21st Century Skills InnovatIon LIbrary EMERGING T h e c Nanomedicine Cherry Lake PubLishing ann arbor MiChigan by Martin Gitlin
EMERGING TeCh Chapter 1 Tiny Treatments I t is late summer of 1966 Americans flock to the aters to watch a science-fiction film titled Fantastic Voyage The plot revolves around a scientist named Jan Benes He has perfected a secret formula that shrinks people and objects down to miniature size Later Benes strikes his head and suffers a blood clot in his brain He has only a short time to live In Fantastic Voyage a team of scientists and their spaceship-like vehicle are shrunk to a tiny size so they can cure an illness in a man’s body Today’s nanomedicine treatments work a lot like this 44
A group of scientists is shrunk down using Benes’s secret formula They must travel through his body remove the clot in his brain and get out before he dies They are placed in a tiny submarine and injected into his bloodstream And so begins the fantastic voy age The explorers travel into Benes’s heart through his inner ear and into his brain Once the clot is removed they have only six minutes to exit the body In the end they save Benes Even today the idea of tiny people traveling inside a human body to cure an illness might seem crazy But more than 50 years after Fantastic Voyage hit theaters a similar way of treating health problems has become a reality Welcome to the world of nanomedicine The prefix nano refers to things that are very small Nanomedicine is the use of incredibly small devices to treat illnesses inside the body Just how tiny are these devices Believe it or not they are much smaller than the width of a hair Yet despite their tiny size they have a lot of power They could even be used to save lives Nanomedicine is part of a larger field called nano technology Nanotechnology deals with devices that 5 NaNomediciNe
