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

It will have small beginings..

[Anonymous Coward]

.. and gradually scale back.

10, 15, 20 years away?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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

Wait, that was a good analogy.

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".

Re:10, 15, 20 years away?

[Scarblac]

I don't agree at all. Human brains work by neurons firing in specific patterns, in specific ways, in extremely huge numbers and with complicated interneuron connections. There is no quick fix to knowing how the brain works, since it's not a simple thing.

That said, even if the brain relied on some quantum effect, I find the idea that just building something completely different that also relies on a quantum effect (a quantum computer) and just letting it run (doing what?) to be pretty bizarre.

The main problem to solving "true AI" remains _defining true AI_. You can't solve a problem if nobody can say what the actual problem is.

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.

Re:oxymoron

[MaelstromX]

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.

I've always wondered

[quokkapox]

Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future? So-called (and self-proclaimed) experts have been trying for decades, and they aren't doing much better than psychics. Or are there wildly successful visionaries with high accuracy of whose publications we are now unaware? I'd love to see a discussion of futurists' predictions that HAVE been surprisingly accurate.

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?

Re:I've always wondered

[TallMatthew]

Why do we humans keep trying to predict our technological future?

Funding.

Re:I've always wondered

[adtifyj]

SciFi writers have been very good at predicting human advancement.

I suspect this is because they research rather than speculate, and they believe in their predictions enough that they flesh them out by writing detailed descriptions of what life would be like after their predictions come true.

Re:I've always wondered

[kabanossen]

Predictions are tools of perception. People use predictions to better understand phenomena and to create better goals and plans.
Predictions are ideas so they affect people's thinking; they give us new ideas, new perspectives and insights.
The gap between ideas and technology is continuously narrowing and that makes predictions about our technological future more and more like inventions.

Re:I've always wondered

[tehdaemon]

" SciFi writers have been very good at predicting human advancement.

Agreed. However they do not seem at all good at predicting the when as well as the what. They have 'tech X' but not the 'year Y' part.

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:I've always wondered

[LionKimbro]

Hm, you may be interested in this: Predicting mid-range global futures (2005-2050).

In particular, it talks about the Delphi method, and shows how Japan predicted, in the 1970's:

• Possibility to a certain degree of working at home through the use of TV-telephones, telefaxes, etc. (forecast: 1998)
• Acquisition of observation data from unmanned probes around Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and outside the solar system. (1999)
• Development of optical communication technology that can realize substantial savings in the use of copper. (1999)
• Possibility of external fertilization or artificial womb. (2001)
• Widespread use of heart transplant from human being by resolving problems such as transplant immunity, rejection and donor. (2001)
• Practical use of rapid-transit railway using iron rail and iron wheel, which can run at 300 km/h. (2006)
• Development of artificial ear. (2007)

They were rated at 64-71% accurate, which is not bad, considering that you're jumping out 30 years into the future, and making specific and useful predictions.

This is much better than psychic's prediction, unless the psychic happened to have an article on Moore's Law hidden beneath the table.

While there are a lot of well-reported predictions that are basically bunk, and even though the public has fixated on images that make no sense, there are also sources that are doing their homework, and are actually well researched. It's sad that the good stuff goes unreported.

All this said, even near-term futures are very exciting and interested, and people simply don't know about what's happening. I've personally worn a NOMAD headset, for example. Anyone can have one, for $2,000. These devices are certain to get cheaper, and will be in color, within 5 years. They're great devices, and I personally think that they'll be as common as bluetooth headsets are now. Bluetooth headsets will get cheaper, and become much more useful, as wireless networks expand, (as they are sure to,) and Internet access becomes much more pervasive.

The "Camp" phenomenon happening right now is exploding. Investments in communications and intelligence technology is leading to this sort of thing, and the work of these sorts of things is further compounded into more communications and intelligence technology, and the spread of the technology.

Another poster here rightly said it: Even if predictions turn out false, they are still extremely useful. In many cases, we predict so we can make sure that they turn out false. To ensure that they come out false. Every single human being makes predictions about the course of their life, so that they can steer themselves in one direction, or to avoid another. It would be very surprising to me if human societies did not engage in this activity. (This is scenario planning, and used by just about every corporation and government.)

Technology prediction in some ways is the easiest thing to predict, looking into mid-range futures (the hardest territory.) If you put your money on Moore's Law, you're doing far better than (say) betting on baseball games, or who wins the presidency.

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.

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.

Re:I predict...

[Stan Vassilev]

"Telling "It will work out in the future, somehow" is the best motivation-killer."

Well yea, but telling them "no matter what you do, somehow, you'll end up in a nuclear holocaust and highly toxic environment with lots of deadly mutation and deseases, the last surviving human societies will be a bunch of ruthless scavengers forced to canibalize their fellow buddies for survival, in the hope of slowing the their imminent doom" .. .. ain't a lot better motivation-wise.

Plus everytime someone predicts flying cars next year someone sits down and works on it for real. Some day, some year, someone will succeed, and we'll have flying cars! How cool would be that ?!

Artificial human organs by 2020

[Stan Vassilev]

"...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.

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

[Shihar]

I too work in nanotechnology. In fact, the company I work for just kicked out their first product, a carbon nanotubes based memory cell. I completely disagree with you. I think we are moving forward at a blistering pace that is just getting faster.

I suggest holding onto your ass, as pharmaceutical companies are about to start blasting new useful products. You need to remember that what we see in a lot of industries is on a time lag. It takes a bare minimum of 10-15 years to create a drug from scratch and get it through the FDA. Think about that for a moment. The drugs being released today come from before the Internet was being widely used. The fruits of these efforts are already starting to become clear. My father for instance probably just tacked an extra 10-20 years onto his life with new cholesterol lowering drug. Things are only going to get better.

Everything is shrinking at an accelerated rate. The amount of information that we have access to is expanding exponentially. As a culture, we are so used to change that we are utterly blind to it when it happens. 5 years ago I knew only one or two people with cell phones, and those people rarely used them. I recall having friends who swore they would never own one of those damn things.

Just the other day I ran into the first person I have met in the past year under the age of 50 who doesn't own a cell phone. This guy came to a gathering of about a dozen people that I was throwing. We were crowded in my living room when someone asked what his cell phone number was so they could coordinate meeting up the next day. The guy said he didn't own a cell phone. That statement brought conversation in the room to a dead stop. The group then spent a few minutes trying to figure out how in the hell you coordinate meeting at a park if you can't use a cell phone. In this group, there were people that just 5 years ago swore they would never use a cell phone. Now, they have to struggle to remember how meet up with someone without using a cell phone.

As a culture we are desensitized to change. We don't suffer from 'future shock' as some futurist thought we would. As new things come we roll with it very well. Show a guy from 1990 the year 2006, and he would be awed. True, we don't have floating cars or cool looking buildings. A city street today looks roughly like a city street from 15 years ago. What a person from 1990 WOULD notice right away is the fact that everyone owns a cell phone. They would be blown away by how trivial it is to get knowledge simply by using the Internet. The speed and power of our computers, or games, and our MP3 players would be unlike anything they could have imagined possible. They would recognize that socially technology is changing how we interact at a blistering rate.

Things are accelerating very quickly. There might be a limit or a set of breaks out there somewhere, but it sure as hell isn't in sight right now. The best is without a doubt yet to come.

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.

Breathing-in NanoTech

[digitaldc]

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.

Re:oxymoron

[Dr. GeneMachine]

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.

Add +25 years for Regulatory Issues

[caesar-auf-nihil]

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.

Re:oxymoron

[fireboy1919]

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.

Obligatory Wayne's World quote

[edunbar93]

"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.

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.