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Nanotechnology: the Good, the Bad, the Hyperbole
pillageplunder writes "A very informative interview with Kristen Kulinowski who is an executive Director at the Federally funded Center for Biological and Environmental Nanotechnology at Rice University. A good well balanced read."
You have it in your PCs and disk drives. This form of nanotech has a bright future.
What isn't here, and probably never will be, is the SciFi "self-assembly" nanotech. Throw out some powder on a rock and watch it turn it into a new car. Or something equally silly.
Strangely, we don't expect steam shovels to make other steam shovels. We don't expect cars to run without gasoline. And we certainly don't expect it to all just work without breaking down. But make the robotics very very small, and suddenly magic is supposed to occur.
She sure didn't say much, but then the questions weren't exactly thought provoking and the answers were likely trimmed for space. I am glad there is attention and concern about the long-term affects of nanomachines, rather than complete focus on the short-term results possible.
Personally, I think Sci-fi does a better job of presenting the many possible hypes and fears about nano-machine than she did, and the many ways of handling the issues. It seemed like she was trying to prevent public rejection of nano-technology by providing the most minimal information possible. What sort of controls is the FDA looking at? How does she propose to prevent the problems the public fears most?
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Seriously, though, it is good to read a nice boring article about any technology. It seems like the average dolt has to have something blowing up or a mass kill in a story before they bother to read it (or more likely watch it) anymore.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Nanotech could go the way of Genetically Modified Foods. It never harmed anybody, but the Public fears the New & Different. The New Luddites will feed the fear with hyperbole.
The only thing new in this world is the history that you don't know.[Harry Truman]
The interview of a person who's self-stated goal is to "to draw attention to proactive, responsible development" (i.e. media flack functionary) appears in Businessweek, a magazine with a natural pro-business "bias", and you call it "a good, balanced read"? So I imagine you decide (affirmatively) that Fox news is fair and balanced, as well.
Is it any wonder that the average American is a moron? Critical thinking doesn't live here anymore.
As to the actual merits of the article, I found it to be a puff piece, with lots of whining about the failure of industry marketing to overcome resistance to wonderful technologies like GMOs (the frightened herd avoids the blame, and, to her credit, she avoided the word luddite.)
Where's Scientific American when you need it?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
At best, you could perform a battery of test on animal subjects and look for adverse reactions, like is done with new drugs. And even then, occasionally a dangerous one slips through.
That sounds great, until the bots kill all the E. Coli in my gut causeing me to die of indigestion.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
They're not going to rust. First of all, they probably won't be made out of iron, they'll probably be made out of carbon, oxygen and hydrogen. The chemical bonds that are necessary for oxidation or any other kind of reaction are already being used to attach the various pieces of the nanotech together. If there are no free electrons or "holes" nothing else is going to latch on. In effect, it's already "rusted."
What makes you think they'll have computer circuits that could be affected by an EMP? They could just as easily be using rod-logic or something similar.
As for "diamonds" being brittle, not at the scale we're talking about. The type of sound waves needed to break carbon bonds at a microscopic level would destroy just about anything else as well. What do you do if a person gets affected? Shooting at them with a beam of something that breaks all carbon bonds is _not_ a good solution.
Why would moderate temperature changes cause them to break? You can get large structures to break by changing the temperature repeatedly, but that takes a long time, and it's because of the aggregate expansion of all the molecules inside. Small structures, such as the cells of our body for instance, don't fall apart from the stress of small temperature changes. You can denature proteins and set stuff on fire if you make things hot enough, but that's because of chemical changes, not expansion/contraction.
Oh, and depending on the nature of the nanotech "reprograming" them might be difficult or impossible. They might only be capable of the specific task they were designed for if they have physical logic rather then reprogramable circuits. That would make terrorism much harder, up until the point technology advances enough to let anyone with a home lab cook up some nano-tech. In terms of grey-goo the biggest threat will probably be programming error, followed by mad scientist, followed by terroists.
Of more pressing concern is possible enviromental dangers (potentially very serious when one of the possible enviroments is your body) and smaller malfunctions. It's a quite possible for nanotech to screw up and kill you in a way that doesn't involve grey-goo or threaten the rest of the planet.
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