Nanomedicine

- K. Eric Drexler, "Engines of Creation".

Nanotechnology: The coming ability to build materials and products with atomic precision.

All manufactured products and living creatures are built from atoms. The properties of these products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal we can make diamond. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a few other trace elements) we can make computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we can make potatoes.

Throughout history, humans have always created things by moving vast quantities of molecules around. Even in our most precise fabrications, our manipulation of molecules has been in bulk, carving or moulding or shaving away trillions of atoms at a time.

Ralph Merkle from Xerox PARC provides an interesting analogy: “Its like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap t

Nanotechnology will revolutionise most industries, and has been compared in importance to humanity's taming of fire. The Industrial Revolution pales in comparison. Because assemblers will be able to build copies of themselves quickly, using inexpensive materials, little energy, and no human labor, a single assembler can be used to make thousands. Once we have software to program assemblers to make consumer goods, each household could use an assembler system to produce goods cheaply and quickly. Manufacturing, mining, transportation, and other industries will change radically.

Nanotechnology involves building things atom by atom on this atomic scale. This basic description may itself sound initially uninspiring, but the far-reaching and life-changing implications of this simple idea are infinite and truly mindboggling.

Broadly speaking, the central thesis of nanotechnology is that almost any chemically stable structure that can be specified can in fact be built. This possibility was first advanced by Richard Feynman in 1959 when he said:

At a 1989 nanotechnology conference held in Seattle “Engines of Creation” author Erik Drexler was asked by an audience member: “What about the accidentally destructive aspects of nanotechnology as well as the beneficent and the malicious applications of nanotechnology? As a software writer, I've noticed that I rarely write a program that doesn't have bugs the first time.”

Eventually (after amortisation of possibly quite high development costs), the price of assemblers and of the objects they build should be no higher than the price of other complex structures made by self-replicating systems. For example trees - which have a staggering design complexity involving tens of thousands of different genes and proteins directed by complex genetic information – have a low cost due to their ability to self-replicate with little production costs.

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