Nanobots Can Swim Around a Wound and Kill Bacteria
wired.com
wired.com
The original idea of nanobots argued that with enough effort mechanical machines could work at that level, even if it would be difficult. It'd allow for these machines to work outside of water and for them to be built out of materials like diamond. We're still not there yet, and may never be.
I understand why researchers use the term 'nanotechnology' to describe their work with molecular biology, but it gives entirely the wrong impression. Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
Electron transport chain:
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes… and so do peoples fears. Many times they are misinformed and misplaced, but usually right to be concerned in the first place.
My dumb take: what could go wrong? Interrupting normal proteins to become prions, that’s what.
it would take a serious lack of imagination on my part to look at something like a custom protein and not think about the possible disastrous consequences that follow -- let alone something being described to me as a 'molecular robot', even without a lot of pop-culture influence.
Unless these things are capable of replication (they're not) then they're just an advanced version of regular drugs.
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(the joke is that in the MGS video game series, everything ridiculous is hand-waved by "nanobots".)
it's a contentious opinion, but I believe that a lot of that stuff came at-no-cost for the Metal Gear franchise as part of trying to fit into the world of 'hard sci-fi' mecha genre.
The blurring of good and evil, the singular fabricated narrative for the player character until exposure to 'the real world' , the concept of simulation versus reality, information overflow.. these are all themes pretty heavily explored in other mecha franchises (Evangelion, Mobile Suit Gundam, VOTOMs, Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Macross).
It's my opinion that Kojima has always made mecha fan-service games (I love REX) for mecha fans such as himself -- delivered via the medium of interpretive story-telling in the format of an MG game. Zone of the Enders didn't have the mass appeal due to the fact that he jumped into the deep-end with the mecha content; he has found that it works better to sugar-coat the mecha content in James Bond espionage and sexual allure.
All opinion of course -- but it's the opinion of a die hard mecha fan.
Also, I don't want this to come off as mean or underwhelmed , it's not; Kojima has been a part of some impressive world-building, I don't want to sell that short.
That, plus wounds with poor circulation, or as the article notes, infections that are protected by biofilms.
Edit: I should have added that such self-replicating antibacterial "nanobots" already exist naturally in vast numbers, and are known to be effective in treating wounds. So why develop something which is probably going to be less effective?
See for example https://bacteriophages.info/en/disease/wounds/ , https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2018.0169... , https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/153473461983511...
1) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky. There are treatment guidelines for things like sepsis right now that are basically un-doable with phage therapy because of the time it takes to tune a phage library.
2) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
3) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West (after being abandoned for some very real, very serious safety concerns back in the day), which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenured professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate, especially when trying to treat at scale. These sorts of small molecules have a similar appeal to them.
A possible concern with such technology is that it would weaken the body's immune response by creating a dependency on external factors. We get sick, and develop high fevers, for a reason -- our bodies need to learn to combat pathogens which are constantly attacking us.
If we stop training the immune system to go after some class of bacteria, then we may end up more vulnerable to related classes of microbes. Billions of years of evolution can't be second guessed.
That said, resistant strains are becoming a major public health threat so this approach may become necessary as a "last resort" to save lives.
1. https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/these-robots-k...
Especially when there are low hanging fruits that could save billions that we haven't touched, not because the science is hard, but because the political willingless/empathy is low.
Yes, but without the political changes, the technological advancements are more likely to be used against us (or just as profit machines) than for good.
Because resources, will, people, etc. are finite.
>Some people are good at research and some people are good at politics.
The use of research is dictated by people good at politics (and bad as persons).
https://backintyme.wordpress.com/article/can-dna-tell-what-r...
"In conclusion, neither mtDNA nor Y DNA can give any hint as to your “racial” membership in U.S. society. Autosomal DNA, if very lopsided to one continent or another, can suggest what you look like. But this does not work for those Americans who choose to self-identify as Black despite having mostly European DNA, nor for White Americans unaware of their African DNA, nor for Hispanics, whose “racial” membership is determined by their culture, not by their genes".
I guess the evil dictator the parent describes can skip this category: ("this does not work for those Americans who choose to self-identify as Black despite having mostly European DNA") and spare: ("white Americans unaware of their African DNA"). In fact, that evil white dictator would probably want to do so, even if it wasn't a technical limitation.
[1] https://wires.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/widm.1...