essay type - nanotechnology/health/

Nanotechnology is the Future of Mankind

By Sean Hein, published Sep 24, 2008

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The science of nanotechnology has grown leaps in the past decade or so. In fact, there are lots of nano-materials being commercially produced everyday even as we speak. Research is being carried out in all major universities and research labs all around the world, to make the dream of a nano-world a reality. These researches are spread around in all possible fields like Automobile industry, electronics, semiconductors, biology, medicine, etc.

One of the major industries where nanotechnology is expected to make a huge impact on is medicine. There are studies going on in various branches of medicine already. There are plans for nanorobots which can enter a human body, find a particular cell in the entire body and destroy that cell alone. This is proposed as the ultimate cure for cancer. Another such innovative research idea is smart drugs.

These are a new type of drug molecules. They get to work only when they are in the presence of an infection. One such type of smart drugs is Immunotoxins. An Immunotoxins molecule is manufactured as a hybrid to combine protein molecules from two different types of proteins, namely, a toxin and an antibody. Toxin proteins are the dangerous proteins which are produced and released into the human body by infectious bacteria.

These Immunotoxins react when they come into contact with a toxin and they attach themselves to the cell surface, and then they release the antibody directly into the system, thus effectively killing the cell after penetration.

There are various ways in which this can work wonders for the human race. Not only for curing cancer, but also making medicine release a confirmed action rather than a chance.

There are so many diseases which can not be cured beyond a point, resulting in people ending up with the disease their entire lifetime. In other cases, the patient may not have enough antibodies in his system, which may result in treatment being ineffective. But with the usage of antibodies, all these problems can be taken care of.

This would also reduce health care costs to a very small amount as there will not be a need for repeated medication and a lot of medication, and hence reducing the number of visits to the doctor as well as reducing the cost of medicine purchase. In other words, medical help may at last be accessible to everyone.

Of course, one has to remember that there could also be certain possible side effects to this entire concept. For example, if we are trying to treat a lot of cells at the same time, the large amount of dead cells produced in the process have to be removed from the body and sometimes the blood stream may not be able to assimilate that many dead cells at the same time. This can create complications.

However, these kind of possible drawbacks are nothing compared to the benefits that can be achieved. Soon the day will come when science will have a solution to every problem faced by mankind rather than being a problem in itself as it is now. Let us hope that day is not too far in the future.