The Nanobots Within You

When we think of illness, our minds veer to macrophenomena that incite symptoms. Sidelined by the flu, we speak of fatigue or feverishness, of achy muscles and breathlessness. But hidden behind these gross symptoms lie a remarkable number of perturbations in physiology occurring at the micro level, phenomena that easily escape our purview since our psyches are more attuned to the downstream effects. After all, its how an illness makes us feel that gets our attention.

Much of modern medicine is interested in exposing and redressing the upstream phenomena: the alterations in immune responses that expose elderly patients to respiratory infections, the imbalance in hormones that allow tumors to thrive, the nuances in cell signaling that predict response to therapies. The problem with many of the treatments used today is that although targeted for a particular microphenomenon, the application requires exposure to completely unaffected locales throughout the body. Most of the chemotherapeutics we give are injected intravenously and expose many otherwise normal happy cells in uninvolved organs to very caustic chemicals. It’s like the fire department flooding an entire city in order to douse an inferno at just one apartment building. Sure you cure the fire, but now the subways are flooded and your new sneakers aren’t fresh.

To avoid deluging a slew of organs with chemicals intended to treat a problem involving just one region of the body, modern therapeutics must embrace more directed approaches to medicine delivery. In the emerging field of nanorobotics, engineers are creating miniature robots made of a variety of organic and synthetic materials and tasking them with a whole array of directed, site-specific operations. Imagine a cancer therapy attached to a nanobot that bypasses normal cells and identifies only cancer cells, thus delivering the medication only to where it is needed. Another nanobot could deliver medications that strangulate the blood supply feeding the tumor. Absent the systemic side effects, this experience becomes much more tolerable for patients.

But why would we stop just at illness? Like many technologies, the intended use may initially serve a noble purpose, but the engineering can readily be tweaked to service an entirely different set of concerns, some that might not need fixing at all. Imagine nanobots in service of the wellness industry. A set of nanobots might continuously assess changes to a panel of hormones, temperature, and heart rate variation that suggest the onset of sadness. Variations in mood that might otherwise be attributed to normal fluctuations in emotional states may soon become targets of miniature bots capable of bringing lexapro directly to mood centers in the amygdala, thus avoiding any systemic toxicity. What will it mean to be human if we cede control of our emotional centers to algorithm charged bots tasked with keeping us “normal?” Certainly there will be a need for directed drug delivery of antidepressants to people under the care of a physician for depression, but how many steps removed are we from more unconventional, even illicit use of nanobots, say for something we’ve always called sadness? Such emotional states (in a non-pathologic scenario) part of the normal state of human emotions. When sadness or normal grief or boredom or nervousness become strategic targets for pharmaceutical manipulation, we will lose a lot of the texture that defines our humanity. Nanobots certainly have a place in our future, but it would be unwise not to anticipate the potential downsides of such a technology.