Magnet-Steered Nano-Fish Could Deliver Drugs and Sweep Body Toxins

dkatana writes: David Warner writes on InformationWeek how "nanoengineers" from UC San Diego have created microscopic fish powered by hydrogen peroxide that use magnets to steer themselves. "The "fish" are powerful enough to swim through your bloodstream, removing toxins or bringing medicine directly to crucial parts of your body, as cells in your blood stream do. Given enough time, the fish could be used to deliver drugs directly to cancer tumors or parts of your body that are too fragile for surgery."

Comments

Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

The nanotech fanbois are almost as bad as the Space Nutters. Look, it's been 30 years since K Eric Drexler wrote The Engines of Creation. I was a huge fanboi back then too.

Now I realize that even though nanotechnology already exists in cells, we simply don't have the theory to really understand what is going on here.

Until such a time, this is all sci-fi speculation.

Re: Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the last thing we want is to have carp floating around in our blood stream.

Re: Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Read 'the diamond age' by Neal Stephenson.

Re: Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Even more sci-fi crap by people that would barely muddle through high-school chemistry? No thanks. We seem to have enough delusional beliefs as it is.

Re: Oh good grief

[gregor-e]

But TOXINS! In your blood!

Re: Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry. Do you need some lotion?

Re:Oh good grief

[Hartree]

Nanotech has become a buzzword that can refer to excellent research or crackpottery depending on what's desired by the speaker. I hope you're restricting your rant to the crackpottery. but tossing baby with bathwater is practically an Olympic sport around Slashdot.

On the other hand, we've long used a lot of chemistry of all sorts that we really don't understand.

Just because we're not likely to get full up assemblers in the short term hardly means that nothing good will come of what's broadly termed nanotech.

Re:Oh good grief

[Anonymous Coward]

Almost as bad as the AI fanboys who scream about AI sentience because Siri can tell them what the latest football scores are.

Re:Oh good grief

[lucien86]

Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...

Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)

The real problem with assemblers is that there is so much BS about them. The technology's so complicated that even with a working machine it might take another 10 - 20 years before anyone can do anything useful with it. People also totally over-estimate what the things will be able to do - and massively under-estimate how long the machines would take to do it. - The 'perfect' worst example that comes to mind is the Knight Rider remake - sure assemblers could reshape a car like that -MAYBE- but it would take them months or years to do it each time someone pushed the button.

The first real problem with diamond assemblers is that they would need to be cryogenically cooled to work and kept in an environment even more extreme and clean than the current best IC factories... The things will have terrible problems getting enough power to work and even worse problems with overheating.. The real killer though is that the 'reproduction' process itself is the hardest of all - and either very slow and complex - or actually just about impossible..

On the other side of the coin, research totally away from assemblers has already achieved virtually the same thing - synthetic life. Ok today everything is still very primitive, but it has a broad front of research and things are definitely actually advancing.. The simple real truth is that new science and new technologies are difficult and don't take five minutes to get right.. Doesn't mean its not worthwhile..

So far, so good

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

So is there hydrogen peroxide naturally in blood, or it can be safely introduced, to drive these things? (It reacts with platinum particles in the tail to provide thrust, and are externally guided by magnetism via iron in the nose.)

Drug delivery is by ramming into the area in question and dissolving, releasing the payload (already proven in previous, simpler experiments.)

Bad particle "eating" is done by binding the fish with some chemical that attaches to it.

Re:So far, so good

[binarylarry]

So all we need is some kind of embedded AI vision system to detect cancerous cells and kill them.

Should make for some interesting CIA and FSB asssasinations.

But can these deliver my stuff from amazon?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wazat? No? Go back to selling records David.

Afterwards people can say:

[nospam007]

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"

Re:Afterwards people can say:

[rmdingler]

Tough crowd.

Drugs are bad mkay

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the last thing we need, frigging nano drug smugglers

Powered by hydrogen peroxide?

[GrumpySteen]

You know what else hydrogen peroxide reacts to? Blood!

Blood contains he enzyme catalase which really likes to react with hydrogen peroxide to make a foamy mess that would not be the healthiest thing to have in your blood vessels.

Re:Powered by hydrogen peroxide?

[penguinoid]

Coward! I myself am planning to use the peroxide fish as a source of oxygen so I don't need to breathe.

And don't you tell me not to hold my breath.

Doesn't seem practical

[ITRambo]

Powered by hydrogen peroxide that comes from where? There is no information in the linked article. If a person's blood is flowing why do they need to be "powered" at all if steered by magnetism? No one needs tiny devices that release hydrogen gas into their blood stream. So, remove the "powered" part, just steer it and it just might work without causing hydrogen embolisms.

