was a couple of guys in the US who looked at it from a different view point and changed a couple of things to make it work. True, it wouldn't work for the normal way, but just like a philips head vs a slotted head screw, you have to see it differently, and once that is done and the correct question asked - the answer is obivous. IMHO But then again, I might just be blowing off steam. (grin)
To find the truth, you must look beyond what you see.
Wasn't there someone who used an Electron Beam Microscope to write their company logo in 'Gold atoms' on the surface.
Just take and move it up one level, and get a program that takes that ability, and move them around to form into whatever molicule that you want.
Yes, 'Photo' - has limitations. So does your fingers, that is why we use 'mechanical' manipulators to do what we do. And just like the Zip-Drive technology, it takes someone with a different point of view to see how to use the same devices, and increase the density of storage on the same device. Is it that we have better hard drives now, or is it that they are using the concepts first thougth out by Iomega?
And the limits of technology, are the limits of the mind of man - With the correct frequencies, you can change the 'random' orientation of molecules to harmonicly amplify the random properties of an atom - for instance the crystaline nature of IRON (FE) is such that when properly alighned in the molecular form, it creates what is known as a 'Magnetic Field'.
So in one sense the wavelength of radiation is a limit - and in another sense, it is the frozen state of energy that we see as atoms that makes us believe that the energy wavefronts in the electromagnetic spectrum are the only energies out there... Maybe if we 'muse' and don't dismiss what is called 'STUPID' - 'IMPOSSIBLE' ideas we will finaly find real truths.
Or is this one of those situations that the Write Brothers encountered when they flew over the NJ turnpike. Observers said it must be a trick - and it wasn't until a year(?) later that they finally were credited with the impossible.
How many times have we seen in the past that man has said that you should not believe a thing - and who is this crazy man 'Galileo' who thinks that the earth revolves around the sun. We should stop wrong thinking because it is wrong.
I have so many things that 'burst' into my mind - like the SuperTwist LCD. The Japaniese threw the technology out, and it was a couple of guys in the US who looked at it from a different view point and changed a couple of things to make it work. True, it wouldn't work for the normal way, but just like a philips head vs a slotted head screw, you have to see it differently, and once that is done and the correct question asked - the answer is obivous.
IMHO
But then again, I might just be blowing off steam.
(grin)
To find the truth, you must look beyond what you see.
I was interested in the article's comments about using nanotechnology because our immune systems wouldn't recognize them.
If the ability to create these things becomes widespread, it won't be long before some crazy person comes up with something designed to kill people indiscriminately (or perhaps discriminately). (This kind of reminds me of the nano-heart-attack episode from X-files).
When that happens, not having your immune system respond will be a BIG disadvantage. I suspect that we will have to design a "nano"-immune system to fend off nano-attacks, in which case the "no immune system reaction" advantage is no longer there.
I guess you're not totally back where you started from, since you should be able to program the nano-immune system to recognize "friendly" agents. (Of course, then you have the whole "protect the key" problem - somebody steals your private key, then you become a walking incubator for their private nanotech experiments!)
(We're going off-topic, so I'll say no more of this thread - e-mail me for further discussion if you want.)
But a tissue sample does not an animal make. I think it's pretty clear that "an animal" refers to a complete organism, while "animal tissue" is a different thing. True. But what's interesting in this ethical question is not life (which is just a chemical process, albeit a very interesting one), but the termination of a consciousness (or, depending on your terms, an experiencer, a subjectivity, a subject-of-a-life, sentience, whatever) which may be present in a living brain - or (someday) in a computer, or in an extraterristrial critter based on a chemistry so different we wouldn't call it living.Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
I'm wondering whether one of the "big" results of nanotechnology will be "mechanical" memories - large scale memory arrays consisting of switches whose position mechanically indicate one or zero (or if you want to get funky, larger numbers of discrete positions).
Before non-nano-techers dismiss this as too slow, at the scale of single-molecules, people have already made gears rotating at 100Ghz - if molecular "switches" can change their positions with an equivalent latency, I think we can agree that they would satisfy our memory bandwidth requirements for the near future. And they would be non-volatile, and probably pretty tough (does anybody have any feelings as to whether they would be considered rad-hard?)
Of course, the REALLY hard bit is the addressing & data transfers.