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The Future of Nanobiotech Predicted
Quadraginta writes "Aharon Hauptman and Yair Sharan of the Interdisciplinary Center for Technology Analysis and Forecasting (ICTAF) at Tel Aviv University recently presented the results of a survey of 139 researchers on the future of nanobiotech. The presentation itself is only available as a PDF file, but there is a brief news announcement from the ICTAF. Interestingly, Hauptman and Sharan asked for -- and got -- specific predictions from the experts of the year in which various nanotech marvels will appear. For example, the experts say we can look forward to biosensors capable of detecting a single molecule by 2015, the direct construction of artificial human organs by 2020, and the use of nanomachines inside the body for diagnosis and therapy by 2025."
.. and gradually scale back.
Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about 10 years away. They have been for years.
Wait, that was a good analogy.
I deciphered the above to: NanoBiotech? All Bio starts at the nano. Even the largest megafauna or the smallest single celled organism or even the alledged nanobe subcellular organisms are composited of componenents that are self assembling entitities. This goes on right down to single proteins which are self assembling. All bio is at the nano-level. Might as well call is BaNanoTech.
NanoBiotech? All Bio starts at the nano. Even the largest megafauna or the smallest single celled organism or even the alledged nanonbe subsceeluar oranisms arr composted of componenets that are self assembing entitities. This goes on right down to single proteins which are self assembling. All bio is at the nano-level. Might as well call is BaNanoTech.
Congrats on the semi-relevant FP but what's your point? This is about technology, not natural processes. The word "Nanobiotech" is to distinguish from traditional "biotech", and it refers to things such as the molecular-scale biosensors in the summary.
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It seems pointless to make specific predictions, such as Technology X in Year Y. Might it not be better to simply steer our unwieldy technology, as well as we can, in a generally sensible direction?
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Would it mean that I no longer have to take pills or injections for my medical problems?
They called me mad, and I called them mad, and damn them, they outvoted me. -Nathaniel Lee
Deus Ex and Babylon 5 (Crusade) fans know what I'm talking about. That's not a wild fantasy either, if nano biotech ever takes off.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
No it refers to the plan for biologists to tap into a new buzz phrase compliant source of funding now that biotech has worn off. I'm totally serious. Where I work, molecular biologists aren't really welcome to talk about things like protein folding or RNA structure modeling, or cellular structure or enzyme catalyis--the ultimate nanotechnology--for this very reason. The Nanotech guys are afraid to see their pot o gold diverted.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
I predict that this prediction will not happen.
Take that, biotech! Hahahaha!
On a serious note, I remember that episode of Ray Bradbury's Theater where a guy lied to have travelled in the future and saw all ecological issues solved, no wars, and no poverty.
And it indeed happened like this, because people believed themselves they could do it. And his time machine turned out to be just a mirror trick for the press.
We all need a shot of sci-fi in our blood to keep us motivated.
"...artificial human organs by 2020...."
Ok dudes, we got 14 years until the replacements. With the right dosage of obesity, alcohol abuse and smoking, the replacements will be just in time for some of us.
The speed of innovation is increasing all the time
As a "nano" researcher myself, I have started to almost think the tide is turning the other way. We have lots of momentum, but I no longer think we are accelerating.
Of course, it all depends on your measure. If you just count number of journal pages printed, or number of scientists researching, things seem hunky-dory. However, if you multiply that by the value of that information, it shrinks substantially. Science has become exceptionally incremental, and we are advancing via zerg-style attack rather than leaps and bounds.
At least from my position here on the inside, I feel that these estimates are quite optimistic.
Yup, we have to understand better how minds work. Or at least enough to make a copy of them.
And then we also need the processor power equal to that of the brain too. It could well be argued that the Internet crossed that line quite some time ago. But the structure of the Internet is not even close to mind-like. Though there are possibilities...
At any rate, what gets interesting is that we've just recently crossed that same line with "single" entities like the IBM BlueGene supercomputer cluster. We'll probably have a dozen of those online by next year, and hundreds of more powerful ones in five years.