Re:Doesn't seem practical

[Anonymous Coward]

The decomposition of hydrogen peroxide yields oxygen and water

Re:Doesn't seem practical

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, a decomposition reaction would yield hydrogen and oxygen. You are talking about something else. But you seem to be implying that the byproducts are relatively innocuous., while ignoring the havoc caused by this stuff interacting violently with just about anything it touches. Still, your knowledge of chemistry seems to be good enough to realize that the whole precept of nano bullshit is just fraud dressed up in wizardry

Re:Doesn't seem practical

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_peroxide#Decomposition

Re: Doesn't seem practical

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a chemist, but I did pay attention in 4th grade, and Hydrogen Peroxide definitely decomposes by losing an oxygen atom, with water and oxygen as the byproducts.

http://www.britannica.com/science/hydrogen-peroxide

Body toxins?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they like body thetans; shit that doesn't exists that people made up to sell you expensive therapy to get rid of?

FTA

[rmdingler]

"Of course, nanobots are often the source of speculation about the death of all humanity. There is the "grey goo" theory that one day nanobots will learn to self-replicate and quickly eat everything organic on the planet in a never-ending urge to procreate. There are several explanations about why this couldn't happen, including the fact that we could stop it with a fairly simple electromagnetic pulse. But it is fun to think that with this step toward a viable 3D-printed microscopic delivery device we are either one step closer to curing all the diseases of mankind or one step closer to just destroying ourselves entirely. Or both."

It's the way of too many of our watershed technological breakthroughs. When you ask if we are ready for the responsibility of a potential Doomsday Device, be certain to solve for (we).

I was skeptical

[kencurry]

at first, nanobots delivering drugs in the bloodstream and all...

But then, I read that they were "3D printed" nanobots, and I was all like "Whoahh, these guys are onto something!"

Re:I was skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? If anything, "3D printed" should immediately raise healthy skepticism.

Re:I was skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh

Re:I was skeptical

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they also mention they were "drones" and connected to the cloud? If they did, I am writing a check right now.

Speaking of Adams references

[davidwr]

Let me know when they've got a fish they can put in my ear that will auto-translate...

... consistently and accurately. [Yeah, I know, I'm being picky.]

alex chiu was right all along

[Anonymous Coward]

alex chiu was right all along http://alexchiu.com/

Hey mister negative....

[Anonymous Coward]

.."they're real."

That's a quote from the article.

This isn't sci-fi. These nano machines exist today and they work.

Re:Hey mister negative....

[Anonymous Coward]

Except they are nowhere near what is "nanotechnology" as promised. They are not self-replicating programmed assemblers benevolently repairing our body... They're just small bits of plastic. They're real. Sure. So what?

Re:Hey mister negative....

[Anonymous Coward]

Those promises aren't in the article anywhere. Nor are they in the definition of "Nanotechnology" as offered by Google:

"the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers, especially the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules."

These "fish" machines qualify, and they sound useful.

You are injecting claims so you can then complain about how they have not been met. Why would you do this?

Re:Hey mister negative....

[Anonymous Coward]

In other words, we revise our expectations down from 30 years ago and then go around screaming about "nanotechnology"..???

Manipulating individual atoms is pretty much everything we do, it's a very "real estate agent" kind of definition there buddy.

YOU are the ones using terms that imply "manipulating matter atom by atom" and in reality, all it is is normal chemical reactions.

These "fish" are ". They're 30 microns thick. Compare that to a human hair, which is about 75 microns ". Nowhere NEAR even YOUR definition.

Why would you do this? Is it because you are a liar? Is it because you are delusional? Or is it because you are stupid?

Re:Hey mister negative....

[someone1234]

If you think about it, nanomachines shouldn't be smaller than a bacterium. Just because something isn't below 1 micron it could be qualified as nanotecnology, especially stuff that moves around in a living body. Microtechnology is already used for a different thing. So what, 30k nanometers is still small enough to work safely in blood vessels. Probably it can become smaller by a factor, but i doubt "nanomachines" can or should become smaller than that.

I don't know about this.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds fishy to me. HAHAHAHAH sorry, couldn't help myself.

Actually sounds kinda cool. I want one I can stick in my ear to translate for me, so then I can understand ANYTHING said to me, in any language!

But before they can say:

[Errol backfiring]

"Resistance is Futile"