Our bodies are filled with intricate, active molecular structures. When those structures are damaged, health suffers. Modern medicine can affect the workings of the body in many ways, but from a molecular viewpoint it remains crude indeed. Molecular manufacturing can construct a range of medical instruments and devices with far greater abilities. The body is an enormously complex world of molecules. With nanotechnology to help, we can learn to repair it.
The Molecular Body
To understand what nanotechnology can do for medicine, we need a picture of the body from a molecular perspective. The human body can be seen as a workyard, construction site, and battleground for molecular machines. It works remarkably well, using systems so complex that medical science still doesn't understand many of them. Failures, though, are all too common.
The Body As Workyard
Molecular machines do the daily work of the body. When we chew and swallow, muscles drive our motions. Muscle fibers contain bundles of molecular fibers that shorten by sliding past one another.
In the stomach and intestines, the molecular machines we call digestive enzymes break down the complex molecules in foods, forming smaller molecules for use as fuel or as building blocks. Molecular devices in the lining of the digestive tract carry useful molecules to the bloodstream.
Meanwhile, in the lungs, molecular storage devices called hemoglobin molecules pick up oxygen. Driven by molecular fibers, the heart pumps blood laden with fuel and oxygen to cells. In the muscles, fuel and oxygen drive contraction based on sliding molecular fibers. In the brain, they drive the molecular pumps that charge nerve cells for action. In the liver, they drive molecular machines that build and break down a whole host of molecules. And so the story continues through all the work of the body.
Yet each of these functions sometimes fails, whether through damage or inborn defect.
Source:
>1991 "Nanomedicine," Chapter 10, Unbounding the Future (K. Eric Drexler, Christine Peterson, Gayle Pergamit)
>Dec. 1994 "Nanotechnology and Medicine" (Ralph C. Merkle)
>http://inventors.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?zi=1/XJ/Ya&sdn=inventors&zu=http%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FNanotechnology
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