So now we really are waiting for the software. We've also got other advantages compared to what researchers 20 - 30 years ago had. Between Wikipedia and Google, we are in the process of digitizing a large percentage of human knowledge. And Wikipedia can provide a good top-level index into that knowledge.
Next it is a (highly non-trivial) task to improve the ability to map natural language into symbols accurately. Or maybe we can sucker people across the Internet into doing the mapping for us (Tom Sawyer fence painting) by making it fun somehow.
We're gonna spy on James Gentile with this shit, it'll be phat!
Well, I've only played Deus Ex but basically the scenario in the game wouldn't have happened if the nano-tech wasn't available to merely a single corporation in the entire world. Something which is unlikely to happen in the real world.
Or is it?....
No idea what we're talking about?
Shame on you for never having played Deus Ex! Tsskt tsskt!
...oh... wait
One thing that is rarely discussed about nano-technology is the possible harm it could do to living organisms. If someone is ingesting nano-technology unwittingly through the air, water, or food, it is possible it could do great harm. Also, since it is almost impossible to see and track, what happens when it creates unintended harm? Who is held responsible and how do you clean it up?
That being said, I am for new technology and I am hoping nano-tech will be used in a responsible manner.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Uhm... where the hell are you working? I mean, what is left for a molecular biologist to talk about, if you exclude these topics? This is the very core of structural biology - and a lively topic of discussion and speculation where I work.
You know, not all science is about funding and buzzwords. To be honest, I am getting somewhat tired about this argument, which seems to be constantly reiterated on Slashdot. Molecular biology, as I experience it, is a very dynamic field full of people pursuing topics out of interest, not because they chase after grant money.
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Windows is a bonfire, Linux is the sun. Linux only looks smaller if you lack perspective.
We grow nano machines.
Darned engineers got it all backwards.
At last we will have NanoFlying Cars , NanoColdFusion ,Nano
Thank you.
Maybe the technological breakthroughs will occur in the predicted timelines, but if you tack on all the regulatory issues, one should really add an additional 25 years to the timelines. The great deal of uncertainty on how these nanoscale devices really affect health, as well as regulatory approval of such devices means just as much research to determine that nanobiotech is really ready for safe use. And let's face it - nanobiotech is basically a new term for molecular biology, and we continue to learn a great deal every day in that field, especially how hard it is to get things to work right at that level if we come up with it.
That being said - some countries may see this tech before others. I'm betting Singapore comes up with this type of technology first. If the regs are such that its more open to widespread use in that country or others, then maybe the timelines will only be 10-15 years off.
-When going for broke, go for Ithaca!
This is welcome news for anyone who has had a sigmoidoscopy with the current "decitechnology"
What the OP refers to, IIRC, is a story element of the PC game Deus Ex. Gray Death is a disease. A cure exists, but it is monopolized by its creators, thus controlling the unwashed masses. It's all a big conspiracy involving the government and that corporation. "Gray Death" is less a story about the dangers of technology than about the possible dangers of power monopolies.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Positivism amongst scientists is not a rare fact, certainly not in a new and "sexy" field like bionanotechnology (in which field I'm active btw).
The fact is that the years of completion you see in this survey are the dates on which scientists assume the _scientific work_ will be done. Sadly this is the easy part, for something biotechnology related to be released for usage by the masses, a lot of aditional testing has to be done. In other words the product has to be approved for use by a variety of boards and governments. Getting a product through all these test and validation fases can easily take up more than 10 years (and a boatload of cash).
This might not be the case for nanocircuitry based on biopolymers, but it will certainly be the case for medical use of nanotechnology (building organs etc). In case of medical use, I think its safe to add 15 to 20 years to the predicted dates.
Grtz,
Wolf
But aren't scientists often inspired by Science Fiction?
Actually, nanobiotech is all about building nanomachines using parts derived from biological "machines" that already exist....but doing so in such a way that the new machines themselves are clearly not biological. It's really a stepping stone to the "harder" nanotech...since we have to do less figuring out about the actual parts to use.
In addition, the disease is actually artificial and created by the same corporation which makes the cure, which I guess is what the OP also was pointing to.
