nanotechnology draft

It is commonly acknowledged that technology has made life a whole lot easier. In fact,
technology has significantly improved our standard of living by supplying us with better communication, faster and safer travel, more effective medical care, and more. But nowadays, it seems that technology has begun to shrink. While it may not sound very logical, this rapid shrinking technology will not only help us, but save us as well.

Imagine a time when cancer treatments could ensure a patient’s full recovery, a person with a debilitating spinal cord injury would walk and a disease could be prevented before it became threat. Imagine that the effects of aging could be completely reversed and broken bones could be healed in a matter of hours. Although these may seem like a doctor’s and patient’s wildest dream, with the further development of nanotechnology, these dreams could become reality.

In the most technical terms, nanotechnology is the study of the controlling of matter on an atomic and molecular scale. Scientists have begun to engineer extremely small robotic devices, nanobots, which have the potential to revolutionize the field of medicine by 2015. Nanotechnology could help doctors effectively diagnose, treat and cure patients because nanobots could retrieve intimate images from within the body and perform complicated procedures that doctors are not humanly capable of doing. Patient aftercare could also be improved with nanobots that are able to regulate the delivery of a drug to the patient as well as allow the patient to monitor their own body systems. These abilities of the nanobots give doctors, as Ralph C. Merkle, researcher of nanotechnology and author of “It’s a Small, Small, Small World”, would say, “positional control” that would guarantee “a quantum leap in our medical capabilities”. Given that there is no end to the possibilities nanotechnology offers for the betterment of the health of the human race, it is as if there is no possible way this new technology could fail us.

Despite the strides nanotechnology has made in the hopes of improving the effectiveness of modern medicine, some critics have expressed their concerns with the more sinister potential these nanobots have to offer. Critics fear that where there is a way to heal, there is always many ways in which to hurt. Among those critics is Cardinal Javier Lozano Barragan, head of the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, reminds the scientific community of the ethical dilemmas that nanotechnology faces with his message that “everything technologically possible need not be ethically permissible." We must consider the risks of developing a technology to use for good that, with a bit of tweaking, could easily be used for evil. Nanobots could guarantee that we could live for a very long time, but, like with all technologies, if nanobots fell into the wrong hands, all of humanity could be in danger.

Imagine a time when a bioterrorism attack could be completely successful because the terrorists have programmed nanobots to deliver poison that avoids the body’s defenses and but to not attack the terrorists. Imagine that nanobots became so advanced that they could self-replicate until they formed an elite army of super humans that could take over the world. Imagine that scientists engineer nanobots as lethal weapons or that doctors could harvest and spread disease with nanobots instead of preventing and curing disease. And again, although these may sound like the wildest dreams of terrorists, mad scientists, and evil doctors, the development of advanced nanotechnology opens the door to these ominous possibilities.

One could debate about the ethical use of nanotechnology for days. The issue with nanotechnology is that its development cannot simply be either beneficial or detrimental to humans. If the issue was that black and white, the answer for whether or not it should be made and used would be easy. Like all technology, nanotechnology’s main problem is that it is being manufactured by human beings who have demonstrated infinite capabilities for both good and evil. Some would argue that doctors need the ability to cure people’s cancer, while others would be adamant that rogue nations should not have access to technology that could wipe out an entire country. As Sherri Chasin Calvo, a freelance science writer specializing in genetics has stated, “nanotechnology can be a double-edged sword”.