Future Products |
We are currently only using nanotechnology to make tiny complex objects, but will this change in the future? Is it possible that your toothbrush in the year 2075 will be made using digital nanofabrication?
Not all products today have the ability to be built using nanotechnology. It is usually only extremely complex products that will be made with DN. This will, however, most likely change in the future! It is clear that there are benefits from creating a product using DN, but it is uncertain whether the benefits outweigh the costs. Let us take an example. It is possible, if not certain, that the lead in a pencil made with DN breaks less often than a mass-produced one. So let us asume that the pencil made using DN breaks once every 100 time one uses it, whereas the mass-produced pencil only breaks every 90 times! Will the DN produced product be preferable? Yes, of course. What if the DN costs 50% more? Or even just 5% more! Is it still worth it? Considering that very few of us use a pencil more than 90 times, it might not be. The usefulness of DN on relatively simple products seems questionable, but it will depend on the products in the future and the added expenses that DN will have. DN will, however, almost certainly outperform other types of fabrication in producing products with great complexity and products very small in size. This area is mainly where we can expect (at first at least) DN to break through.
The computer industry has already and will in the future benefit greatly from nanotechnology, but the impact on the medical industry might be equally significant. Digital Nanofabrication will in the future help create fast and cheap drugs that will be more effective, because of their ability to target small specific areas. Nanofabrication will also improve medical research. Nanotubes can be used as markers and identifiers when performing the tedious task of separating strings of DNA. Future development in this area will also bring about smart drugs that for example can be used as a tool to straighten out the DNA ladder or deliver drugs to specific locations. This is all in the years to come, but there are already significant developments that might bring us these nano-scale smart drugs in the very near future.
The Department of Defense has funded a program at Rice University that uses gold nanoparticles wrapped in a globe of silica to target tumors. The nanoparticles are injected into the body in a liquid and “cancer-specific antibody proteins in the gold shell seek out tumor cells and attach themselves.”* Intense inferred light is then shorn at the tumor area once the gold nanoparticles are at the tumor. This results in the gold nanoshells heating up and “cooking” the tumor while the surrounding tissue remains intact.
Another research laboratory named OctoPlus in the Netherlands has used a similar technique to deliver an anticancer protein, tumor necrosis factor (TNF). TNF is a very effective treatment for cancer, but the side effects have outnumbered the benefits and thus TNF is not used. That might, however, only be for a little bit longer, because the gold nanoparticles enable scientists to place the TNF at very specific cancer infected areas without damaging any other tissue.
Both of these methods are soon to be tested on humans and we will await the verdict with excitement! There is a large gap between gold nanoparticles and fabricating nanorobots (as pictured at the left). It is hoped that nanotechnology will develop to a state where such medical robots can enter the bloodstream and repair any diseases that we might have. Some even believe that such nanorobots could lead to eternal life, because they will be able to continuously repair any damage due to aging. It is far too early to make such predictions, but do not be surprised if nanotechnology will significantly alter your medical treatment over the next decade or so.
Pictured above is the very tip of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). The STM was first invented in the early 80's at a IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland and developed to read the atomic structures by scanning a surface atom by atom. (Hence the name microscope) The inventors received the Nobel prize in physics, but they surely never expected how important their invention would become. In 1989 IBM scientists in California, managed for the first time in history to move specific atoms to specific locations.* They had discovered that the STM, in addition to working as a microscope, also had the capability to move certain elements one atom at a time, when cooled to extreme low temperatures. They published their discovery by cooling Xenon atoms down close to the absolute zero and then used the atoms to write "IBM" on a metal surface. The result is displayed in the video below.
(We have experienced trouble viewing the video files on some browsers, so click on the play-line below the picture if the play button is not visible. You can also try pressing F5 and the video should automatically play.) The technology has been further developed since then and now it is possible to manipulate several different elements at regular room temperature and even stack them on top of each other to create 3D structures. Nano tubes have already been created and it is hoped that these tubes can be used to create super fast computers. Nano tubes are still relatively simple structures, but the hope is that we will eventually be able to build complex structures, such as self-replicating robots. (*www.chem.ucla.edu) |