You're wrong, you know.
We're all composed of atoms, so clearly all matter interaction should be studied as quantum physics, but clearly that's wrong too, since matter is just condensed energy.
We all of life - from going to the drive-through at McDonalds to contemplating the meaning of life - is just energy interacting with energy. Clearly, we must always keep this in mind. Anyone who is not considering that all of their activities are actually quantum-mechanical energy interactions is missing what's Really Important, and only thinking about the non-essential parts of things.
Or, perhaps, there is some value at looking at things from the macro level. Wouldn't you say that the biological fields of medicine (most of it), plant breeding (most of it), animal breeding (most of it) have some merit?
These have little consideration of bionano, just as all of life isn't concerned with quantum-mechanical energy interactions, even if it is the stuff of all things.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Has anyone seen that Outer Limits episide where they have nano-technology and they use it on some guy to cure his cancer I think. As the episode goes on, the nanobots refused to let the man die through his many attempts at suicide, repairing stab wounds, burns etc. By the end of the episode, he had gills and and eyes on the back of his head.
There's no place like ~/
Occaisionally it may be necessary to upgrade the nanobots' virus definitions.
I doubt we'll ever have real artificial intelligence anytime soon, if we're smart enough anyways. Mostly because to create a real AI, you need to give it a purpose or reason to survive... think about how life itself works in general. Survival instincts precipitate change. If we do indeed create real AI, it might turn into something out of the matrix. Just we won't be living in some silly dreamworld. We'll probably just cease to exist because we're horribly inefficient anyways.
"Shyeah, right, and I predict monkeys will fly out of my butt!"
I'm sure that it's just a matter of designing nanotechnology monkeys.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
We watch you with nanobots and talk about your thoughts out loud and we fit on CD.
We need a new Future Shock for this new century, which can be snapshot periodically (for posterity) and updated regularly as technology allows.
Er, maybe that's now called a wiki.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
While it's relatively easy to predict some technological developments (i.e., color TV when you already have black-and-white TV), most of the real innovations sneak up on us unexpectedly. Even Microsoft, the biggest computer technology company in the world, totally missed the importance of the Internet until it was already here.
I predict that, while some of these things may happen, and may even happen 'on schedule', the most important developments in nanobiotech will be impossible to know until it gets here.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
there's a webcomic called Alien Dice, where the space gladiators are given "nanites" that heal them of all wounds, even in cases of attempted suicide.
This is a small world, indeed.
...we can play Duke Nukem Forever on our nanoscale phantom indrema quantum consoles.
I, for one, welcome our new mighty boot engaging, nanoscale, organ replacing overlords.
Knowing how project managers tend to exaggerate product schedules, I'm thinking that such innovations, if they come, are probably four times the estimated dates away... which places them securely outside of my lifetime. :)
--Ray
http://www.beanleafpress.com
What we need is a massive (like in WW2) funding of a manhattan styled nanaotech intiative that covers multi-disciplened fields (look at how fast the Appolo moon program got to the moon (just 9 years after the goal was set). Einstien was quoted saying that the WW2 manhattan program got us the nuclear bomb in 4 years intead of 40 years. The advantage of nanotech is that once you have developed suitable nanotech assemblers, nano-diagnostic devices and nano-repair devices (for the human body), then you simply get the nanoassemblers to make copies of them selves! You can't that with CPU/motherboards, we are basing the advancement of nano on old ways of thinking that we have grown up with, develop the technology and then build a factory and sell you the new tech slowlly over a 10 year period (before everyone has at least one of the new devices).
With nano, just make sure that you have the ability so that it can make copies of itself so that you eventually will simply just download the latest open-source nano design and manufacture it in your desktop computer nano card attachment. By then we will have all sorts of nano/biotech based methods of boosting brain power and methods of interfacing your brain to the net so getting advanced (state of the art) bio/nano/medical info will be a download away. (no more big pharma/medical entities controlling your life and bank accout!!!).
