NANOROBOTICS – 21093
Superminiature robots, called nanorobots, might find all sorts of exotic applications. Roboticist Eric Drexler has suggested that such machines might serve as programmable antibodies, searching out and destroying harmful bacteria and viruses in the human body. In this way, diseases could be cured. The machines could also repair damaged cells.
Plagues that people once thought were eradicated for good, such as tuberculosis and malaria, are evolving new strains that resist conventional treatments. Biological research is largely a trial-and-error process. Suppose people could build millions of smart robots of nanometric dimensions, programmed to go after certain bacteria and viruses and kill them? Futurists believe this is possible. They envision building molecular computers from individual atoms of carbon, a fundamental ingredient of all living matter. These computers would store data in much the same way as does DNA, but the computers would be programmed by people rather than nature. These computers could be as small as 100 nm (107 m or 0.0001 mm) in diameter. Even an object this small has enough carbon atoms to make a chip with processing power equivalent to that of a typical personal computer.
There is a dark side to nanorobotics. Anything that can be used constructively can be used in some destructive way, as well. Programmable antibodies could, if they got into the hands of the wrong kinds of people, be used as biological weapons.
