3 ms·

I think nanotech will bring about it's own problems. What we should be doing is addressing the cause of antibiotic resistance in the first place, namely the ov

• nkozyra 12y ago
  The over-prescription of antibiotics isn't the cause of antibiotic resistance, it's the cause of accelerated antibiotic resistance. Which for all practical purposes might be the same thing, if we're talking 80 years versus 30 years for propagation of resistance. Nanotech will be a very, very arduous and slow process. "Its own problems" is putting it lightly. People will die due to nanotech approaches to anti-pathogenics, no question about it. We're talking about programmable biology, something will go wrong. The biggest problem is what happens when we've eliminated human pathogens? What happens when we've extended the average life expectancy by 10 years - after all, many cancers are caused by pathogens. What happens to the ecosystem when herpesviridae is effectively gone? What are the side effects, the unintended consequences?