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May 8th, 2006

In medicine, small is about to become big

Abstract:
In a darkened conference room, at the country's largest gathering of biotech executives, the slides clicked onto the screen with as much punch and drama as a black-and-white micrograph can pack.

In the first frame, highly magnified cancer cells appeared, surrounded by tiny black dots. In the second frame, cells were gone -- dissolved into a mass of goo.

(Ed.'s note: two things wrong with this. 1 - "Nanotech is better known for its sinister potential than for anything it can actually do. Michael Crichton's novel "Prey" sold more than a million copies in 2002, scaring readers with a vision of tiny manmade "nanobots" that develop a predatory collective intelligence and begin hunting down their human creators." The only people who took Crichton's book seriously and were scared were those unable to distinguish fantasy from reality.

2 - "Even more alarming: the "gray goo" scenario developed by an early nanotech theorist, which holds that a tiny, self-replicating device could end up consuming all the organic material on earth, turning the world into a sterile mush." The grey goo scenario was debunked in 2003. See Grey Goo is a Small Issue. It is being used by scare-mongers as a way to derail the progress being made in the nanosciences.)

Source:
boston.com

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