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As a biologist, this is a major pet-peeve of mine: we don't need "medical nanorobotics". Not only is this a nonsense term, but nature has already provided a m
by polyfractal 15y ago
As a biologist, this is a major pet-peeve of mine: we don't need "medical nanorobotics". Not only is this a nonsense term, but nature has already provided a much better solution.
It's called an enzyme.
Enzymes are hugely efficient "nanorobots" that don't require science fiction. They "manufacture molecules" all the time, every day, at catalytic rates that would make high-tech manufacturing factories blush.
- jakeonthemove 15y agoI always wonder why creating synthetic nanorobots to replace organic ones seems more attractive than learning to control what we already have inside. Maybe it's because of the natural repulsion to biology that most people have...
- moonchrome 15y ago>I always wonder why creating synthetic nanorobots to replace organic ones seems more attractive than learning to control what we already have inside. Would you like to reuse a result of a process that went on for millions of years and reverse engineer all evolutionary accretions created by a random mutation process ? It's not hard to figure out why developers don't like that option, if they work maintaining a large codebase they probably have hands on expirience with that kind of work. It's not something I would unleash on my brain.
- jakeonthemove 15y agoGood point, however we could learn to make the organic bots do what we need them to without having to learn everything else about how they work - kind of like driving a car without knowing how to disassemble its engine. They're also much more tightly integrated into the existing infrastructure...
- polyfractal 15y agoMy theory is because most sci-fi enthusiasts are not biologists. They simply do not understand how powerful enzymes are and prefer to think about synthetic nanorobots instead. Plus it sounds cooler. You don't need to reverse engineer your entire body to understand a single enzyme. We do it all the time in biology. Furthermore, even if you create something that goes haywire in an unanticipated scenario, your body has good defense mechanisms against biological abnormalities. It doesn't know what the hell to do to quantum dots or nano-scale inorganic materials
- reasonattlm 15y ago"Need" is a slippery word, and while it is indeed likely that many or most nanoscale tools of future medicine will be fairly directly derived from cells and cell components, and we could probably achieve all of the design goals for agelessness and disease immunity with those, "medical nanorobotics" is not a nonsense term. It explicitly refers to the design and construction of non-biological nanoscale-featured devices - which is a concept far removed from enzymes. There are some things you can do with these designs that are impossible for presently available or plausible biological machinery. See, for example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte http://jetpress.org/v16/freitas.pdf http://jetpress.org/v16/freitas.pdf http://www.nanomedicine.com/ http://www.nanomedicine.com/
- polyfractal 15y agoEverything you linked is still theoretical/hypothetical. Those links basically prove my point. What you linked is possible right now using biology. We don't need nanorobots to modify DNA, we have enzymes and viruses that work really, really well.