Dr. Behrooz Dehdashti has a Ph.D. in Cardiovascular Biology and is currently a senior research analyst at the University of Arizona. He is working on the development of the Syncardia Total Artificial Heart.

Dehdashti said that advanced complex atherosclerotic coronary artery disease is a therapeutic challenge, poorly treated by angioplasty and bypass surgery. Many options have been used to treat this condition, but the major problems include rejection by the body and degenerative issues. Dehdashti outlined the many different therapies that have been in use or that are being tested right now, and the challenges that they pose to the affected person, taking special care to outline scar density due to various therapies.

Transmyocardial channeling, which is performed via catheter, may be readily performed and is apparently feasible according to research conducted by Dehdashti and his team. This entails drilling little holes within the heart muscle, and allowing the heart to sprout new blood vessels via angiogenesis around nano-tubes that are placed in strategic areas. Angiogenesis would be stimulated by the injection of various growth factors and polymers. With the advent of nanotech, the polymers used in this therapy may become readily available, therefore making this area of research viable in the real world. This model has in fact been performed in four human patients to date. The criteria for approving the patient required at least one included vessel and much chest pain. Dr. Dehdashti said “Mechanical TMC combined with a sixty day period of myocardial healing provides significant protection to the LV myocardium in the setting of acute ischemic challenge.”

Lisa Hopper is CEO and Founder of World Care, a non-profit organization. She has a BS in Radiology Administration and Physics from George Washington University. In 1997, she put all of her retirement savings into World Care and devoted herself full time to developing the organization.

In reference to her work in foreign countries Hopper said “It is not about the medicine that we are bringing people; it is about the education that we bring to these communities.” The World Care dream manifests itself in these words, as she has taken resources that she can procure from Tucson, Arizona (i.e. school supplies that university students donated to the cause, money, and manpower) and brings them to third world countries. “We have both problems here and abroad, it often is about distribution.” Distribution is essentially what she does. She takes the “waste” of our country and deposits them in places of need. Instead of giving just school supplies, she has created infrastructures for schools, libraries, and hospitals in these places of need using a five year plan. “There is a check and balance associated with what we are doing,” she said. “Are we helping people, or are we hurting them?” Hopper makes sure that the help that is provided to people in need is available and lasting, thus creating stability in these environments. She is part of the nuclear weapon disarmament program in North Korea, and thus she gives supplies to NK every time they disarm a potentially devastating weapon. She has been to Honduras, Indonesia during the tsunami, and other areas of need after major disasters.

The following question was posed: How did you get from World Care to nanotechnology?

Hopper said that the idea of nanotech appeals to her background in physics, but more importantly it is an idea that what we do has an effect on everyone. The prospect of cheap energy, molecular manufacturing, and space travel excites her very much. “Transportation of goods from one location to another takes a lot of resources and energy.” She said “How do we get high-level knowledge, development, and understanding to everyone? Nanotechnology has tremendous opportunity for the world, and especially the humanitarian world. With over one billion people in the world living in poverty, free energy, clean water, and housing are very important issues.” Hopper argued that the ramifications of the things we are doing today may be good at first, but alter environments and economies irreparable. She gave as an example of desalination of water; it is good to drink, but starts to kill the wild life around the area where salt is actually taken out of the water.

The potential destruction that nanotech poses is what Hopper is essentially worried about. There are many good things that will absolutely come out of these brand new technologies, but we need governance.

Image caption: Simone Syed (and Michael Anissimov of Accelerating Future) at the Nano/Bio 2007 conference.

My day:

I am very excited to be attending the Nano/Bio Conference 2007 put on by World Care and CRN (Center for Responsible Nanotechnology). I was allowed to come to this conference on scholarship after Lisa Hopper, the conferences organizer and visionary, found out that I was a student and an active member of h+, a transhumanist club at the University of Arizona. The conference is very small, she told me. A total of 37 people have signed up as of this morning. As I walk into the room, I am told that this is an interactive conference; a question and answer format will be prevalent throughout the four days of lectures and workshops, which excites me. I love interactive formats, and small and closed groups where I can meet and talk to people I may actually like to be friends with. I immediate sat down next to a boy about my age, and as he introduced himself to me, I realized that I know him online. He is an editorial assistant for Kurzweil Industries, which is pretty freaking cool. Michael Anissimov is my ‘friend’ on the transhumanist network and it turns out that he knows quite a bit about our h+ club! Michael explains that h+ is the most active student transhumanist club that he has come across. Go, us! I have also met another woman, by the name of Cairn Idun, whose husband has been cryonically suspended. At 8:30 Lisa Hopper opens with her presentation on the beginnings of World Care.

