Should be noticed these are not nanobots in the sense of a tiny mechanical machine, but instead are based on the proteins that form the inner workings of our own cells. Science fiction and pop science has made the former popular, while biology researchers use the term to popularize the latter.
To be fair, when we do develop nanoscale machines, it's quite likely that they will partially or entirely consist of proteins or similarly produced complex molecules.
Not mechanical, but chemical. At that level, brownian motion, molecular charges, and other forces we can't see at our scale are much more powerful than mechanical motion. All of the enzymes, ribozyes, etc. in your body rely on these forces as well as their own arrangement to produce chemical reactions which in turn drive their 'machinery'.
The original idea of nanobots argued that with enough effort mechanical machines could work at that level, even if it would be difficult. It'd allow for these machines to work outside of water and for them to be built out of materials like diamond. We're still not there yet, and may never be.
I understand why researchers use the term 'nanotechnology' to describe their work with molecular biology, but it gives entirely the wrong impression. Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
>Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
it would take a serious lack of imagination on my part to look at something like a custom protein and not think about the possible disastrous consequences that follow -- let alone something being described to me as a 'molecular robot', even without a lot of pop-culture influence.
> Just look in this thread, where you have people asking 'what could possibly go wrong?' Pop culture makes people think nanotech = tiny robots = grey goo destroying the world.
History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes… and so do peoples fears. Many times they are misinformed and misplaced, but usually right to be concerned in the first place.
My dumb take: what could go wrong? Interrupting normal proteins to become prions, that’s what.
A lot of these designer proteins being bad medications or good poisons is a valid concern. At least with that in mind we can better reason about the risks and rewards.
I suppose so, but biological. Like another commenter pointed out “nanocules” could be a more fitting name (I don’t know if it’s used to refer to anything else)
I recently played through the entire series again, and from the ending of Sons of Liberty[1], to Armstrong in Revengeance, it's almost uncanny how prophetic Kojima was. MGS II has sometimes been described as the first postmodern game both in terms of presentation, blurring player, game and narrative as well as thematically dealing with simulation vs reality, information overflow and so on but it's wild how relevant it is right now. Only thing that came close for me in recent years is Nier: Automata.
>terms of presentation, blurring player, game and narrative as well as thematically dealing with simulation vs reality, information overflow and so
it's a contentious opinion, but I believe that a lot of that stuff came at-no-cost for the Metal Gear franchise as part of trying to fit into the world of 'hard sci-fi' mecha genre.
The blurring of good and evil, the singular fabricated narrative for the player character until exposure to 'the real world' , the concept of simulation versus reality, information overflow.. these are all themes pretty heavily explored in other mecha franchises (Evangelion, Mobile Suit Gundam, VOTOMs, Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, Macross).
It's my opinion that Kojima has always made mecha fan-service games (I love REX) for mecha fans such as himself -- delivered via the medium of interpretive story-telling in the format of an MG game. Zone of the Enders didn't have the mass appeal due to the fact that he jumped into the deep-end with the mecha content; he has found that it works better to sugar-coat the mecha content in James Bond espionage and sexual allure.
All opinion of course -- but it's the opinion of a die hard mecha fan.
Also, I don't want this to come off as mean or underwhelmed , it's not; Kojima has been a part of some impressive world-building, I don't want to sell that short.
I presume this is intended for wounds in areas with poor circulation, like a diabetic foot or a walled off abscess. The bloodstream is damn good at delivering antibiotics and immune cells to infected areas.
One of the problems is that the bloodstream is good at delivering antibiotics everywhere, which encourages resistance and many of the side effects of antibiotics.
That, plus wounds with poor circulation, or as the article notes, infections that are protected by biofilms.
What if we could get some nanobots to attach themselves to the surface of the bacteria, inject their DNA into them, and hijack the bacteria's reproductive apparatus to create hundreds of new nanobots, which then burst out of the cell and attack other bacteria? That would be even cooler.
Edit: I should have added that such self-replicating antibacterial "nanobots" already exist naturally in vast numbers, and are known to be effective in treating wounds. So why develop something which is probably going to be less effective?
