Nanotechnology

On a cellular level, the biomedical technologies of today are crude and destructive. Even the most delicate surgery does not repair medical problems. Surgical methods tear away huge swatches of both damaged and healthy cells, and rely upon the body's own ability to heal itself. The drugs of today are developed by trial and error at a cost of millions of dollars, and disperse throughout the entire body, causing numerous side effects in tissues unaffected by the initial physiological insult the drug was intended to correct. Today's genetic screening can determine if a patient's genome contains specific aberrant genes, but can neither determine if these genes will cause real disease, nor effectively treat these genetic diseases. Current experimental attempts at gene therapy involve weakened virus strains or poorly understood biological mechanisms to get the corrected DNA into the body and fix the problem. All of these biomedical difficulties are caused by one simple problem: scale. Human beings are simply too large to work effectively at the cellular scale of life. The tools we have developed to work in this domain were either developed by trial and error as with most pharmaceuticals, or stolen from nature. Nature contains numerous wonderful tools for working on this scale, but nature is the product of billions of years of random, thoughtless evolution, and the tools available exist because they work well enough for the systems in which they evolved, not because they are the optimal tools for the jobs humans would have them do. But this deficiency in the human tool chest may soon be challenged by a controversial new ideal known as molecular nanotechnology.