Nanotechnology and Medicine Ralph C. Merkle, Ph.D. Principal Fellow

Health, wealth and atoms

Arranging atoms Diversity Precision Cost

Richard Feynman,1959 There’s plenty of room at the bottom

Eric Drexler, 1992

President Clinton, 2000 The National Nanotechnology Initiative “Imagine the possibilities: materials with ten times the strength of steel and only a small fraction of the weight -- shrinking all the information housed at the Library of Congress into a device the size of a sugar cube -- detecting cancerous tumors when they are only a few cells in size.”

Bearing

Planetary gear

Fine motion controller

Robotic arm

Making diamond today Illustration courtesy of P1 Diamond Inc.

Proposed molecular tools

Experimental work H. J. Lee and W. Ho, SCIENCE 286, p. 1719, NOVEMBER 1999

Self replication

replicating systems (bits) Complexity of self replicating systems (bits) Von Neumann's constructor 500,000 Mycoplasma genitalia 1,160,140 Drexler's assembler 100,000,000 Human 6,400,000,000

Micro rotation

Exponential assembly

Impact Powerful Computers We’ll have more computing power in the volume of a sugar cube than the sum total of all the computer power that exists in the world today More than 1021 bits in the same volume Almost a billion Pentiums in parallel

Impact Nanomedicine Disease and ill health are caused largely by damage at the molecular and cellular level Today’s surgical tools are huge and imprecise in comparison

Impact Nanomedicine In the future, we will have fleets of surgical tools that are molecular both in size and precision. We will also have computers much smaller than a single cell to guide those tools.

Remove infections

Clear obstructions

Respirocytes

Correcting DNA

Cryonics Liquid Nitrogen Temperature Time

Nearer term