Thinking About Medical Nanorobots

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Nanomedicine, when fully developed, will radically change the scope of what is possible in medical science. While wet nanotechnology is currently only on the drawing board or restricted to diagnostic advances based on better nanoscale manufacturing, we can expect much more from the field in the decades ahead.

While perusing KurzweilAI today, I noticed this link to a Russian concept design for a medical nanorobot by Svidinenko Yuri. It looks rather Matrix-influenced, but it all more or less makes sense from a mechanical point of view - flagellae are how the old-style biological entities move around, after all.

Robert Freitas has been thinking about these sorts of design for a while, of course. The more the merrier to my mind - the sooner we get serious medical nanotechnology, the sooner we can reliably engineer away disease and aging.

In related news, the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology is working with the Russian Nanotechnology News Network in order to help validate their Thirty Essential Studies. The studies are necessary to confirm - or at least pin down - a timeline for reliable development of molecular manufacturing. All of this work, much like that of the Foresight Institute, helps to provide the groundwork for safer scientific and commercial development of these technologies.