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Essay on Use of Nanotechnology in Medecine

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The idea of placing a very small controllable object into the human body in order to accomplish a medical feat, believe it or not, came from a science fiction film! In 1966, a movie by the name of Fantastic Voyage was produced and explored the subject. In this movie, a spy with critical information was nearly assassinated and left comatose with a potentially fatal clot in his brain. To save his life and to retrieve the top secret information, a submarine was shrunk to microbe size and injected into his body with a team of surgeons onboard. The team navigated to his brain to mechanically destroy the clot and save the spy along with his secret information. This idea has evolved from science fiction into what is today the …show more content…

“The prefix ‘nano’ stems from the ancient Greek word for ‘dwarf’. In science, it means one billionth (10 to the minus 9) of something, thus a nanometer (nm) is one billionth of a meter, or 0.000000001 meters. A nanometer is about three to five atoms wide, or some 40,000 times smaller than the thickness of human hair. A virus is typically 100 nm in size.” (Paddock) “The ability to manipulate structures and properties at the nanoscale in medicine is like having a sub-microscopic lab bench on which you can handle cell components, viruses or pieces of DNA, using a range of tiny tools, robots and tubes.” (Paddock) There is one type of microscope in the world that has the ability to see things at the nano scale. That microscope is a scanning tunneling microscope. It has the ability to zoom in on an object by 1,000,000 times as the average high school and college microscope only reaches 100(Nano.gov).
The National Institutes of Health began the U.S. National Nanomedicine Initiative program in 2005 by developing a national network of Nanomedicine Development Centers. “The two major goals of NIH Nanomedicine Initiative are: 1) understand how the biological machinery inside living cells is built and operates at the nanoscale and, 2) use this information to re-engineer these structures, develop new technologies that could be applied to treating diseases, and/or leverage the new knowledge to focus work

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