18-07-2012, 12:08 PM
anomedicine
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Feynman’s early vision
The early genesis of the concept of nanomedicine sprang from the visionary idea that tiny nanorobots and related
machines could be designed, manufactured, and introduced
into the human body to perform cellular repairs at the
molecular level. Although this idea was later championed in
the popular writings of Drexler [16,17] in the 1980s and
1990s, and in the technical writings of Freitas [5,7] in the
1990s and 2000s, the first scientist to voice these
possibilities was the late Nobel physicist Richard P.
Immunoisolation 135
One of the simplest medical nanomaterials is a surface
perforated with holes, or nanopores. In 1997, Desai et al [19]
created what could be considered one of the earliest
therapeutically helpful nanomedical devices, using bulk
micromachining to fabricate tiny chambers within single
crystalline silicon wafers in which biologic cells can be
placed. The chambers interface with the surrounding
biologic environment through polycrystalline silicon filter
membranes micromachined to present a high density of
uniform nanopores as small as 20 nm in diameter.
Medical nanorobotics of tomorrow 409
In the longer term, perhaps 10 to 20 years from today,
the earliest molecular machine systems and nanorobots may
join the medical armamentarium, finally giving physicians
the most potent tools imaginable to conquer human disease,
ill health, and aging. Organic building materials (eg, pro-
teins, polynucleotides) are very good at self-assembly, but
the most reliable and high-performance molecular machines
may be constructed out of diamondoid materials, the
strongest substances known. Many technical challenges
must be surmounted before medical nanorobots can become
a reality. Building diamondoid nanorobots—the most
aggressive objective—will require both massive parallelism
in molecular fabrication and assembly processes [72] and
programmable positional assembly including molecularly
precise manufacture of diamond structures using molecular
feedstock [73-75].