I’m a fan of tiny robots.  In my future, helpful and malicious micro machines saturate people’s bloodstreams, hunting disease and keeping people young.  Entire wars are fought by unseen insectian enemies.  The possibilities for miniaturized machines are infinite.  I’m just hoping I live long enough to get my first intelligent swarm injection.

Nature already understands the necessity of tiny helpers.  Billions of microbes call your body home.  Your eyelashes, the back of your knee, your fingers, and the tiny crevices in your skin seethe with microorganisms.  For every cell in your body ten microbes roam your systemNow researchers at Harvard are working to make that a reality, studying biology and engineering DNA robots that can seek out and kill cancer cells.


The beauty of this system is that micro machines can seek out specific DNA and deliver a payload, like a lock that only opens because it finds the right combination.  Drugs, for all the miracles they’ve provided people, are blunt instruments.  They’re the bio equivalent of a sledgehammer.  They kill good cells and bad.  The best drugs minimize collateral damage, but they’re still no better than using a bowie knife to do heart surgery.


The researchers have a way to go.  They can’t keep their robots alive long enough in a real body.  Our immune systems terminate them before they get very far.  Eventually we’ll need to find ways to coat them or signal the immune system they’re friendlies.  Of course, that also opens us up to the second kind of robot I’ve long imagined, the malicious military or surveillance and tracking kind, but everything has a dark side.  If we design machines that can selectively kill diseases without causing collateral damage, we need to do it.  We’ll deal with the nasty side effects when we get there.