Magnet-Steered Nano-Fish Could Deliver Drugs and Sweep Body Toxins 37
dkatana writes: David Warner writes on InformationWeek how "nanoengineers" from UC San Diego have created microscopic fish powered by hydrogen peroxide that use magnets to steer themselves. "The "fish" are powerful enough to swim through your bloodstream, removing toxins or bringing medicine directly to crucial parts of your body, as cells in your blood stream do. Given enough time, the fish could be used to deliver drugs directly to cancer tumors or parts of your body that are too fragile for surgery."
Re: Oh good grief (Score:1)
I think the last thing we want is to have carp floating around in our blood stream.
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Those promises aren't in the article anywhere. Nor are they in the definition of "Nanotechnology" as offered by Google:
"the branch of technology that deals with dimensions and tolerances of less than 100 nanometers, especially the manipulation of individual atoms and molecules."
These "fish" machines qualify, and they sound useful.
You are injecting claims so you can then complain about how they have not been met. Why would you do this?
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If you think about it, nanomachines shouldn't be smaller than a bacterium. Just because something isn't below 1 micron it could be qualified as nanotecnology, especially stuff that moves around in a living body. Microtechnology is already used for a different thing. So what, 30k nanometers is still small enough to work safely in blood vessels. Probably it can become smaller by a factor, but i doubt "nanomachines" can or should become smaller than that.
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Nanotech has become a buzzword that can refer to excellent research or crackpottery depending on what's desired by the speaker. I hope you're restricting your rant to the crackpottery. but tossing baby with bathwater is practically an Olympic sport around Slashdot.
On the other hand, we've long used a lot of chemistry of all sorts that we really don't understand.
Just because we're not likely to get full up assemblers in the short term hardly means that nothing good will come of what's broadly termed nanotech
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Hate to agree with you but in some ways I do. I actually worked on solving the problems of assemblers way back in the early 1990's. I solved a core technical problem - which ultimately turned out to be the solution to building Strong AI. Over twenty years later and neither exists even now...
Back then they said that assemblers were 10 years and $10 billion worth of focused research away. I would say that's almost exactly true today.. (maybe it was 'almost' true even back then)
The real problem with assemblers
So far, so good (Score:2)
So is there hydrogen peroxide naturally in blood, or it can be safely introduced, to drive these things? (It reacts with platinum particles in the tail to provide thrust, and are externally guided by magnetism via iron in the nose.)
Drug delivery is by ramming into the area in question and dissolving, releasing the payload (already proven in previous, simpler experiments.)
Bad particle "eating" is done by binding the fish with some chemical that attaches to it.
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So all we need is some kind of embedded AI vision system to detect cancerous cells and kill them.
Should make for some interesting CIA and FSB asssasinations.
Afterwards people can say: (Score:3)
"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish"
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Speaking of Adams references (Score:1)
Let me know when they've got a fish they can put in my ear that will auto-translate...
But before they can say: (Score:2)
Powered by hydrogen peroxide? (Score:5, Informative)
You know what else hydrogen peroxide reacts to? Blood [youtube.com]!
Blood contains he enzyme catalase which really likes to react with hydrogen peroxide to make a foamy mess that would not be the healthiest thing to have in your blood vessels.
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Coward! I myself am planning to use the peroxide fish as a source of oxygen so I don't need to breathe.
And don't you tell me not to hold my breath.
Doesn't seem practical (Score:2)
FTA (Score:2)
"Of course, nanobots are often the source of speculation about the death of all humanity. There is the "grey goo" theory that one day nanobots will learn to self-replicate and quickly eat everything organic on the planet in a never-ending urge to procreate. There are several explanations about why this couldn't happen, including the fact that we could stop it with a fairly simple electromagnetic pulse. But it is fun to think that with this step toward a viable 3D-printed microscopic delivery device we are either one step closer to curing all the diseases of mankind or one step closer to just destroying ourselves entirely. Or both."
It's the way of too many of our watershed technological breakthroughs. When you ask if we are ready for the responsibility of a potential Doomsday Device, be certain to solve for (we).
I was skeptical (Score:5, Funny)
But then, I read that they were "3D printed" nanobots, and I was all like "Whoahh, these guys are onto something!"
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Huh? If anything, "3D printed" should immediately raise healthy skepticism.