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."

Comments

Replacing medicines

[poeidon1]

Would it mean that I no longer have to take pills or injections for my medical problems?

What about the gray death?

[Travoltus]

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.

Re:10, 15, 20 years away?

[Scarblac]

Artificial intelligence, i.e. thinking machines, are always about 10 years away. They have been for years.

That's not quite true. AI used to be always 50 years away. Not that that means much, of course. I believe we still have no idea what it is we're actually looking for, and keep redefining it (people used to think that a computer playing chess would be AI).

The speed of innovation is increasing all the time, so our feeling of "some time in the future" is getting shorter. In ten years AI will probably be always "just after next weekend", and no closer than ever...

But yeah, it's a good analogy. Nowadays we build things at nano-scale (materials), but as long as it's not actual grey goo it'll be called "not real nano-tech".

I predict...

[Stan Vassilev]

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.

I think I disagree

[Ogemaniac]

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.

Re:I think I disagree

[ace1317]

I'm also a "nano" researcher, and while I agree that alot of the recent papers havent been huge advances, the fact that characterization methods are very limited at this scale makes it important to learn techniques that work wonderfully as well as those that work minimally at best. Molecular biosensing happens to be my field, and I have no trouble believing that we'll be able to detect single molecules by 2015. Hell, we can currently detect a handful of DNA molecules and distinguish them from other oligos that are 1-base mismatches. It may take less than 10 years for certain types of biomolecules.

Re:I think I disagree

[Frisson]

I'm not sure that's a very good analogy to be honest. Cell phones are based on technologies which are decades old, well understood and have been incrementally advanced. It could be argued that it has taken half a century to realise the telecommunications systems which we have today.

In the field of nanotechnology there are many barriers to progress. One of the main ones as mentioned above is accurate measurement (metrology) of the substances and products which are being manufactured. The recent advances (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/01/ 04/0344203&tid=126) in superlenses to beat the diffraction limit may help advance optical techniques and advances are being made all the time in complimentary methods such as AFM and electron based methods, but these are all incremental too.

One of the most exciting aspects of nanotechnology is also one of the current barriers, which is the fact that everyday, well understood materials can behave COMPLETELY differently at the nano-scale. For instance, clusters of 20-80 gold atoms have experimentally been shown to posess totally alien chemical and electrical behaviours when compared with the properties of the material that we are familiar with on the macroscale. This means that it becomes difficult to predict how materials are going to behave working on these length scales and extensive experimentation is required.

For this reason too, I strongly hope that nanotech does progress at a slower pace, as that will give us time to develop strategies for health and safety concerns in tandem with the 'cool' technology. Radical changes in material behaviour may well realise some fantastic new devices which will revolutionise modern life, but toxological and bioactive properties must also be well understood, particularly in the nanobiotech areas.

Working in the area, it is also vitally important to educate the general public about this branch of science and help to reassure them that the nanorobot invasion/grey goo armageddon predictions from some branches of the media aren't likely to happen. Otherwise the science will follow Genetically Modified foods into the dustbin of history.

Of course, if this does occur, each nanotech area will simply revert back to their respective disciplines of materials science, molecular biology, etc etc. It would just be a shame to lose such a lucrative funding source ;)

It is about processor power too.

[ansible]

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.

Re:I've always wondered

[PietjeJantje]

I've always been interested in futurologists. It started as a kid, when they spew ideal worlds with flying cars and such. A.k.a. The Jetsons period. Soon afterwards, I started realizing it was all crap, and started using them as a source of entertainment as to this day. It makes a great laugh every now and then. If a futurologist predicts something, as a rule of thumb I'd say it won't, still, they tend to take themselves very serious.

However, so far I've seen two 'predictions' that are worthwhile:
- The partly self-fullfilling prophecy the books by William Gibson (Neuromancer, etc.); Not only is he spot on most of the time, what is scary is that while he issues many warnings, mostly the "coolness" was remembered and used, resulting in the opposite effect, starting with termonology: words like cyberspace, matrix and the Net originate from these books. Funnily, I like the books now mostly on other levels.

- The concept of technological singularity. Hey, they almost spoil it with stuff like http://www.singularitywatch.com/spiral.html but the effect in history cannot be denied.

Re:10, 15, 20 years away?

[Todrael]

People are already trying to solve this problem. They're working to create Friendly AI, not through technology, but through definition of the human brain and our thought processes. Check out some of their work at: http://www.singinst.org/

If they succeed, they hope to create a Singularity, a point at which we have no ability to predict what lay beyond, sheerly due to the intelligences involved.

The Future is Always Unpredictible

[airship]

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.