Tha fact that now-a-days, the average person can use the internet to easily work/explore very complex software and hardware (ie: open source game design, OS design etc.), these capabilities 25 years ago were confined to big companies (IBM, DEC etc.) and big organizations like the military and big universities, Now anybody can buy a $1000 PC and work on massivelly complex projects in their own living room. Just imagine what is going to be possible 5 or 10 years from now!
Once people realize that we are getting really close to some really cool advances in nano, they will want to put massive pressure on their governments so that their particular country does not get left behind in the future nano races.
When we could essentially take any cell in your body and analize its internal structure and machinery and identify its health, its age, and what parts of its structure and machinery needs fixing, or else make new parts right inside the cell, using nanoassemblers, take out the old, deffective part and whalla!, no more old person, you get younger, you reach a state of being (say, 20 years old) and stay there indefinetly (you just get tune-ups every 5 years, if it's possible to have the nano build it, then no tune ups required as your cells now can maintain themselves permanently.
All sorts of future tech will be possible, with real time nano monitoring implants, you could store your life experiences, you could google other peoples life experiences, you could communicate non-verbally with mental images with other people and probablly with adanced AI's etc, so as to not waste years going to shcool, just download other peoples knowledge from big AI based googles of the future. Who knows what computers will have evolved into by then, you could probably program them by thinking about the problem (no more tapping keyboards or using mouses).
The thing is, nanotech has the ability to bootstrap itself into existance,(faster that the old way of developing a technolgy, building factories and getting people to buy your new gee wiz item), so all we have to do is develope the appropriate nano manufacturing capability, while we develope the nano-sensor ability to delve into complex systems like the human body and build big datatbases if it biological specs (funtionality), so that when we develope the nano tools to manipulate cells and their contents, we would now have the tools to analize and repair ourselves.
We are now at the point in history where people are realizing these things, (people in past centuries would kill to be where we are now, to have the ability to control lifes processes has been a holy grail quest thr
In 1971 Nixon declared war on cancer. Billions of dollars and countless research hours spent on the problem. We have made some progress but cancer is still a major threat.
Nanotech, that is, real molecular, bottom-up technology, will make real medicine possible for the first time ever. But not in 20 years. 50 maybe.
While I think the report is somewhat interesting, these experts seem overly optimistic. I also notice the vast majority of them are academic researchers, perhaps there is a connection there. Less than ten percent were from industry--a mistake I think, but admittedly it's much more difficult to identify the right people in industry than in academics.
Having worked in industry in a position that had me constantly checking out various new achievements in nanobiotech, I can say that there have been some outstanding successes (for example, see the work of Chad Mirkin and his companies). But for many of the enormous milestones cited in the report, the experts seem to feel that we're there after only a few more years of research. I think we have much much further to go on many of them.
One thing about this report that bothers me is that quite a few of the subjects listed need not have anything to do with nanotech. The first one, for example, is understanding the cell cycle. There is absolutely no reason why nanotech is needed to solve this riddle. Nanobiotech may give us the answers there, but the answers may just as likely come from more conventional technologies. And lab-on-a-chip is most desirably NOT nanoscale--at that scale the sample size (number of molecules) is generally too low to be statistically significant for most applications.
Part of the problem is what is defined as nanotechnology--this varies quite a bit. This is extremely important to the issue of regulation. Automobile tires are classified as nanotechnology by some--apparently carbon nanotubes are an ingredient of tires to the tune of some million or so tons a year if I remember correctly. IMO it is folly to even consider the possibility of regulating nanotechnology, it is much too diverse. There are all kinds of dangerous technologies, some of them may come in small packages.
Of course Bill Joy is partly to blame for the potential regulatory issues having been one of those behind the 'grey goo' nonsence where nanorobots go awry and begin deconstructing all matter. To all the 'grey goo' proponents: please study physical chemistry--in particular the part about the Boltzmann distribution. If by some miracle little nanomanufacturing robots are realized, surely those quantum farts would blow them all to Hell!
--
"Nano" - prefix used with corporate moniker to acquire venture capital.
But would it not come somewhat more quickly if a really kickass military application could be found for this ? Maybe they could spray some on the enemy, they all sport giant woodies, and screw themselves to death.
If common sense were common everyone would have it.