I seem to have failed to notice a recent interview with nanotechnologist and healthy life extension advocate Robert Freitas, conducted by Michael Anissimov. The discussion is mostly concerned with matters of interest to the Lifeboat Foundation, but the interview opens with this new news:

My professional goal for the last two decades has been, and continues to be, to help make life-extending medical nanorobotics technologies happen as fast as humanly possible. ... I've been trying to figure out how to build diamondoid nanorobots, starting from current manufacturing technologies.

...

culminating 5 years of intermittent effort I've finally finished my latest theoretical scaling study of a new diamondoid medical nanorobot called the "chromallocyte". This is the first full technical description of a cell repair nanorobot ever published. The nanorobot design addressed in the paper is a very important one - it is perhaps the key nanorobotic system for anti-aging and life extension applications.

Quoting part of the abstract:

"The ultimate goal of nanomedicine is to perform nanorobotic therapeutic procedures on specified individual cells comprising the human body. This paper reports the first theoretical scaling analysis and mission design for a cell repair nanorobot. One conceptually simple form of basic cell repair is chromosome replacement therapy (CRT), in which the entire chromatin content of the nucleus in a living cell is extracted and promptly replaced with a new set of prefabricated chromosomes which have been artificially manufactured as defect-free copies of the originals. The chromallocyte is a hypothetical mobile cell-repair nanorobot capable of limited vascular surface travel into the capillary bed of the targeted tissue or organ, followed by extravasation, histonatation, cytopenetration, and complete chromatin replacement in the nucleus of one target cell, and ending with a return to the bloodstream and subsequent extraction of the device from the body, completing the CRT mission...."

The title of the paper is "The Ideal Gene Delivery Vector: Chromallocytes, Cell Repair Nanorobots for Chromosome Replacement Therapy" and it is currently in press at the peer-reviewed Journal of Evolution and Technology (and is soon to be available online).

If you want a good look at the medical engineering of 2040 - at the technologies that will be in full swing at the same time as we have refined regenerative medicine to an expert art and know all there is to know about our own biochemistry - then pay attention to the work of Robert Freitas. There's more to repair in and around an aging cell than just damaged DNA, but if the medical community of the time can build and control millions of chromallocytes, I'm willing to grant that the rest of the job is well within reach via similar methods.

Technorati tags: life extension, nanomedicine, nanotechnology

Posted by Reason at April 24, 2007 8:15 PM | TrackBack (0)