Question

What did Albert R. Hibbs suggest to Feynman regarding uses of nanotechnology? Have these suggestions become useful today?

Answer 1

The concept of nanotechnology first appeared in 1959 by the late Nobel physicist Richard P. Feynman, who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos during World War II and later taught at CalTech for most of his professorial career. In his lecture, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”, Feynman explored the possibility of manipulating materials at the scale of nanometers . He was aware of the wide applications of his concept in medicine and therefore offered his first proposal for a nanomedical procedure to cure heart disease.

He says, “A friend of mine Albert R Hibbs suggests a very interesting possibility for relatively small machines. He says that, although it is a very wild idea, it would be interesting in surgery if you could swallow the surgeon. You put the mechanical surgeon inside the blood vessel and it goes into the heart and looks around. It finds out which valve is the faulty one and takes a little knife and slices it out. Other small machines might be permanently incorporated in the body to assist some inadequately functioning organ” . However, the term “nanotechnology” remained a concept and was not used until 1974, when Norio Taniguchi, a researcher at the University of Tokyo, used it to refer to the ability to engineer materials precisely at the nanometer level. Many of the early definitions of nanotechnology employ a cut-off around 100 nm including that of the National Nanotechnology Initiative focusing on the former, where quantum effects are often restricted to structures on the order of ones to tens of nanometers . However, unique physiochemical behaviour sometimes emerges for nanomaterials with defining features greater than 100 nm (e.g., the plasmon-resonance in 150 nm diameter gold nanoshells that are currently under clinical investigation for cancer thermal therapy) . A lot of evidences emerged out as technology advanced and now size of nanotechnology and nanomedicine products occupy wide range of 2-1000 nm.

For years people have been told about robots replacing doctors completely, but so far little success has been achieved in this regard.

When we imagine of nanorobots, we end up believing that they will do the entire task just like any other automatic robot. But in reality all available nanobots needs a specialized team of experts to handle it especially when delivering inside a human body.

However, as progress in nanotechnology advances, investigators around the world are trying to maximize the benefits by equipping the nanorobot with instruments by which it can successfully image, diagnose, deliver drugs and perform minor surgical operations. For sure, within next few decades nanorobots could be the future in nanomedicine and biotherapeutics replacing the older versions of drug delivery.