Touching the cells: robots in the nanoworld

[xchrom]

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/sociedad/Touching/the/cells/robots/in/the/nanoworld/elpepusoc/20111223elpepusoc_5/Tes

Hippocrates, a Greek doctor who flourished in the 5th century BC, is commonly referred to as the father of medicine. Hippocrates made significant contributions to the techniques of prognosis and diagnosis, and the Hippocratic oath continues to the present times, although with modifications. But Hippocrates faced an insurmountable obstacle in his medical research: the Greek taboo against the dissection of corpses on religious grounds.

Physicians in the olden days could not use post mortem surgery to determine the cause of any rare disease: all that they had to go by was a detailed study of external symptoms in their patients combined with dissection of animals. It was not until a brief period of about 40 years in the 3rd century BC when the ban on human dissection was lifted. Then, working in Alexandria, Herophilus and Erasistratus were able to dissect copses to better understand the working of the human body and the causes of its numerous dysfunctions.

Nowadays, it is an accepted approach to investigate diseases and even their treatments at the level of a cell or even that of a molecule. And it is here that today's physicians face another unsurmountable barrier: cells and molecules are too small to be seen, let alone manipulated. Whereas we can see and work with objects roughly one-tenth of a millimeter, these modern 'cell surgeons' need the acuity of vision and accuracy of movement that are ten times or even ten thousand times as precise to study cells and their components?which is where robots step in to lend a hand. Since the first prototypes developed at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Robotics Institute of the Carnegie Mellon University in the sixties and seventies, one of the primary objectives of robotics has been to execute tasks that are beyond human abilities. In the same way that three robots on Mars are extensions of the hands and the eyes of NASA's scientists, we at the Microrobotics and Nanocharacterization Laboratory, University of Barcelona, in collaboration with the Nanobioengineering Laboratory of the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia, are developing robots to serve medical doctors. Using these robots, physicians will be able to study cells and molecules the same way they study organs and tissues.

Advances in nanotechnology have led to the development of robots that can see and handle objects with a precision greater than a nanometer (one-millionth of a millimeter, or about one-hundredth the size of the influenza virus). At that scale, the robots can operate tools to manipulate cells and their organelles. However, a greater challenge is to provide a suitable interface that will allow doctors to work without being aware of the scale: to observe and handle cells and molecules as though they are objects ten thousand times larger, handling mitochondira as though they are sausages, so to speak. These two aspects - nanotools for robots and virtual reality for people - are the focus of our research. The objective: to improve, with the aid of robots, the sense of sight and of touch of a nanosurgeon 10 000-fold. This is the equivalent of being able to read those letters you read while getting your eyesight checked when they are six kilometres away.

[laconicsax]

1. Very cool. Recommend.

[qazplm]

2. I know most think this "woo"

and just "wishful thinking" but I truly believe technology and ideas like this are going to be what results in significant life extension in the next generation or two, that is folks in their 40s today could live 150 years. And folks younger than that could end up living 200 or even 300 years.

[drm604]

3. This will likely lead to amazing things.

The precise manipulation of matter at the molecular level could solve so many problems, and no doubt also create many problems and ethical dilemmas.