We have been both amused and outraged at the amount of effort being wasted on studying the implications of nanobot based medicine versus the paltry amount of funding available for basic feasibility studies in this area. The future may be exciting but lets try figure out how to crawl before we start trying to run marathons (or start worrying about the implications of trying to run).
A recent Economist article highlighted the type of real and feasible nanomedicine that is going on. No fancy nanobots, just a titanium sheet with a few nanobumps to encourage osteoblasts to stick to them which holds the possibility of taking us from better medical implants to almost perfect osteoblast based drug delivery devices.
As we have often pointed out, nature has already done much of the work, all we need is the vision (and the tools) to make good use of it.