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Interviewer: How much of what you're working on, or might be in the
future, is nanotechnology a part of?
Dr. Aubrey de Grey: We don't work on nanotechnology per se, but there are
certainly very respected scientists working in the area of what's often
called Molecular Manufacturing, the creation of things that are a bit like
enzymes, or bigger machines in the body; but which are not made out of
proteins the way the body naturally is. Instead they're made out of
hardware really, out of non-biological material.
The theoretical basis for that type of technology, it's very sound. It's
highly likely in my view that in the distant future, we will have an
increasing ability to exploit non-biological solutions to medical problems,
especially as the militarization process progresses.
That eventually could easily be that those non-biological interventions
dominate. They become the major thing that we do. But I do think that we're
a lot further off from having any of that interventions really working than
we are from the straightforward [inaudible 00:00:58] that SENS Research
Foundation is following.
Now I should say that the militarization aspect is the key there, because
there are non-biological solutions to medical problems that [on the]
macroscopic, that are already in place, and indeed are improving all the
time.
Obviously we've had glasses for a long time. That's an example. We've also
had cochlear implants, which are really the way to treat certain types of
deafness. Those are getting better all the time; so much so that people are
now talking about cochlear implants actually giving people better hearing
than normal. Of course, we've got artificial hearts, we've got, you know,
all matter of different things; so I definitely not in any way dismissing
the non-biological component of medical research.
Interviewer: Can you explain the nanotechnology a little bit though, and
what the theories behind that is?
Dr. Aubrey de Grey: Well, nanotechnology, or . . . I need to be careful
with the terminology here, because the word nanotechnology was first used
to describe what you're asking about, Molecular Manufacturing, but now it's
bundled together with something which is really material science; nano-
materials, where one is not actually putting atoms together in a precise
way that Eric Drexler and others proposed 20 or 30 years ago. Rather, one
is simply doing material science.
Molecular Manufacturing is all about precisely positioning atoms in a form
that makes not just the simple crystal structure, like a diamond for
example, but a structure that's been designed. So in other words, they
could make actual machines of the sort that we would have to [inaudible
00:02:26], but at the absolute tiny scale; at the scale of nanometers.
The average atom is maybe a tenth of a nanometer across, and atoms are
maybe one nanometer apart in a particular molecule. So putting them
together one by one sounds pretty laborious, really, doesn't it? But the
thing about molecular manufacturing is that one can accelerate by doing an
enormous part of the assembly in parallel. A load of the designs that have
been done have taken this into account and have shown that realistically,
one should be able to actually construct these tiny machines that are a
millionth of a meter across, or less, without actually having to wait until
a thousand years from now.
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We already have artificial hearts, artificial implants to benefit hearing, could more non-biological answers be on the horizon? Dr. Aubrey de Grey discusses the possibility as well as the science of nanotechnology and what that might meat to health in the future.
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