Nanomedicine

ATOMA writes: " The book Nanomedicine from Robert Freitas is now available. And it's free on the Web. With 10 chapters, this is one of the most technical books on nanotechnology, along with Nanosystem from Eric Drexler. But Robert has said it's not his last one; we should expect another two books on Nanomedicine from him. "

Comments

Can you name one we WERE ready for?

[A nonymous Coward]

Fire -- look at all the trouble that's caused.

Wheels -- we are swamped by speeders and traffic cops.

Levers -- Damned Greek wants to start moving the earth!

Rocks -- people throw 'em at glass houses, for Pet's sake!

Water -- Titanic runs into one version of it, sinks in another, people down in it.

Oxygen -- contributes to all the problems with Fire, not to mention Water.

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Nanomedicine already exists

[joshv]

Why the attempts to fabricate from scratch little machines that can manipulate the material and biochemistry of our bodies?

We have a ready made toolkit for doing just this. It is the finely tuned result of billions of years of evolution - the genes of the virus and bacterium.

Biotech is the future of medicine - custom engineered viruses that attack cancer cells, or bacteria that eat arterial plaque. These things are designed to live in us already - a few tweaks can make them do some extremely useful things.

-josh

TMTOWTDI -- competition is good

[A nonymous Coward]

You should always have a backup plan, and a backup to the backup. The more backup plans, the better.

Nothing wrong with going at something both ways.

100 years ago, electric cars and steam cars were more promising than internal combustion. Good thing they didn't decide right off the bat which to pursue.

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Nanomedicine and nanotechnology can be safe

[bradbury]

I was a reviewer for Nanomedicine and I speak with Robert Freitas frequently. He is very serious about designing nanobot medical devices so they are non-replicating, have numerous failsafes, and do not create the possible problems most people envision. One reason writing all three volumes will take 6 years is the depth of analysis that has to be done to meet this standard. While it is doubtful that a single individual can think of everything, Nanomedicine clearly will lay the foundation for safe and very useful nanobots such as Respirocytes.

The problems mentioned by Bill Joy in his interview point out how poorly informed he is. Anyone who has been in the computer industry as long as he has, should know enough to "read the manual(s)" before offering uninformed opinions. The problems regarding nanotechnology run amok have been discussed for many years in the sci.nanotech newsgroups as well as at conferences for the Foresight Institute's Senior Associates. The basic solutions involve making "safe" (e.g. reviewed, open source) designs available while at the same time developing defenses against nanotech run amok. The Extropy Institute's Mailing List Archives, for example, contains recent discussions about encouraging the availability of "almost anything" manufacturing boxes (similar to Star Trek "replicators"), while discouraging the availability of "everything" boxes.

Diamondoid or saphire based molecularly assembled nanobots used in medical applications will greatly exceed the capabilities in of "biobots" built on existing genetic machines (DNA, enzymes, bacteria, cells, etc.) because they are stronger, can pack the "code" more densely, and can have more complex programs than the rather "ad hoc" designs that nature has provided us with. Most of the first volume of Nanomedicine is devoted to determining exactly what the physical limits will be on power, communication, mobility, etc. Most of the applications will be discussed in Volumes II and III.

Joy may be right that the technology poses a threat to the "human species", but that begs the question of "Why would you want to run on obsolete hardware?". Anyone who understands even a little astronomy knows that galactic hazards doom biological human forms to death at some point. Only those humans who choose to upload have any hope of living the trillion or so years that seems quite feasible. So while the hopes for biochemical humans are rather dismal even with Nanomedicine, the long term prospects for humanity, based on what nanotechnology allows are quite good indeed.

As far as nanotechnology background material goes, the best (nontechnical) source is Engines of Creation. Other references can be found in Eric Drexler's CV.

Ironic counterpart to Bill Joy article

[marcsiry]

The intense focus on the idea of introducting nanobots into the body for the purpose of medicine is the sort of thing Bill Joy warns about in an article reported on Slashdot earlier today.

I paged through all ten chapters of the Nanomedicine article and I failed to find a single instance of the possible dangers of nanobots-run-amok, or the chance that a malevolent force could use them as a weapon. Without a consciousness that the technology could go wrong, or that it could be used for evil, Joy asserts that progress for the sake of progress could have dire consequences.