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
EMERGING TeCh The Artistic Side of Richard Feynman Richard Feynman was a Nobel Prize winning physicist who predicted the coming of nanotechnology But he was also a man of many other talents His sense of humor made his lectures and books highly entertaining He was also an artist whose primary focus was on drawing A collection of his artwork was published in 1995 in a book titled The Art of Richard P Feynman Images by a Curious Character Feynman also became quite adept at playing the bongo drums He died in 1988 at the age of 69 range in size from 1 nanometer one-billionth of a meter to 100 nanometers The concept of nanotech nology extends back to 1959 That is when renowned physicist Richard Feynman spoke at an American Physical Society meeting Feynman described a future in which atoms and molecules would be manipu lated one by one using precise instruments Feynman claimed that tools could be built to cre ate and operate even smaller tools This process would be repeated until the tools were tiny enough to work on individual atoms and molecules The idea of working with devices on such a small scale gained credibility over time Scientific breakthroughs resulted in greater knowledge of nano technology Such learning led to new ideas about its potential benefits in the world of medicine 6
The uses of nanomedicine we are likely to see in the near future would have once read like a science fiction story For example nanorobots placed in the bloodstream could warn of worsening illnesses or repair damaged cells Machines planted in the body’s nervous system could monitor a person’s brain waves Today’s researchers believe that nanotechnology can be applied to many different areas of medicine Among them is the transport of needed drugs to Richard Feynman was one of the most famous physicists of the 20th century 7 NaNomediciNe
