Nanotech small jobs

[Shrykull]

What are feasible uses for nanotech, I've heard about using it to fight cancer and repair, but how would it repair a cell, you usually recover from an injury by your body making more cells, not repairing the ones it already has, and I thought once the cell membrane springs a "leak" all the material inside comes out and the cell is destroyed. How do they propose using nanotech to repair cells? Where would it get the new material to "patch up" the cell membrane and exactly how would it do it?
I thought about nanotech with the regard of cell-MAKING instead, what if you could make any type of egg, then fertilize it, or assemble it fertilized, I was wondering if since you could make the genes atom by atom your imagination is the only limit on what kind of organism you want to make, you could make a dragon that breathes fire and drinks gasoline instead of water![/img]

[Darth Wong]

What are feasible uses for nanotech, I've heard about using it to fight cancer and repair, but how would it repair a cell, you usually recover from an injury by your body making more cells, not repairing the ones it already has, and I thought once the cell membrane springs a "leak" all the material inside comes out and the cell is destroyed. How do they propose using nanotech to repair cells? Where would it get the new material to "patch up" the cell membrane and exactly how would it do it?

It presume it would have to carry a payload of enzymes or some other organic chemical reaction catalysts to do its job, but patching individual cells seems far too complex.

Killing cells is easier and more potentially useful. The most fantastic potential application of nanotech would be the elimination of cancer; if a sample of cancerous tissue could be examined for DNA discrepancies and the bots designed to reliably target those discrepancies, they would run through the human body killing off the cancer cell by cell, rather than using present-day "nuke the whole body and hope the patient survives longer than the cancer" methods.

I thought about nanotech with the regard of cell-MAKING instead, what if you could make any type of egg, then fertilize it, or assemble it fertilized, I was wondering if since you could make the genes atom by atom your imagination is the only limit on what kind of organism you want to make, you could make a dragon that breathes fire and drinks gasoline instead of water!

OK, now you're getting into pure pie-in-the-sky stuff.

[neoolong]

A proper use for nanotech would be to build a moon-sized battlestation out of organic materials. This battlestation would then rule the universe since it would combine the advancement of both biotech AND nanotech.

Yes. And we'll call it a, "death star."

[NecronLord]

if since you could make the genes atom by atom your imagination is the only limit on what kind of organism you want to make, you could make a dragon that breathes fire and drinks gasoline instead of water!

Just for reference, it'd be better drinking one of the less used crude oil products. They are cheaper. Or maybe alcohol.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

A proper use for nanotech would be to build a moon-sized battlestation out of organic materials. This battlestation would then rule the universe since it would combine the advancement of both biotech AND nanotech.

One word: SQUISH!!!

[Admiral Valdemar]

What are feasible uses for nanotech, I've heard about using it to fight cancer and repair, but how would it repair a cell, you usually recover from an injury by your body making more cells, not repairing the ones it already has, and I thought once the cell membrane springs a "leak" all the material inside comes out and the cell is destroyed. How do they propose using nanotech to repair cells?

I think repair is a vague term here, repairing the damage from cancer usually just involves chemotherapy or radiotherapy to kill the cancerous cells and allow the body to regain a normal metabolic rate. You can't really repair cancer cells since their DNA has been altered to the point of insane replication rates, it is in essence a perfect cell for patching up cuts etc. in no time due to the rate it replicates, but it is uncontrolled and can quickly become malignant and cause all sorts of hell with the body. It is also true to say that you cannot repair a "burst" cell since actively using resources to patch up one cell leaking cytoplasm is a silly waste as there are hundreds of billions of cells in the body, one or two make little difference and will soon be replaced naturally unless the disease continues.

Some people have talked to me about cancer being eliminated by fixing the DNA in each cell manually. I can't imagine the time and complexity such a task would entail and is purely fantasy.

Where would it get the new material to "patch up" the cell membrane and exactly how would it do it?
I thought about nanotech with the regard of cell-MAKING instead, what if you could make any type of egg, then fertilize it, or assemble it fertilized, I was wondering if since you could make the genes atom by atom your imagination is the only limit on what kind of organism you want to make, you could make a dragon that breathes fire and drinks gasoline instead of water![/img]

No need for cell making, you have a few billion years evolutionary tech in your body that makes cells quite well considering we are all made up of a tightly packed "swarm" of micromachines. Making a cell artificially bares no use. Genetically producing a cell however is different. The GM E. coli 0157:H7 I have used can be made to resist all kinds of antibiotics and it is possible to make bacteria become miniature factories, Factor VIII is a special protein needed in the forming of scab tissue over cuts and bruises etc. Without it, haemophiliac suffering people will bleed until the damage is covered up normally by bandage and forcefully made to heal by injecting Factor VIII. There are giant vats now that hold bacteria at optimum conditions to produce these products for industry use, milk is also a good one since cows or goats can be genetically modified to produce milk with antibiotics in it. But be warned, genetic engineering is NOT as easy as some would have you believe. It is not a case of "Oh, this gene does this, so getting rid of this gene will make it work better". By doing that you could potentially kill the whole organism by producing a chemical it can't tolerate. Even modifying fungi to attack only weeds in a farmers field is painfully difficult, last year one such trial had a fungi that not only ate the weeds, but the crops and every other plant around! It is a very hit and miss affair and to say you want a flying pig through genetic engineering is like saying I want a Sopwith Camel that can go to Mars.

At the moment nanotech is still in its infancy and will be for the next decade or so before the real funding gets into it (the US spends the most, around a billion $ a year I believe).

But there are many applications at the moment too, examples include protein engineering to make more efficient enzymes to carry out tasks that no normal biological chemical has done (recently a purely artificial bacteria was made to make chemicals that no other natural organism could). In the future nanomachines may be possible, but they will not be making production lines obsolete since building atom-by-atom or moelcule-by-molecule is painfully slow but more exact thus it will be used for smaller objects that require atomic or near that precision.

The three main fields, biotech, computing and nanotech will be merging in the near future to help produce an industry with applications from medical aspects to mining or agricultural.