• Productive Nanosystems: Launching the Technology Roadmap
• DoubleTree Hotel Crystal City, Arlington, VA, USA
• October 9-10, 2007
• Description:
  

  For 20 years, researchers have explored the amazing promise of atomically-precise manufacturing. Now, for the first time, the Technology Roadmap for Productive Nanosystems will show the way forward, and the payoffs along the road, to this ultimate technological revolution.

  Over the last two years, under Battelle’s leadership, and hosted by four U.S. National Laboratories, researchers from academia, government, and industry have met to chart paths toward advanced, atomically-precise manufacturing. The resulting roadmap reveals crucial challenges and unexpected opportunities in the next steps forward. Join us for two intensive days with leading experts as we explore the power of advanced “bottom-up” nanotechnologies.

Please see Frontier Channel’s coverage of this event.

• Challenges & Opportunities: The Future of Nano & Bio Technologies - An Interdisciplinary Conference organized by World Care and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
• Radisson Hotel and Suites, Tucson, AZ, USA
• September 9-13, 2007

Prince Charles and environmentalists warn of the possible dangers of nanoparticles entering the human body. Eric Drexler and Richard Smalley argue about the feasibility of “molecular manufacturing”. Recent science fiction novels warn of nanobotic swarms and gray goo that will devour the Earth. But where are we today? Is nanotechnology science fiction?

The current state of the art is no where near the visions of opponents and proponents. Yet, regardless, nanotechnology is revolutionizing the world. Nanotechnology is here, TODAY. The biggest use of nanotechnology is as nanoparticles to help enhance existing products, such as sunscreen and makeup. Nanotechnology is being used to demonstrate the building of cheap solar cells on flexible materials like plastic, the removal of heat from hot microprocessors, and dense and nonvolatile memory. The first products using nanotechnology as such mechanical and digital components are expected sometime next year. Work is ramping up for working models of assemblers, the proposed building blocks for a future of unlimited productivity.

It is telling that opponents of nanotechnology no longer argue that such technology is science fiction. Instead, they are at this very moment putting together the first proposals for new laws and restrictions to curb or even ban nanotechnology. Studies have been launched to determine the effects of nanotechnology on the environment and inside people. On the other side, new projects to accelerate the development of nanotechnology are reaching the funding stage. Profits for some existing nanotechnology companies are doubling every year.

All this is happening while only a small percentage of the public actually knows what nanotechnology is. Science and progress never require consensus. The time by which policy lags behind the state-of-the-art in technology is now measured in years. The point? Debate, laws, pros and cons are all really just background noise to a technology that is perhaps progressing faster than our current ability to deal with it.

Researchers have initiated animal trials for a potential cancer treatment using nanotechnology. The early results are promising. In the experiment, nanoshells built to heat up under a specific near-infrared frequency were injected into groups of mice with cancerous tumors in their tissues. After a few hours the skin above the tumors were irradiated with a near-infrared laser. The nanoshells apparently migrated to diseased tumor cells rather than healthy cells and killed these cells as they heated up. The healthy tissue around the tumors was unaffected.

One of the earliest proposed risks of molecular manufacturing (nanotechnology used to build products from the atom up) was “grey goo“, coined by Eric Drexler in his phenomenal 1986 book Engines of Creation. Self-replicating nanobots could escape into the environment and start devouring everything around them to reproduce, resulting in a runaway exponential destruction of the planet Earth and all its inhabitants. This horrific scenario has been repeatedly sited as a reason to curb the development of nanotechnology for molecular manufacturing, and has also been a staple of science fiction about the technology.

Eric Drexler, along with Chris Phoenix, have revisited this idea and concluded that molecular manufacturing is possible without making use of self-replicating agents. The opinion paper has been published in the latest issue of the journal Nanotechnology (the paper is available for 30 days at the Institute of Physics Publishing website, but requires a free registration to download). They conclude that simpler non-self-replicating devices would be more efficient, easier to create, and much more desirable then self-replicating nanobots. They are careful to state, however, that even stationary manufacturing systems are risky in a climate of political unrest and economic uncertainty. Such technology would have a profound and immediate effect on the world’s societies and economies.

In the United States, the nearly one billion dollars committed by the federal government for nanotechnology research is being directed primarily to developing nanoparticles for unique purposes, rather than the development of nanodevices for manufacturing. Naysayers say molecular manufacturing is simply not possible, despite the fact that nature has demonstrated the development of molecular manufacturing devices through evolution in the form of the nanobots DNA and RNA (as well as the other biological molecular machines at work in our bodies right now). Eric Drexler formed the Foresight Institute to promote molecular manufacturing. His ideas for nanotechnology form one of the major pillars of the Technological Singularity meme.