Nanobots. You might know about them from sci-fi movies or books. Robots that are as small as molecules. One might think of them as an imaginary concept, something out of a dream, with what nanobots are shown to be able to do in movies. Giving people super strength or being able to instantly heal a wound. But is there any reality in this? If we could make them in reality, what potential would they have?
One of the most substantial fields for the use of nanobots is the field of medicine. There are two major problems that can be fixed by nanobots. First, we have developed extremely effective toxic chemicals and antibiotics that can kill a virus easily, but the problem is that we cannot deliver them to a specific virus cell without major damage to the tissue around it, leading to even worse damage to the body. Second, Our immune system has a very limited way of detecting viruses in our body. How would nanobots solve this?
Nanobots can enter cells and if there are diseases that camouflage themselves with the body’s chemicals and ones that even splice the body’s genes with itself to be undetected like Ebola which the body’s immune system cannot detect easily, nanobots can recognize them, and they can deploy antibiotics to the exact cells and kill invasive pathogens before they get a chance to spread throughout the body effectively and without any other damage to the rest of the body.
This can be revolutionary for curing certain diseases like cancer, treatments like chemotherapy have side effects which could have been prevented if we were able to kill just the cancer cells.
As nanobots could not just eliminate viruses but also repair tissues, it could lead to a major extension of the human lifespan. All non-communicable diseases together account for 74% of deaths globally. We could more than half the amount of deaths of human lives worldwide through nanobots.
Nanobots are still in development, and there is a lot more research and development needed to practically actualize them, and this very fact makes it all the more exciting, as our generation gets the chance to develop a new, cutting-edge field of science that could revolutionize humankind.
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