The word’s been around for some time. Nanotechnology. Probably like me, you think you sort of know what it means. But it’s something really, really tiny that’s exploding in the world in a big way.
Nanotechnology comes from the Greek word, “nano,” for “dwarf,” according to a textbook on the subject. Put simply, nanotechnology is about manufacturing small things, but also about making big things work better.
And nanotechnology in medicine? As John Rennie wrote, some of us have thought, of it as “tiny robot(s) swimming through the human body, dwarfed by nearby cells, performing some life-saving medical tasks.”
But thinking of it as a size, he quotes Mihail Roco, the chair of the U.S. National Science and Technology Council’s subcommittee on nanotechnology, misses the point. Rather, Rennie wrote, “We should think of it as the application of quantum mechanics (and physical phenomena dominant at the nanoscale) to the control of matter.”
Let’s see if we can put it a tiny bit more simply. Nanotechnology really involves “science and engineering at a billionth of a meter scale”
Rennie reports that it’s even simpler than that. It’s the programming of “materials and objects with properties that will perform exactly as we want, when and where we want.” What can we do with it?
Kathleen Eggleson, who gave us the scale size above, writes that engineers are developing ways of coating medical materials with nano-sized particles of silver that can be applied to hard surfaces, like bedrails and doorknobs, and to fabrics, such as sheets, gowns, and curtains, to cut down on bacterial infections. Silver has long been known for its antimicrobial capabilities, she says.
Rennie has other examples. He writes about co-author Robert S. Langer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on a “cancer-fighting nanobot that, once inside the body, could navigate its way specifically to a tumor to deliver a chemotherapeutic drug locally, all the while evading the body’s immune defenses . . .” and might even be able “to assemble itself from its constituent molecules.”
Nanotechnology will continue to influence biotechnology, according to the textbook at the start of this article. One of the ways it could be used, the textbook theorized, could be to “produce ingestible systems that will be harmlessly flushed from the body if the patient is healthy but will notify a physician of the type and location of diseased cells and organs if there are problems.”
Rennie says the manipulation of matter at the molecular level has been going on for billions of years. But where it may take medicine next is anyone’s guess.
Edited by
Amanda Ciccatelli
