Nanotechnology and Medicine

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Nanotechnology and Medicine

• Ralph C. Merkle, Ph.D.
• Principal Fellow

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Health, wealth and atoms
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Arranging atoms

• Diversity
• Precision
• Cost

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Richard Feynman,1959
Theres plenty of room at the bottom
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Eric Drexler, 1992
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President Clinton, 2000
The National Nanotechnology Initiative

• Imagine the possibilities materials with ten
  times the strength of steel and only a small
  fraction of the weight -- shrinking all the
  information housed at the Library of Congress
  into a device the size of a sugar cube --
  detecting cancerous tumors when they are only a
  few cells in size.

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Bearing
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Planetary gear
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Fine motion controller
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Robotic arm
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Making diamond today
Illustration courtesy of P1 Diamond Inc.
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Proposed molecular tools
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Experimental work
H. J. Lee and W. Ho, SCIENCE 286, p. 1719,
NOVEMBER 1999
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Self replication
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Complexity of self replicating systems (bits)

• Von Neumann's constructor 500,000
• Mycoplasma genitalia 1,160,140
• Drexler's assembler 100,000,000
• Human 6,400,000,000

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Micro rotation
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Exponential assembly
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Impact
Powerful Computers

• Well have more computing power in the volume of
  a sugar cube than the sum total of all the
  computer power that exists in the world today
• More than 1021 bits in the same volume
• Almost a billion Pentiums in parallel

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Impact
Nanomedicine

• Disease and ill health are caused largely by
  damage at the molecular and cellular level
• Todays surgical tools are huge and imprecise in
  comparison

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Impact
Nanomedicine

• In the future, we will have fleets of surgical
  tools that are molecular both in size and
  precision.
• We will also have computers much smaller than a
  single cell to guide those tools.

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Remove infections
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Clear obstructions
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Respirocytes
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Correcting DNA
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Cryonics
Liquid Nitrogen
Temperature
Time
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Nearer term
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