Medical Nanorobotics - Science or Science Fiction?

Robots always caught our imagination. Books that had been written a century before the first robot already described the complex relationship between humans and robots. Actually, people thought of metal devices with "life" already in the area of classic greek... Have a guess? Colossus of Rhodes described as a huge man made of bronze allocated by the greek titan (like a god creature) of the sun to protect Rhodos.

Nanorobotics is a new kind of robotics with can be defined as "The technology of creating machines or robots close to the scale of a nanometre".

A nanometre is equal to 10 by -9 of a meter. To get a sense of how small is nanometre look on a needle; A nanometer is roughly 1000 times smaller than the pointy end of a needle.

Nanorobotics has been used in many different areas, from garment design through farming and up to medicine as a result of the huge range of possibilities available to this kind of microscopic devices. I would like to talk about the medical aspect of nanorobotics...

Today's studies present the future of nanorobotics in medicine as targeted drug delivery units. Thus nano-units (the definition "robots" have not agreed upon by all the scientists) will swim autonomously in the blood system and deliver drugs to the specific area where needed. This method can replace pills because nano-units avoid most of the side effects of drug delivery to wrong places in the system and reduce the wait time from getting the drug and the time it in the blood system.

Furthermore, nano-units can also be helpful to monitoring a developing illness, cancer, and other troubles; we would like to catch them as early as possible if we wish to gain the best opportunity to deal with and save as many lives as we can. (as the former president of the US always said: Yes, we can... ). Nano - units will be injected into patients within a high-risk group every once in awhile. The nano-units will flow through the blood system and search after known precursors of the illness. If such precursors found, the nano-units just have to declare the findings by releasing a special drug that can be easily scanned by the patient or the doctor.

I know what you think to yourself: "This sounds like science fiction to me". Well, for now, it is science fiction. But (and this is a really big "but"), the ability to send a message from Europe to America in less than a second was science fiction only a half of a century ago. We already have the basic understanding of nanorobotics - how to produce them, what they made of (protein, not metal), how to program them to do complex tasks (In theory and not completely) and so on... There are still more questions than answers when it comes to nanorobotics, but you can be calm, great minds from all over the world with different expertise working on this task and it looks like we are on the right path.

For me, the problem ahead of us in medicine nanorobotics is how to program them to accomplish complex tasks in practice and in theory. In addition to calculating the movement of such brave swimmers in the blood system. If you are working on such things and want to contribute to the effort - please send me an email.