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EUCOMED, Place Saint Lambert 14, B-1200 Brussels, Belgium - Tel: 32(0)2 772 2212 - Fax: 32(0)2 771 3909 E-Mail: eucomed@eucomed.be - Web Site: www.eucomed.org Exploring the incredibly small Medical nanorobots: just imagine the future … Microtechnology is the technology that allows you to fabricate objects on the micron scale. A micron is a millionth of a meter. That is the length scale that is relevant to building devices such as computers, memories, and logic devices. Back in 1985 the computer and memory devices that were sold had sizes for the structures being made that were about one micron across. The current state of the art in the most recent Pentium computer chip, for example, is about a third of that, 350 nanometers, or a third of a micron. It's expected that a decade from now the size of these microelectronic objects is going to shrink to less than one-tenth of what it was in 1985: a tenth of a micron, which is 100 nanometers. A nanometer is a thousandth of a millionth of a meter. This is about as far down in size as it is feasible to go, because a nanometer is equivalent in size to about three to five atoms. For us, and the things around us in ordinary life, atoms are the ultimate building blocks. If you could get down to that nanometer level, and craft the object with atomic precision, the power of your ability to control the behaviour of this object would become immense. Human molecules are nanomachines The greatest example of that power at present is in every living thing. Every blood cell for example is full of thousands of "little machines" that move around in the liquid world of the cell doing the business of life -- enzymes, hormones, RNA, and DNA. These little machines are molecules. They range in size from about one to several tens of nanometers across - they are nanomachines! Imagine what our world would be like if we really could construct objects with the degree of atomic perfection that life achieves routinely! A typical medical nanodevice might be a minute robot assembled from nanoscale parts. A typical future nanomedical treatment (e.g. to combat a bacterial or viral infection) could consist of an injection of nanorobots suspended in fluid. Some nanorobots would be intended to travel through the bloodstream to their target; others would be nonbloodborne tissue-traversing nanorobots, alimentary or bronchialtravelling nanorobots.
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