Year 2025 A.D.
A 55 year old man enters the consulting room of a Cardiologist ."Hello Mr.Naidu,"the doctor greets smilingly,"What brings you here today?"."O nothing too serious doctor",Naidu replies nonchalantly,"Had an inferior wall myocardial infarct an hour ago."So saying he indicates a palm sized monitor on his belt.
Dr.Pandit smiles.He picks up a vial reading 'myovores' and injects it into the man's cubital vein."Why don't you relax in the side-room Naiduji,it will take about an hour to heal the heart,"he calmly censures.
An hour later Mr.Naidu happily drives home the monitor reading 'Heart restored 100%'.
Seems like a science fiction novel isn't it?Well then ,think again.
A respirocyte is a bloodborne 1-micron-diameter spherical nanomedical device . The device acts as an artificial mechanical red blood cell .It is designed as a diamondoid 1000-atmosphere pressure vessel with active pumping powered by endogenous serum glucose, and can deliver 236 times more oxygen to the tissues per unit volume than natural red cells while simultaneously managing carbonic acidity.
A heavy infusion of respirocytes would allow you to survive four hours without breathing, as during a drowning accident or a heart attack.
Mr.Naidu carried a subcutaneous depot preparation of this and hence was unaffected by the infarct.
What is this myovore?
It is just another name for a tissue-repair nanorobot which can selectively dissolve cancerous tumors or rebuild wounded flesh in minutes or hours.In this case it was the cardiac muscle.
When doctors gain access to medical robots, they will be able to quickly cure most known diseases , to rapidly repair most physical injuries our bodies can suffer, and to significantly extend the human health span.
A wide spectrum of diseases such as Alzheimers,Multiple sclerosis,Parkinsonism,SLE which are hitherto irreversible could become curable.
Artificial white blood cells (microbivores) suggest typical performance improvements of 100- to 1000-fold over natural biological systems. Injecting a few cc's of microbivores would clear a bloodborne bacterial infection in minutes to hours rather than taking weeks to months with todays' antibiotics.
Artificial platelets could stop bleeding in seconds.Imagine the life-saving potential in familial bleeding disorders.
Chromosome replacement therapy will allow us to replace our old worn-out genes with new digitally-correct chromosome copies installed in every tissue cell of our bodies. Such therapies will eliminate all genetic diseases and reverse other accumulated defects that lead to aging.
Our latest global pandemic of HIV could be totally eradicated by a specific nanorobot vaccine to be injected to every neonate immediately after birth.
The applications and implications are vast and magical.
Medicine has now come to a stage where the era of medication and drugs is becoming limited.The further progress rests squarely on the shoulders of primarily two new offsets:-
1.Genetics and gene therapy
2.Nanotechnology and nanomedicine.
Gene therapy and the human cloning is destined to run into major ethical issues that could thwart it's further development.
However nanomedicine has no such impediments.The rapid advancement in technology such as supercomputers,superconductors and robotics imply that we may have our first nanorobots within the next 5-10 years.
Sometimes in our bid to survive the present ,we tend to neglect the future. We doctors are prone to be averse to the induction of technology and engineering into medicine.We prefer to have a more clinical approach which is definitely laudable.
However we must remember our primary aim is to cure the disease and use whatever tools at our disposal in order to achieve it.
'Ring out the old, Ring in the new'
Nanomedicine is here. right on cue'.
Welcome to the nanosphere!
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