PERHAPS MORE COMPELLING than nanomedicine’s potential to cheat death is its potential to improve life. As Claudia Kalb wrote in Newsweek in Jan 2000, “Nanomedicine isn't just about getting rid of the bad--it's about enhancing the good. Imagine artificial red blood cells containing tiny nanopumps that would compress oxygen, allowing each cell to carry more than 200 times as much as its human counterpart. Are you at high risk of having a coronary? Doctors would inject you with an army of nanocells. Even if your heart shut down during an attack, you'd continue to be nourished with lifesaving oxygen.”

When cancer is detected too late, people die.When cancer is detected early enough, it can be treated through a number of different methods including chemotherapy, radiation and surgery. Dr. James Baker at the University of Michigan is designing a kind of smart bomb that would target cancer cells by reading their chemical signatures and be small enough (about 20 nanometers) to get inside an individual cell and blast it away. The detection and treatment would be painless and never known to the patient. Imagine walking into your doctor’s office and asking for a prescription of cancer detectors.

The elderly will have bones as strong as their children through chemical regulators through life. No more broken hips from simple acts of walking.

Another example is the work of Dr. Desai of Boston University as described in The Economist in December 2001. “A typical example of the state of the nanobiotechnological or nanomedicine art is Tejal Desai's artificial pancreas. Dr. Desai is aiming to produce something that could be implanted into those diabetics who now have to inject themselves with insulin--a hormone that is produced in the "islet" cells of the pancreas.” Through the use of nanomedicine, nanopores are being developed to complete the change in insulin delivery and improve the quality of diabetic lives.

The potential uses of nanomedicine are as long as the list of diseases. Treatments themselves will be innocuous and the need for them increasingly infrequent. Nanomedicine’s potential to improve quality of life is immense.