Nanorobots Inside Our Bodies?
Roland Piquepaille writes "In this very short article, Genome News Network (GNN) looks at the work of a Brazilian researcher, Adriano Cavalcanti, and his colleagues. Cavalcanti is working in nanorobotics, an emerging field in medicine which states that nanorobots soon will travel inside our bodies, digging for information, finding defects or delivering drugs. The GNN article contains spectacular images, and Cavalcanti's page about Nanorobotics Control Design includes additional ones. Even if the computer-generated images are impressive, please notice that real uses of nanorobots for health care will only appear progressively within the next ten years. Finally, this summary contains more details and a third set of images of simulated nanorobots at work. [Additional note: I didn't flash about Cavalcanti's work when Nanodot wrote about it last July in Collective Nanorobots Control Design. Now, I think it's worth mentioning a second time.]"
August 24th, 2004 at 12:52 PM
Pretty pictures
Is it just my poor impression, or is all nanorobotic research restricted to drawing pretty pictures? Pictures of nanorobots and glowing descriptions of all the things that will be possible once we have them, without much thought given to how they will work in the first place. This paper's authors, along with everybody else, seem to be forgetting that appearance is difficult to predict if you do not know how the device works, and their pretty pictures will be as useful as, say, science fiction novels, attempting to portray cars designed in the age of horseless carriages. Just as science fiction novels are read for entertainment, so are today's nanotechnology science papers. I admit to having been greatly entertained by this paper,… without coming one step closer to enlightenment.
August 24th, 2004 at 4:37 PM
Come on, Nanodot!!
I'm getting more up-to-date nanotechnology news on sciencedaily.com. This particular news is almost, literally, a decade old.
Post some FRESH news, and stop posting what the other news sites have previously posted.
For being at the forefront of Nanotechnology, the Foresight Institute's blog sure is slow – of course, I am sure all of the talented people at Foresight have better things to do than to post recent news updates…but this laziness is hypocritical to Foresight's mission – which is to educate the world about the benefits and hazards of Nanotechnology.
If I were to rate Foresight's performance from 1 to 10 on educating the public on Nanotechnology, I would rate it a 2. The word is definitely getting out – but not to the right people. Foresight needs to start making waves – and soon.
August 27th, 2004 at 8:50 PM
Re:Come on, Nanodot!!
What should be done then, to make true Molecular Manufacturing get into the minds of the everyday people, like the people who spend their days eager to go to the next baseball game and who know little if anything about MNT? What are your suggestions? My suggestion: Rent advertising space in movie theaters in that twenty minutes or so before the movie, where they advertise, and have big nano graphics and a list of what MNT can do, posted there, with info such as the Foresight url, and, make a series called "Better Living Through Molecular Manufacturing" in which a new tape is made each month, and sent out to the History Channel and other television networks.
August 29th, 2004 at 8:52 AM
News which is useful…
I have to agree with the tone of the several other comments. This isn't "news". Some of Cavalcanti's papers are 2+ years old. Nanorobots and applications for improving human health have been known about by people at the Foresight Institute and IMM for 5-7 years — in detail. Roland (in case you aren't aware of it) the publication year on Nanomedicine Volume I was 1999! Other papers are even older (see the Foresight Nanomedicine page). If you want to post about it on your own blog fine. But people here would appreciate news of greater significance (moderators please take note!).
Anyone who has studied this knows it is highly unlikely that we are going to have diamondoid nanorobots in the next decade (biological nanorobots maybe — since we already have the functional parts they require and the assembly methods do not require a huge amount of work). Studies that involve the control and movement of nanorobots do not provide us with the design of the parts they are composed of or the means by which to assemble them. So about all you end up with is pretty pictures.
August 30th, 2004 at 10:48 AM
Re:News which is useful…
That is why I greatly enjoyed your paper regarding using biology to bootstrap MNT, Robert. The one about using protein technology to bootstrap parts for diamondoid technology. I forget the original title, but it was eye-opening. I also found your paper on a mass of people using their computer power to design nanotech parts, instead of wasting time and resources on SETI programs, very informative. Has there been any progress along these lines that you know of, since that paper was released? We need a catalog of molecular machine parts, similiar to the few that Merkle and Drexler and others designed, but, a wide range of them, designed to atomic detail.
September 1st, 2004 at 11:21 AM
Re:News which is useful…
You are discussing Protein Based Assembly of Nanoscale Parts and Nano@Home.
I cannot take credit for much of the protein based approach since it is in large part derived from Drexler's discussion of solution based synthesis and the creation of molecules with increasing covalent bond density per unit volume (Chapters 15 and 16 of Nanosystems). I simply added in biotechnology as a solution to some of the problems that chemistry might not easily solve. That analysis however is still the only one I'm aware of that attempts to look at the real costs of and cost reduction strategies for one of the MNT development paths.
With regard to Nano@Home, it has a Web Site and had quite an active discussion last year. But I think most of the people who became involved were users who expected to run an @Home client that doesn't exist yet. What was/is really needed is a group of highly committed open source developers who are willing to get their fingers dirty learning chemistry. We also leaned towards running the project under BOINC and that has taken some time to be available in a form that can be used (I just started downloading the package this last week to try and understand it.)
I agree that we need a catalog of parts; then we need a library of chemical reactions that can work with them (this insight due largely to comments made by Eugen Leitl). The progress in these areas is slow. Recent publications my multiple researchers at Zyvex, including Freitas & Merkle, suggest that one can model some parts of the reactions at the atomic level and understand what works and what doesn't work. But you need a few dozen groups working in areas like this around the world and there is both a lack of people educated to do this work as well as a lack of insight/commitment to proper funding by governments, foundations and VCs.
I do have an interesting idea as to one way to tackle this problem (to prove the assembly of complex nanoscale parts is indeed feasible). People who either have a spare Mac 68K doing nothing or would be willing to purchase one on EBay (or find & run some Mac simulation software on a PC???) and who would be willing to spend $500(?) to purchase a retrosynthesis package should contact me.
Robert