Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities
© 1999 Robert A. Freitas Jr. All Rights Reserved.
Robert A. Freitas Jr., Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities, Landes Bioscience, Georgetown, TX, 1999
Molecular nanotechnology has been defined as the three-dimensional positional control of molecular structure to create materials and devices to molecular precision. The human body is comprised of molecules, hence the availability of molecular nanotechnology will permit dramatic progress in human medical services. More than just an extension of "molecular medicine," nanomedicine will employ molecular knowledge to maintain and improve human health at the molecular scale. Nanomedicine will have extraordinary and far-reaching implications for the medical profession, for the definition of disease, for the diagnosis and treatment of medical conditions including aging, and ultimately for the improvement and extension of natural human biological structure and function.
"Within a few short decades we can expect a major revolution in how the human body is healed. Nanomedicine lays the foundations for understanding this revolution and points to where it is taking us."
-- K. Eric Drexler, PhD, Institute for Molecular Manufacturing and author of Nanosystems
"...a classic in the making...A few of the possibilities of this new field of nanomedicine have been hinted at, a few more have been sketched in some research papers, but only with the publication of Nanomedicine have we started to see the full richness of it...Nanomedicine is more than just a description of what might be, it is a call to action."
-- Ralph C. Merkle, PhD, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)
Robert A. Freitas Jr. has degrees in physics, psychology, and law, and has written nearly 100 technical papers, book chapters, or popular articles on scientific, engineering, and legal topics. He co-edited the 1980 NASA feasibility study of self-replicating factories in space, authored the first detailed technical design study of a medical nanorobot ever published in a refereed biomedical journal, and has been researching nanomedicine full-time since 1994.
Last updated on 28 February 2003