Tiny Robots in Your Bloodstream: The Future of Medicine

The thought of microscopic robots traveling through your body may seem like a science fiction novel from the 1960’s but, in the next decade or so, it may become science fact. Imagine clogged arteries being swept clean, cancer cells detected and destroyed and kidney stones being dissolved, all done by minute robots, eliminating the need for costly and invasive surgery. These are just some of the possible applications of nanotechnology in medicine, also known as nanomedicine. Nanomedicine can dramatically improve medicine and healthcare beyond our imagination. Nanotechnology was first mentioned in 1959 in a talk given by physicist Richard Feynman. Although he did not use the term, he described a process by which a pair of normal sized robot arms would build a copy of itself that was one tenth its size. That pair of arms would continue the process and so on until the arms reached the size of a molecule. (Patel 63) This would be the level of nanotechnology. Nano comes from the Greek word meaning â€Å"dwarf†. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter and when we speak of nanotechnology we are speaking of devices in the 1 to 100 nanometer scale. To help visualize how small that is, a germ is about 1000 nm wide, a human hair is about 100,000 nm wide. (Marchant, G. E. 231) The scanning tunneling microscope, invented in 1981 by Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, allowed humans to see individual atoms. Binnig and Rohrer both worked as physicists for the computer company IBM. The atomic force microscope was invented a few years later which allowed the user to actually move atoms by using a feeler with an extremely small, sharp needle on the end which allows it to see and move the atoms by f... ... and we will be able to create our own virtual realities that will integrate all our senses, expanding our intelligence in ways we cannot imagine. Nanomedicine will give rise to AI by giving humans extremely detailed scans and diagrams of the human brain and how it functions. Eventually, AI will be able to think and have emotional responses thanks to the info gathered by Nanobots. The two technologies will feed off one another resulting in a world that may be more wild than any science fiction novel ever written. (Kurzweil 40-46) It is clear that nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize health care and even transport humanity into the next evolutionary leap, but great care must be taken in order make sure we get there safely. Once technology becomes smarter than humanity, we may not be able to control our destiny any longer.