Coming Up Next

A diagnosis of pancreatic cancer would be devastating to any of us, bringing with it the horrors of debilitating chemotherapy and a slim chance of surviving the next five years. Fifteen years from now, however, you might not even bat an eye at the news. Your doctor will simply hand you a capsule packed with millions of sensors, each programmed to seek out and kill the cancer cells in your body. A few weeks and a dozen doses later, your tumors will be gone--destroyed while you were going about your daily routine.

This isn't science fiction. The National Cancer Institute and NASA plan to spend $12 million a year for the next three years to develop nanosensors--devices less than one-thousandth the diameter of a human hair--that will scan the body for the molecular signatures of cancer--the aberrant proteins found on malignant cells, for instance--and map the locations and shapes of tumors. If engineered to carry drugs or genes, the sensors could treat cancers one cell at a time, attacking malignant cells but leaving healthy ones unharmed. The result: an end to the pharmaceutical carpet bombing we call chemotherapy, not to mention its attendant miseries.

And that's not all. One day, autonomous "nanobots" far smaller than motes of dust will patrol the body, repairing aging organs and fixing genetic damage before it can turn into disease. But nanomedicine is still in its infancy, cautions Carol Dahl, co-director of the NCI/NASA collaboration. "Most of the work we're seeing out there right now asks, What are the widgets we can build? Next, the question will be, How can we apply them to solve specific problems?" Mihail Roco, adviser to the National Science Foundation's $150 million nanotechnology initiative, believes we will have an answer soon enough. He predicts that the rudiments of nanotechnology will aid the manufacture and design of up to half of all drugs by the end of this decade.