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

3. Health, wealth and atoms

4. Arranging atoms
Diversity
Precision
Cost

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

6. Eric Drexler, 1992

7. 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.”

8. Bearing

9. Planetary gear

10. Fine motion controller

11. Robotic arm

12. Making diamond today
Illustration courtesy of P1 Diamond Inc.

13. Proposed molecular tools

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

15. Self replication

16. replicating systems (bits)
Complexity of self
replicating systems (bits)
Von Neumann's constructor ,000
Mycoplasma genitalia ,160,140
Drexler's assembler ,000,000
Human ,400,000,000

17. Micro rotation

18. Exponential assembly

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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.

22. Remove infections

23. Clear obstructions

24. Respirocytes

25. Correcting DNA

26. Cryonics
Liquid Nitrogen
Temperature
Time

27. Nearer term