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SamQuan236 t1_j9ydlm5 wrote

You see nanomachines all the time. You just call them cpus, for example. Just because they arent flapping around doesn't mean they are not doing an important job. Health care (not my area) makes extensive use of computers.

Gate sizes are tiny - larger than advertised by cpu manufacturers, who like to redefine what their widths refer to but still incredibly dense. A finfet is about 20-30nm across the core, and is so small it is hard to get good imagery with common methods. This would not be possible without modern nanotechnology.

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aphasic t1_j9yo0c2 wrote

So the breakthroughs in "nanomachines" are actually coming in biology. Cell and gene therapy is absolutely exploding right now with methods of reprogramming cells and viruses to do things like deliver payloads, rewrite the genome, kill or replace diseased cells, etc. Turns out the real nanomachines were the friends we made on the way. Viruses are absolutely self assembling and self replicating nanomachines with a programmable instruction set that we are learning how to re-write. It's not how we conceived it in the sci-fi of the past because progress in physics and computing seemed much faster than the glacial pace of biology, but biology is absolutely nanotechnology and the tools for manipulating it have come into their own in the last 20 years.

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tenesis t1_j9ysofg wrote

Have you been reading the news during covid? They engineered a vaccine for a new decease using a new delivery method in a few months. The way science works nowadays is not based in big breakthroughs but small incremental optimisations that together lead us to big changes in a medium period of time. However, no there are no nano machines in hospitals yet.

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series_hybrid t1_j9yvmnn wrote

Its adorable that this question sounds like the OP feels that global pharma and the health plans want to save the patients money. IF...any new improvement happens, they will charge the same amount they always have (bankrupting common people), and they will pocket the difference.

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CattleDependent3989 t1_j9z29zy wrote

Replying to aphasic (#1,995,595)

I find this kind of stuff extremely fascinating! As a child, I loved anything related to science. I remember having this mail order binder set, where every month they mailed a new insert on a topic and it was anything from the Hubble Space Telescope to DNA.

I remember reading about the Human Genome Project and how it was anticipated to be completed somewhere in the early 2000s and what they hoped to achieve with it. When they finally announced it’s completion, I was ecstatic! I couldn’t believe something I read about as a child was finally coming to life.

Nowadays, you can literally go to a Walmart and grab a kit, spit in a vial and know your genetic lineage and genetic predispositions to certain conditions as well as genetic traits. You can get a Pap Smear with HPV genotyping and find out if it’s of a certain genotype that increases your chance of developing cervical cancer by ~70%. You can test for the BRCA gene impairment and find out if you’ll likely develop breast cancer in your lifetime.

We don’t have flying cars and robots just yet, but holy hell we have come so far and it’s delicious

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