No, I was describing bacteriophages, assumed that that was obvious, and was pointing out that they would be more effective than the nanobots described in the article. The nanobots don't reproduce, and deliver antibiotics to the site of the infection (https://pubs.acs.org/doi/pdf/10.1021/acsnano.1c11013). Bacteriophages reproduce at a phenomenal rate and overcome the problem of antibiotic resistance - they're not antibiotics, and they can evolve.
I have a deep and abiding fondness for phage, but they're not quite as awesome as they seem at first glance. From the perspective of an infectious disease epidemiologist who has been super-interested in phage for my whole career (literally tried to get a job out of undergrad with a phage therapeutics startup):
1) There's no such thing as a "broad spectrum" phage. They're organism specific, and that means not only would you need to keep a phage library on hand, but you'd have to do a lot of diagnostic tests. That's going to be both expensive and tricky. There are treatment guidelines for things like sepsis right now that are basically un-doable with phage therapy because of the time it takes to tune a phage library.
2) Phages are living things. Not only is that a weird regulatory framework to be in for a drug, but it also means that you need to be able to keep phage alive. In contrast, antibiotics are inert.
3) Phage therapy is also relatively new in the West (after being abandoned for some very real, very serious safety concerns back in the day), which means there's just less of a R&D infrastructure behind it.
There have been people working on commercializing phage therapy since I was in undergrad (I'm now a tenured professor). The problem is it's hard, and antibiotics are so much better as a treatment that there's kind of a ceiling on the excitement that they can generate, especially when trying to treat at scale. These sorts of small molecules have a similar appeal to them.
The Wired article was paywalled and I could not read it, but it might be related to this ASME piece from 2018[1] regarding micro-robots killing antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
A possible concern with such technology is that it would weaken the body's immune response by creating a dependency on external factors. We get sick, and develop high fevers, for a reason -- our bodies need to learn to combat pathogens which are constantly attacking us.
If we stop training the immune system to go after some class of bacteria, then we may end up more vulnerable to related classes of microbes. Billions of years of evolution can't be second guessed.
That said, resistant strains are becoming a major public health threat so this approach may become necessary as a "last resort" to save lives.
The latter half of a charming video by Kurzgesagt[0] talks about the tension between anti-bacterial resistance and bacteriophage defenses - we might be able to see-saw treatments based on what local microbes have adapted to. I only mention it as a tangent, and because your comment makes me think you'd be interested.
Would this be a long lasting problem if used once (or just a few times — as in not constantly for any cut or graze)? I’m thinking within the context of war for wounded soldier with little access to hospital/medics.
You know what else does a good job of swimming around wounds and killing bacteria, medical grade maggots. They are fantastic in wound healing, and can fight mrsa.
Especially when there are low hanging fruits that could save billions that we haven't touched, not because the science is hard, but because the political willingless/empathy is low.
Sadly, no. The nanobots will be used for very bad things. To give you an idea, imagine a nanobot that will go into your cells, detect your race based on your DNA, and then decide to kill you or not; imagine how bad dictators can use these selectively against whole groups of people. It's biological warfare on a completely new level.
"In conclusion, neither mtDNA nor Y DNA can give any hint as to your “racial” membership in U.S. society. Autosomal DNA, if very lopsided to one continent or another, can suggest what you look like. But this does not work for those Americans who choose to self-identify as Black despite having mostly European DNA, nor for White Americans unaware of their African DNA, nor for Hispanics, whose “racial” membership is determined by their culture, not by their genes".
I guess the evil dictator the parent describes can skip this category: ("this does not work for those Americans who choose to self-identify as Black despite having mostly European DNA") and spare: ("white Americans unaware of their African DNA"). In fact, that evil white dictator would probably want to do so, even if it wasn't a technical limitation.
>are more able to make technological advancements than they can make political changes.
Yes, but without the political changes, the technological advancements are more likely to be used against us (or just as profit machines) than for good.
I'm not sure why they have to be mutually exclusive. Some people are good at research and some people are good at politics. Why would the folks good at doing research stop doing the research and try to change policy? Parallelization is fine...
I am always fascinated by the ignorance that is blatantly displayed on HN when it comes to biotech advancements. Not even some actual criticism of the tech, or even the faint understanding that this sort of thing is exploratory research. Wonder why this sort of skepticism is never applied to cutting edge AI research whose ethical ramifications are much more severe and which is already being utilized by bad actors to facilitate genocide [1].
