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Hand Stitched by Robots (continued)

An experienced surgeon doing conventional1 surgery can do this type of surgery very efficiently and very rapidly, but with a piece of equipment, a robotic tool that’s been programmed properly and is working efficiently, the chances of actually producing in fact a better end result2, is there. No matter how much better robots might be it’s highly unlikely that they will replace surgeons in the operating theatre.

However, it is possible that the surgeon’s role will come under threat from a very different kind of robot -- one created by nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is defined in terms of the scale so it refers to any manipulation3 of materials devices, which are on the scale of about 1 millionth of a mm. Newcastle University has been granted funds to set up a state of the art4 Centre for Nanoscale Technology. Here, a multidisciplinary5 team of research scientists is hoping to create nan-osized surgical robots, so precise they will be operating at the level of a single cell.

The nature of the robot which we might use is again an unconventional robot, it doesn’t have knives, it doesn’t cut, it doesn’t take material in, in the normal sense and replace it. What we envisage6 is a device which would seek out and identify and destroy cells, organisms defects which at the present time require invasive surgery. These nanorobots will probably be engineered from both man-made and biological structures. In an ingenious7 solution to the problem of propulsion8, for example, the robot might be given one of nature’s own motors, from bacterium. E-coli for example has a whip-like tail very similar to a mechanical bearing and that allows E-coli to actually move within bodily fluids. We can now use elements like that for propulsion. We can now extract such motors from bacteria and use them in new settings. The eyes and ears of these particles will also come from biological systems. Nano-robots could perform all kinds of operations. It will still be surgery, but not as we know it today. Nanotechnology is going to change surgery and it’s going to take us away from the idea of surgery as a physical knife and replace it by the atomic or molecular scale equivalent. Knee replacement operations might become a thing of the past. Where the old joint is worn out or diseased, the nano robots will simply help our bodies to grow a new one.

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