The Economist runs a somewhat alarming headline this week, Nanotechnology cures cancer! but promptly qualifies it with Well, it might… and this avoids our wrath.
The article should be salutary reading, along with Soft Machines, for anyone who likes the idea of cancer zapping nanobots. As is increasingly the case, it turns out that nature has already provided is with a toolkit for doing almost anything we want, but understanding how nature works is the problem. In general, understanding natures methods is a little like being given a recipe that only consists of list of ingredients, with no quantities or cooking instructions. So for beer the recipe would specify water, malt, yeast and hops (at least in Germany) but give no clue to the consistency of the resulting mixture (liquid or solid) or whether to boil, fry, bake or ferment the mixture. Nature is often similar in that we increasingly know which genes, proteins and enzymes are involved in a process, but not how they interact and in what sequence.
Unfortunately, just like beers, there are many different types of cancer, each one requiring its own special recipe to slow or eliminate tumour growth so a generic cure may be a long way off. Still, the convergence of nano and biotechnology is making increasingly large strides towards understanding natures way of doing things, and once we understand how something works, we may, one day have the possibility of controlling it.