That nanotechnology is one of the most powerful technologies that human beings have created in hundreds or even thousands of years is something that Tim Harper, from Cientifica.com, made very clear yesterday to those attending the debate on “The future of nanotechnology “at EmTech Spain, the emerging technologies conference organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Spain. But the most important thing, he stressed, is thatto work well on the scale of atoms and molecules we have had – and will have – to learn from nature. “DNA, for example, is the best storage medium ever invented: if we transcribed it into binary it would take up relatively little space compared to other artificial data systems,” Harper reminded the audience. “In addition, nature uses a handful of polymers, cellulose, sugar and nucleic acid for the same thing that humans use thousands of different materials.”
In his presentation, Harper assured that the microscope has been a fundamental technology in the evolution of science and technology. “We have gone from controlling materials (passive) -when we carved stones- to controlling things (active),” said the expert. Now, thanks to nanotechnology,we can ask ourselves directly about the properties of the ideal materials that we need to create. As Javier García Martínez, professor and director of the Molecular Nanotechnology Laboratory at the University of Alicante recalled minutes later, nanotechnology is not the future but the present, because it is already happening: there are more than 500 products on the market that already include nanoparticles, and many more crowd at its doors. Will it help us cure cancer or AIDS, perhaps? García Martínez sees two other applications closer: obtaining clean energy and manufacturing all kinds of lighter materials.
What is clear is that, as Harper concluded, “Nanotechnologies and the biosciences will be as important in the twenty-first century as were petroleum, polymers, and semiconductors in the last century.”
Biotechnology will make us happier
“The foundation of happiness is health,” stated Richard Kivel (Rhapsody), founder of Rhapsody Biologics. And with 7 billion people on Earth, “there are many people to make happy, and to provide energy, water, transportation and fuel, etc.” One of the emerging technologies that is going to make this possible is undoubtedly biotechnology. In addition to its application in the development of biofuels, as well as the rise of bioinformatics, Kivel highlighted that personalized medicine is one of the first lines of application, followed by tissue engineering, which has extraordinary potential. It seems like science fiction, butwe can create new tissues and organs in the laboratory? enthusiastically affirmed the expert, who also predicts that “the next generation of drugs will be created by biotechnology companies with only ten or twelve employees,” something that a few years ago would have seemed unthinkable to us.
For his part, the Spanish Ángel Cebolla, CEO of the Biomedal company, explained that the antibody is “the natural nanotechnological drug.” Using monoclonal antibodies to treat diseases such as cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, offers innumerable advantages, since they are safe, reach almost the entire body, are specific, are stable and shorten development time.
After Ángel Cebolla intervened Robert Nicol, Director of Operations for Genetic Sequencing and Technological Development at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, who confessed that his training in engineering and construction was essential to later investigate the human genome. “I understood that engineering applied to biology could change the world, and I found thatmultidisciplinary training is necessary for the future of biotechnology“, he concluded.
