Cure aging with nanobots?

Entrepreneur and inventor Ray Kurzweil's latest publication is called Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough to Live Forever. Written with Terry Grossman, the book "purports to make the scientific case that immortality is within our grasp, thanks to modern technology, and that it can be reached via three so-called bridges," according to this somewhat skeptical report.

The first bridge relies on the latest medical research into ageing and how to counteract the process with "nutritionals" (food and food supplements), meditation and exercise.

The second bridge is about bio-engineering and how we will soon be able to grow a new heart in situ, or be vaccinated against diseases that kill millions of people, such as cancer.

The third bridge is where we step into more familiar Kurzweil territory: it is about the benefits of technologies such as nanobots, strong artificial intelligence and full-immersion virtual reality...

When we cross the third bridge, [Kurzweil] says, nanobots will replace our digestive systems. We will dispense with our heart and replace it with nanobots that shuffle oxygen and carbon dioxide around our bodies.

We hope that Kurzweil and Grossman are right, and that effective anti-senescence treatments will be available to all at modest prices in the not too distant future (hopefully soon enough for you and me).

Through the convergence of biotechnology, genomics, and nanotechnology, it seems very likely that the process of human aging will undergo a fundamental transformation sometime in the next few decades.

In the real world, however, development of benefits to slow, stop, prevent, or reverse aging depends not only on progress in medical labs, but more critically on our success in managing the earlier stages of nanotechnology.

Could public debate over the social, environmental, geopolitical, and economic impacts of advanced nanotechnology hinder or disrupt the availability of aging ameliorative nanomedicine? Or worse, could unwise policy -- or lack of policy -- result in conditions so disastrous that such research will no longer be performed?

Mike Treder

Tags: nanotechnology nanotech nano science technology biotechnology genomics

Comments

[Brian Wang]

Three bridges. I just happen to think of the movie "A Bridge too Far" for some quotes.

Brigadier General Gavin: What's the best way to take a bridge?
Maj. Julian Cook: Both ends at once.

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Lt. General Frederick "Boy" Browning: I've just been on to Monty. He's very proud and pleased.
Major General Urquhart: Pleased?
Lt. General Frederick "Boy" Browning: Of course. He thinks Market Garden was 90% successful.
Major General Urquhart: But what do you think?
Lt. General Frederick "Boy" Browning: Well, as you know, I always felt we tried to go a bridge too far.

re: Market Garden
The 101st had to secure the bridge over the Wilhelmina canal in Son, the bridge over the Dommel in St-Oedenrode and the bridges over the Aa and Zuid-Willemsvaart canal near Veghel. The bridges over the Maas at Grave and the Waal at Nijmegen were the targets of the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division; they were dropped near Groesbeek and Overasselt.
Finally, the British 1st Airborne Division had to secure the bridge over the Rhine at Arnhem.

My take: the historical takeway is that narrow targeted assaults are great if they work, but if the goal is worthwhile then more resources and a broader effort should be pursued. However, a narrow effort is not what is being proposed. I just happen to like the movie and the quotes

;)

[Throwya]

it is new and upcoming field of biotechnology
it might also be posible to bring someone back to life.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Throwya, I don't think we're talking about spooky stuff here. It's not bringing a dead person back to life, any more than warming a hypothermia victim or defibrillating a heart attack victim is bringing a dead person back to life.

Of course, our standards of what's "dead" may change over time. It used to be that if you had no pulse, you were dead.

And our standards of what's spooky may also change over time. Take someone from 1931 who's just seen the first Frankenstein movie. Show them someone lying on a table, with no pulse... an electronic device applying shocks to their chest... and they "come back to life!" Would that person from the 1930's worry about whether it was the "same person" or whether a corpse had been revitalized? Sure. But today, we take it as a lifesaving technology.

People have been revived after being drowned in ice water for over an hour (though this is rare). I've also read serious medical proposals to insert ice-water suspensions into the lungs of heart attack victims and use CPR to supply cooled blood to the brain... then revive them later in the emergency room.

Will people who are dead by today's standards be brought back to life? Almost certainly. Will they be dead by the standards of that time? No.

Chris