Nanotech: The Ultimate Key to the Pinnacle of Evolution?
By Rishi Ganesh
Cancer, throughout history, has always been feared and enigmatic; its deadly properties have led to its perception as the wrath of the gods, magic, or other supernatural forces. People have tried and failed over and over again to determine a cure or a solution to the progressive, fatal disease, attempting numerous odd strategies to rid the human body of the disease. In Ancient Egypt, the high priest and physician Imhotep, the architect of the first Egyptian Pyramid, recommended a localized infection of another ailment in order to try and slow the growth of tumors. Despite these efforts, however, Ancient Egyptian papyrus often depicted cancer as a scourge of humanity, chillingly stating “There is no treatment.”
“There is no treatment.”
Even today, over 4 millenia since the Ancient Egyptians proclaimed cancer as incurable, modern scientists, technology, and research, despite millenia of near-exponential technological progress, have not come to a cure. Despite many hopeful “breakthroughs”, a concrete, foolproof method of curing cancer has not been found. Chemotherapy is the “best” option for many, but while it kills cancer cells with pure radiation, the brute-force method also can have a disastrous effect on the human body itself, killing healthy cells and resulting in hair loss, fatigue, general weakness, low blood cell count (also known as anemia), and the potential to cause other forms of cancer itself.
However, scientists have had another ray of hope appear in numerous suggestions, and this technology looks like the most revolutionary yet: nanobots, microscopically small robots that can offer extreme precision, surgically targeting and killing rogue cancer cells and preventing the possibility of future spread, making them possibly the “cleanest” option overall for future patients and oncologists. Rather than bathing the entire body in harmful radiation, creating side effects, these nanobots can be injected quickly into the bloodstream just like a vaccine, using the natural flow of blood to make their way to certain areas of the body, accurately targeting cancerous cells and killing them, minimizing the possible side effects that chemotherapy creates.
It almost sounds too good to be true. But is it?
How do these apparent cure-all bots work, though? Based on their description, they seem like a possible pipe dream, decades or even centuries into the future. But organically made or even inorganically made nanobots, like out of a durable material like metals (such as silver) or even diamond (which is less likely financially but could offer the best productivity), are not far off, as engineers teaming up with scientists have produced molecule-scale machines capable of operation.
It all sounds great, but how will these tiny machines manage to eradicate something as incurable as cancer? It seems like chemical injection at a tiny scale may be the answer. Even in small doses, the injection of chemicals such as calcium phosphate and citrate leads to cell death, and while these options are not feasible currently due to the aforementioned side effects and possible inaccuracy, nanobot-delivered injections, like doctors giving thousands of tiny injections to kill diseases in individual cells, have the potential to put these chemicals to use without causing major cell loss and damaging the body of the patient.
Nanobots are regarded by many experts in microbiology and biotech as the future of human healthcare. On top of being a potential cure to cancer, they can administer vaccines more effectively, repair broken DNA molecules to cure genetic deficiencies, and repair individual cells at the molecular level, and eventually, nanotechnology could hold the ultimate key, the pinnacle of human evolution: near-immortality, repairing aging cells and adapting to various diseases like a second, more comprehensive, controlled immune system.
