Abstract
This chapter discusses nanomedicine, nano-electronic-biosensors, molecular-computers and micro-mechanical devices, all which exist in managing disease in the modern era. Other projects are underway range from designing nano-robots to perform repairs at the cellular level, and allow AI technology to analyze, diagnose, prescribe and provide medical treatment. Technologists estimate that at the current state-of-the-art, processors, having billions of transistors, will continue to shrink to the size of a bacterium, 2 micrometers (μm) in length and 0.5 μm in diameter, with a cell volume between 0.6 and 0.7 μm3. Transistors, but a few atoms wide, will populate state-of-the-art processors with upwards of 13 billion transistors.
Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real.—Jules Verne
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Notes
- 1.
The blood–brain barrier prevents materials from crossing from the blood supply into the brain, proper. The smallest vessels or capillaries are lined with endothelial cells, which have small spaces between each cell so substances can move readily between the inside and the outside of the vessel, but in the brain, these cells fit tightly and substances, with some exceptions like glucose, cannot pass out of the bloodstream. The ribosome, which is of course of a component of every cell in the body, is therefore something of a biological machine already found in the brain, functioning in protein synthesis (translation). Ribosomes link amino acids specified by mRNA molecules, where small subunits read RNA and the large subunits then join amino acids to form a polypeptide chain, a linear organic polymer of a number of amino acid residues bonded together in a chain, which form part or the whole of the protein molecule.
- 2.
The pattern recognition described here was reported in Scientific American, November 1970, entitled Analysis of Blood Cells (K. Preston, M. Ingram). The 620 I was a general-purpose digital computer, with a parallel, binary 16-bit word for instruction and data, with magnetic-core memory. A basic machine cycle took 1.8 microseconds.
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Carvalko Jr., J.R. (2020). Fantastic Voyage. In: Conserving Humanity at the Dawn of Posthuman Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26407-9_23
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26407-9_23
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