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]

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: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

[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.

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.

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

[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 ;)

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.

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.