Salon.com > Alan H. Goldstein

I, Nanobot

Thu, 09 Mar 2006 11:57:00 +0000

Don't call me Ishmael, for I am not a survivor. Don't call me Cassandra either, since some might believe what I foretell. Perhaps I am the final manifestation of the singularity ignited in Olduvi Gorge a million and a half years ago. The flame that has grown to consume our planet and send sparks into outer space. The singularity that started as an ineffable, ineluctable pulse resonating through the neural matrix of Homo habilis. A voice that said, You whoever you are, You must sharpen that stone, pick up that bone, cross that line. A voice of supreme paradox; one that simultaneously makes us uniquely human, yet is itself not human. Nor is it the black extraterrestrial monolith of Stanley Kubrick's imagining. Rather, it was always here. Hard-wired into us at the atomic level -- and we into it. A voice whose physical manifestation, the tool, sang its song millions of years before human beings walked the earth. This voice prophesied and then enabled our coming. It will instruct us in our going. Or so I say, while understanding too well that in the 21st century we are all jaded and stultified with sensory overload. It's always the end of the world as we know it -- and we feel bored.

Nanomedicine’s brave new world

Mon, 28 Nov 2005 12:14:00 +0000

It's the not-too-distant future, say 2016. You have been diagnosed with Stage III melanoma. Cancer has metastasized throughout your body. Just 10 years ago, in 2006, the choice of treatment would have been based on the type of primary cancer, the size and location of the metastasis, your age, your general health and your treatment history. Your prognosis would have been gloomy. But that was back in 2006, before we entered the era of nanomedicine.

In 2016, your doctor will be capable of scanning your entire genome in a few minutes. She will do this because every cell has a different gene expression pattern or profile. When a cell becomes cancerous, this profile changes. Your Stage III melanoma has a unique, schizoid genetic signature reflecting both a skin cell heritage and a newly acquired outlaw metabolism. Your doctor will explain that while your cancer has a great deal in common with other Stage III melanomas, it is not exactly like any other. Your doctor knows this because for the past few years DNA from virtually every melanoma patient in the U.S. healthcare system has been routinely extracted, scanned and deposited in a national database. This population of sequences, fully analyzed and with a user-friendly graphic interface, is available in real time. Searching this database for any specific cancer sequence will be about as difficult in 2016 as finding Madonna's birthday on Google is today.

The (really scary) soldier of the future

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:50:00 +0000

Vast government contracts have corrupted the American university system, turning off the fountainhead of unfettered ideas and scientific discovery. Multibillion-dollar federal R&D budgets have replaced the solitary inventor with veritable armies of scientists and engineers in laboratories across the country. Public policy itself has become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.

2005? Try 1961. The paragraph above was taken with only minor changes from President Dwight Eisenhower's famous farewell address.

Things have only gotten worse in 44 years. If Eisenhower was worried about the power and influence of what he called "the military-industrial complex" then, he'd be catatonic now. The risks -- and opportunities -- posed by today's corporate-academic-military behemoth are exponentially greater than in his day. So is the money: Total military spending on basic R&D is probably somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion per year and rising. Scientists funded by this bottomless war chest are working on mind-blowingly powerful devices that threaten to plunge the world into a deadly new arms race. Oh sure, this stuff could also revolutionize medicine, communications, transportation and every other aspect of human life: the shopworn "spinoff" argument honed for decades by NASA's P.R. machine. But whether humanity will get to use the awesome power of these new technologies -- in particular nanotechnology -- for good rather than ill is one of the key questions of the 21st century.

Everything you always wanted to know about nanotechnology…

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 12:45:00 +0000

What is nanotechnology? Recent surveys indicate that most Americans don't have a clue. (The good news is that most of the rest of the world doesn't either.) Competing definitions are in circulation. The simplest, but least adequate, simply states that anyone manipulating matter at the dimensions of 100 nanometers or smaller is engaged in nanotechnology. How big is a nanometer? A billionth of a meter, but that definition doesn't mean much. If you split a human hair into a thousand equal parts, each part would be about 100 nanometers in diameter -- a nanohair, so to speak. But researchers on the frontier of nanotechnology have no interest in working with anything this bulky and cumbersome. They would argue, and quite rightly, that by the time you reach this scale most of the qualities unique to the nanoworld have either been used or lost.

Bring on the plague years

Thu, 28 Oct 2004 19:30:00 +0000

Historians joke that those who remember the past are also condemned to repeat it. On Dec. 28, 1984, President Ronald Reagan had a vision to eliminate nuclear terror from the skies of America. His vision was the Strategic Defense Initiative, or "Star Wars." Reagan said, "Through the SDI research program, I have called upon the great scientific talents of our country to turn to the cause of strengthening world peace by rendering ballistic missiles impotent and obsolete."

The Great Communicator envisioned an umbrella in the sky that would protect America from nuclear missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative, with its estimated price tag of $50 billion to $100 billion in 1984 dollars, was never implemented. A major argument against SDI was that is violated the spirit, if not the exact terms, of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT). By building a defensive system that made existing offensive systems obsolete, we would force the Soviet Union to generate a next generation of offensive weapons.

This same argument can be applied to the Bush administration's strategic biodefense initiative. Unfortunately, the American scientific community is apparently too terrified to mention it. As a result, American science is now leading the way into the next global arms race in bioweapons.

Invasion of the high-tech body snatchers

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Right here, right now, it is virtually impossible to find a human being in the developed world who is not technologically enhanced or modified. Ever been vaccinated? Have a tooth crowned? Wear contact lenses? One does not need a pacemaker to qualify as a bioengineered Homo sapiens.

These examples have profound implications. There is no theoretical difference between a dental implant and a mental implant except that we know how a tooth works and can manufacture a functional replacement. Currently, the same cannot be said for the neural network of the brain. But from a bioengineering standpoint, that is only a matter of time.

Once the structure and function of an organ are elucidated, bioengineers can develop replacement parts. Artificial heart-valve implantation is practically routine. Next-generation pacemakers will come with built-in diagnostics and telemetry to provide your hospital's computer with a constant stream of data on the condition of both your heart and the pacemaker itself. Some designs even include global positioning systems for emergencies. Several tissue-engineering companies produce commercial synthetic-skin products for grafting onto burns. Some use a mixture of biological and synthetic polymers, while others offer the genuine article, natural tissue grown from cells. As these technologies emerge, humans will metamorphose: The first stage of our metamorphosis will, in fact, be the physical fusion of human beings with both the biological and nonbiological systems we are engineering.